The ontological status of universals...

Hm.

Being a universal.

Becoming a universal.

Existence of universals.

Do universals exist as they are prior to our awareness of them?

When I googled those 3 terms, I found them occurring together, without other alternatives included. But you already knew that.

Sometimes the possibilities that are acceptable and appealing to people are ones that were introduced long ago.

What's wrong with Platonic Realism? As described in the articles I found, It's the simplest.

How can anyone say that there aren't inevitably abstract facts, or that they, or inter-referring systems of them, need anything other than eachother (in the case of an inter-referring system) and the hypotheticals that they refer to?

Michael Ossipoff

Wow, sorting through all of this would be a monumental task, especially given how vague some of these words are. I'm not sure that there is any one answer that will satisfy philosophers generally, given the wide spectrum of theories and definitions. That said, you seem to looking for more modern views of Realism. It's an interesting topic, and I would be interested in hearing what others say about it.

My own view, is that consciousness, or a mind or minds is at the bottom of all reality. So whether we're talking about universals, abstract objects, particulars, etc, it all proceeds from consciousness. To be clear, I'm not coming from any religious point of view, only that consciousness is the unifying principle that unites all of reality, including the way we talk about reality. Since I haven't kept up with some of these theories myself, I'm not sure how my own ideas would fit within context of your question; and I'm not sure how modern my ideas are in terms of past ideas.

Pantheism? It seems to be making some inroads into Philosophy of Mind of late.

"What's wrong with Platonic Realism?"

Feser's objection focuses of Plato's postulation of a "third realm", transcending the physical and mental realms, in which the Forms exist.

I don't think pantheism is quite what I'm talking about, especially since pantheism is mostly identified as a religious idea.

I think, but may be mistaken, is that all pantheism needs is the idea of a universal mind, inherent in all things. Panpsychism would have the universal mind (or soul) inherent in all living things.

If you want a solid alternate realist position it's Husserl's. I'm with Feser on this, universals exist (though I'm not sure what sort of realist I am exactly, maybe Husserlian?).

That's not to say I would like it if nominalism were true. It would make things less oppressive, I think. For instance, Feser's argument "words are universals too" strikes me as imperialistic. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE UNIVERSALS, EVEN WORDS ARE UNIVERSALS TOO. At least some nominalists must have wanted to escape this metaphysical regime: see early Buddhist philosophers who argued for extreme nominalism in order to overturn the Hindu caste system. As do I, but unfortunately I don't know if it's coherent to deny that universals exist.

Implicit in Feser's (et al) approach to metaphysics seems to be the dominion of the Same over the Other, the desire to "fit" everything within a totality, the imperialistic urge to know everything. To which I typically say: no thanks.

"What's wrong with Platonic Realism?"

Feser's objection focuses of Plato's postulation of a "third realm", transcending the physical and mental realms, in which the Forms exist. — Mitchell

So he was a Dualist?

For one thing, I don;t believe in Mind separate from body. You're your body.

For another thing, it sounds like you're saying that Plato believed that 1) metaphysics describes all of Reality; and 2) Metaphysically, there's nothing other than matter and Mind (if you believe in it as separate). Do you believe those things?

I don't believe in "realms".

If he said those things, then I'd better shut up about his position, because I must have bigtime misread those articles about it. So I retract what I said about "Platonic Realism", because it's obvious that I don't really know what he believed.

There obviously are abstract facts.

Michael Ossipoff

I’ve been reading the chapter from Feser’s book on universals. First up, I agree with all the arguments that universals are real, and that nominalism and conceptualism are both untenable. However I am not at all certain that his depiction of the ‘third realm’ of Platonic Reals is correct, nor of his argument that 'scholastic realism' is the correct interpretation.

It’s been decades since I have read any Metaphysics, but I cannot help but think that surely in the 900 years since Aquinas, other views defending Realism have been offered. — Mitchell

I don’t think you will find many defenders of (scholastic) realism outside (neo)Thomism. After all, despite the shortcomings of nominalism, the nominalists, who were important precursors to early modern science, actually won the day in terms of convincing the secular academy that their view was correct. Scholastic philosophy of whatever variety was only preserved in the Catholic system.

What I see as the problem, is that I believe universals (numbers and the like) actually have a different mode of existence than do particulars. That is to say, numbers, logical laws, propositions, and the like, represent a different kind of reality than do objects. (This is where the passage on Augustine and intelligible objects is useful.) When we know an intellectual object, like a mathematical proof, our knowing of it is immediate and direct in a way that is not the case with the knowledge of sensory objects (an understanding that is certainly preserved in scholastic metaphysics, where the 'intellect' perceives the 'intelligible form' of things, whilst the senses receive the 'accidents').

So the tentative understanding I am developing is that universals (like numbers) don’t exist in the sense that objects like chairs and tables exist. They're real, but can only be perceived by the intellectual operation of counting and calculating. But as the overwhelming tendency in modern philosophy is to equate 'what is real' with 'what exists' then there is no provision for the notion of different modes or kinds of reality. Something either exists or it doesn't: horses exist, unicorns don't; the sum of 2 and 5 exists, the square root of 2 doesn't.

That is why I think the usual understanding of the Platonic ‘third realm’ is misleading. There is no actual realm - in this case, the term ‘realm’ is being used metaphorically. But the very idea of ‘realm’ connotes some place, something that exists somewhere; the mind tries to envisage an ethereal realm, and can't do so, so it rejects the idea as absurd.

But if you think about the ‘realm of natural numbers’, then is something that is real - it has members, and also things that excluded from it. But it’s not an existent, in the sense that particular objects or even stellar ensembles (like galaxies) are existent. And actually many of the same observations can be made about natural laws - do the Laws of Motion exist? They're not 'among phenomena' but are said (following Newton) to 'govern' phenomena (although such language is nowadays deprecated because of its obviously theistic implications.)

In my view, all of this implies the notion of an hierarchy of being, with degrees of reality, within which intelligible objects such as number are of a higher order than sensible objects such as chairs and tables, which is in keeping with Platonic epistemology. I think that is very much what was lost in the transition from medieval realism to modern empiricism. That's my reading.

(About the only metaphysics text I have encountered which talks in terms of 'degrees of reality' is indeed a neo-thomist book, Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge. I borrowed it once, couldn't understand it, but might try again. Brief discussion here, 'Maritain's account presupposes that there is a metaphysical and epistemological hierarchy'.)

All this leads up to a simple question: is he right in claiming that there are only three possible Realist views: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic? It’s been decades since I have read any Metaphysics, but I cannot help but think that surely in the 900 years since Aquinas, other views defending Realism have been offered. — Mitchell

My take on this question is this:

• Platonic Realism seems incoherent if it is taken to posit a separate realm of "Forms" which empirical objects somehow "instantiate" or "partake of". There is an interaction problem here because of this idea of radical separation.

• Aristotelian Realism seem coherent because generality is a real feature of particulars ( just as particularity is a real feature of generals). Generality is as much 'right there' in the thing as particularity is. We artificially separate the sensing of objects from the understanding of objects, it is really 'all of a piece", and the confusions begin with our artificial separations.

• The main difference between Aristotelian Realism and Scholastic Realism is that the latter is developed within the pre-established context of Christian faith. It posits that universality, since it seems to partake of the Eternal, would not be possible without the Transcendent Eternal (God).

However if we interpret Plato in a different light in terms of his "Time is the moving image of Eternity", then perhaps the differences are not so great. Eternity is not a "separate realm" but the 'other face' of time, just as generality is the other face of particularity, and transcendence the other face of immanence. In this view transcendence is not really transcendence as it is traditionally understood, because it does not posit any degree of separation whatsoever.

All this leads up to a simple question: is he right in claiming that there are only three possible Realist views: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic? — Mitchell

There is also what CS Peirce called his extreme scholastic realism, or realicism. That follows from Avicenna and Duns Scotus. And it fits with a modern systems science view of causality.

The way I would put it is that universals are our names for natural limits. They are the emergent regularities - the symmetries or laws - that emerge to bound nature.

So as Avicenna argued, the world in itself is not pre-divided into the general and the particular - some realm of matter vs some realm of form, for example - rather it expresses everywhere that potential to become divided in this fashion. It can become organised or structured in a way that is understood as a separation towards these two complementary poles of being.

So the particular and the general are both limits - the furthest that reality can go in these two kinds of opposed developmental directions. The limits are themselves thus also real. They actually do causally limit reality's development. Their existence is not fictional, just as the fence around a paddock is really there.

But also, these limits or bounds are not real in the embodied, substantial, hylomorphic fashion that most folk mean when they talk of the "physically real". In being limits - the place where reality finishes or completes the fullness of its "coming to be" - they are also exactly where substantial reality ceases to be. The line we draw to mark the circle isn't part of the circle. We can certainly give a name to a limit - an edge where things suddenly stop. We can point in a direction to where it lies. However the reality of the limit lies in this apophatic fact. It marks the edge, the boundary, of what you are calling reality.

To flesh this out further, in systems science or hierarchy theory, we would call the general and the particular, global constraints and degrees of freedom. So universals really refers to the notion that reality is organised by its emergent constraints. Restrictions arise that give form and purpose to substantial being.

Then particulars are degrees of freedom, or the material and efficient causes of substantial being. Constraints give shape to bare material possibility. And then having being shaped, this stuff can start to have constructive action. It becomes a substantial kind of possibility - a play of atomistic being - which combines and reacts in the familiar Newtonian mechanistic fashion.

The explanation gets confusing at this point because an atom is a universal term. Just like any substantial being, we can point to the form and the purpose that gives an atom its shape - its mode of being as a degree of freedom, as a primary material/efficient cause, with the "goal" of blindly and mechanically reacting so as to produce more complex constructions.

However this is consistent with Anaximander, Avicenna and others who say reality itself is just the potential to become organised by a separation towards the opposing limits of particulars and universals, constructive degrees of freedom and limiting constraints.

Atoms are a substantial expression of this ontology on the smallest or simplest scale - as modern quantum particle physics makes plain. But the same hylomorphic principle applies at every level of substantial being, including the most complex, as with life and mind.

So this extreme scholastic realism or systems thinking treats both the particular and the general as limits. Both are emergent from reality - this "reality" being itself the third more primordial thing of a not-yet-divided potential with a readiness to become structured by the division represented by the particular and the general.

Reality thus - as Peirce put it - comes with an irreducible complexity. No one part of it seems actually real. You have a primordial potential that lacks either the particularity or generality of actual substantial being. And then the particular and the general are our names for the complementary limitations on actual substantial being. They are not "real" in the conventional sense either. They are just the two extremes of causal action - the emergence of regularity or law into the developing world, and the matching emergence of concrete or material degrees of freedom into that world.

Actuality or substantial reality is what you finally get out of this triadic or hierarchical process of development. It is the structured result - or at least our snapshot view of whatever degree of definite hylomorphic development has occurred by that point.

Again, it is all a flow, all a process of coming to be. The idea of arriving and becoming completely fixed in a classical physical fashion - a world of definite objects - is itself an illusion, not "real" in the usual way people want to mean it. Like Heraclitus and his river, it looks like an actuality, but actuality remains only relative.

To be actual would be to actually arrive at the limits we encode with the notions of constructing particulars and bounding generals. And achieving that would negate the fact that they are "the limits". If you could arrive at the edge of being, it would no longer be the edge. It is like claiming to have arrived at infinity having done enough counting. Finitude can't touch the infinity that bounds it, though it can strive endlessly to reach it.

To sum up, a long line of "systems" thought argues that the dualism or dichotomy of the universal and the particular can only be resolved triadically.

The usual view of realism seeks to make it a monistic choice - one or the other is the real "real". Atomism was the creed that material particulars are the primordially real. Platonism was the creed that formal generals are the primordially real. Then most folk get stuck with the feeling that both seem kind of real, and so some kind of confused dualism must be tolerated.

The way out of this is to go for the holism of a three-way developmental story. Which - being what we find right back with Anaximander - is also a pretty ancient metaphysical position.

Now we have an emergent systems view where in the beginning is just a bare potential - an Apeiron, a Firstness, an Ungrund, a Vagueness. That's not really real. But it can be logically divided. Dialectically, any potential harbours its complementary opposites. And so within the barest notion of the potential lies the possibility for a dichotomy of the general and the particular. You have two logically matched limits in terms of matter vs form, local constructive action vs globally constraining action.

These are not really "real" either. They are the ultimate limits on being as a possibility. They are the two directions in which a potential can be divided. They exist only as the ultimate extremes of those contrasting directions of development.

However together as a triad, these three can be seen as the fundamental aspects of a holistic reality within which hylomorphic substantial being emerges as an ontically structured state. A world of objects is what we arrive at.

So in the end, nominalism starts to look the correct view, the classical physics view, as we seem to exist in a static Universe ruled by abstract God-given (or mathematics-given) laws and composed of atomistically material particulars. (That is, if we can ignore the reality of bounding laws of physics, we can pretend that material particulars are all we need to consider as "the substantially real".)

They are the emergent regularities - the symmetries or laws - that emerge to bound nature. — apokrisis

You wouldn't say that laws are expressions of latencies that is actualised by concrete instances? I'm having trouble understanding 'emergent' as that seems to suggest laws or regularities are 'consequent to' - that first of all there's material bodies, then the laws 'emerge'. Whereas I had thought that in modern cosmology, something like the dimensionless constants (which might correspond to constraints) are real prior to the particulars, and that when laws to emerge, it's because these latencies are now being actualised - 'what is latent becomes patent'.

Nominalism starts to look the correct view, the classical physics view, as we seem to exist in a static Universe ruled by abstract God-given (or mathematics-given) laws and composed of atomistically material particulars. — apokrisis

This is confusing, because nominalism is 'names only' - i.e. that what realists think are universals, are really just names for similarities.

All this leads up to a simple question: is he right in claiming that there are only three possible Realist views: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic? It’s been decades since I have read any Metaphysics, but I cannot help but think that surely in the 900 years since Aquinas, other views defending Realism have been offered. — Mitchell

I don't know. But I'm willing to give the thought a gander.

What would you count in the category "universal" that you would also count as real?

This is confusing, because nominalism is 'names only' - i.e. that what realists think are universals, are really just names for similarities. — Wayfarer

And so nominalism depends on an ontology where everything is a material particular. The differentiation of being is the primary fact. The integration we see and give name to is entirely secondary. It is not recognised as something that is equally real.

As I argued, a triadic metaphysics accepts that the integration, or the constraining top-down causes, are "merely" emergent and not primary being. But then so also is any local individuation or differentiation. The particulars are just as emergent, so have the same ontic status. Neither are "real" in that sought-for sense.

And even the primary reality is just a primordial notion of bare potential. It ain't "real" either.

You wouldn't say that laws are expressions of latencies that is actualised by concrete instances? I'm having trouble understanding 'emergent' as that seems to suggest laws or regularities are 'consequent to' - that first of all there's material bodies, then the laws 'emerge'. — Wayfarer

Development proceeds from the vague to the crisp. So from the first moment, both the universal laws and the concrete instances have only the haziest existence. The first act - the Big Bang moment - counts as no more than a fluctuation, a fruitful suggestion, the right start to a proper separation.

And we see this in the quantum physics of the Big Bang. It begins as a hot soup of radiation, an undifferentiated mess of potential being. There are no local definite particles. It's too hot and small. There is no organised physics of constraining forces. Again, it's too hot and small.

The strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, even gravity - none of these clearly exist at the first moment. The familiar laws of physics have not yet emerged. It takes cooling and expansion to allow the familiar laws to condense out and start organising the initial maelstrom fluctuation.

So electrons and electromagnetism are both emergent features of our classical reality. The particulate matter, and the laws that rule them, have to pop-out in mutual fashion due to developmental symmetry-breakings or phase transitions.

We can of course look back and read their future existence into the white hot and formless first moment of the Big Bang. The mathematics of symmetry now account for how they were inevitable as the way things would eventually get structurally organised. But properly speaking, both the matter and the form only emerged into actual substantiality when the Universe had developed enough to make another break in its initial state of high symmetry.

Physics already takes an emergent view of law as well as matter. Although it is true that most physicists wouldn't put it that way.

Whereas I had thought that in modern cosmology, something like the dimensionless constants (which might correspond to constraints) are real prior to the particulars, and that when laws to emerge, it's because these latencies are now being actualised - 'what is latent becomes patent'. — Wayfarer

The terminology here is confusing. Physics calls things like the various coupling constants of the forces "dimensionless". But the truly fundamental constants - the "dimensional" ones, the foundational triad of h, G and c - seem more properly the dimensionless as they are only measured against each other. They are bootstrapping in that they don't require measurement against some further external dimensioned backdrop. You can just set their "strength" to 1 and get on with it.

So the dimensional constants - h, G and c - are the properly latent ones as they encode the very fact of a "reality forming dichotomy" in my view. They are what I would rather call "dimensionless" precisely because they only stand in an inverse or reciprocal relation to each other. All the basic aspects of the Universe are a playing off of h vs G (that is: the quantum action vs the gravitational action).

The quantum action stands for a primordial notion of differentiation. The gravitational action stands for a primordial notion of integration. And then c - the speed of light - captures the universal "rate" at which they interact to form a substantial state of being.

So the dimensional constants are certainly latent in the potential that became the Big Bang cosmos. They are our most naked description of the fact that reality exists because any naked potential is a potential for just this kind of differentiation~integration kind of world-making dichotomy. If there is causality, it must take this logical form - material particulars vs global constraints.

Again, h scales the bare act of differentiation. G scales the bare act of integration. Once you have these two polar tendencies in operation - the "accident" of a Big Bang fluctuation - then you get the third thing of a rate, a universal speed, at which they mutually develop into increasingly concrete being.

The big question then is what to say about the dimensionless constants - all the further couplings strengths of the various forces and masses that become "exposed" due to further symmetry breakings as the Universe cools and expands.

It could be that they are mathematically hardwired as well. There may be a fundamental geometric explanation - a mathematical constraint that lurks and gives a constant its necessary value. Or it could be that we have to accept some kind of multiverse scenario where a random range of these dimensionless constants could be expressed. They themselves might be a "degree of freedom" within the bigger cosmos-forming picture.

The jury is out. But I obviously favour the simpler idea that all the constants will turn out to have a sufficient mathematical necessity so that our Universe can be understood as a single unitary "mathematical event".

All this leads up to a simple question: is he right in claiming that there are only three possible Realist views: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic? — Mitchell

Traditionally the problem of universals is:

[1] Are universals real?
[2] If so, are they real apart from particulars?

Regarding the second question, the transcendent realist says "yes" while the immanent realist says "no".

As Boethius put it, "Plato thinks that genera and species and the rest are not only understood as universals, but also exist and subsist apart from bodies. Aristotle, however, thinks that they are understood as incorporeal and universal, but subsist in sensibles."

That exhausts all the possibilities, so the question is really which of those two positions Scholastics subscribed to.

In the first place, nearly all medieval thinkers agreed on the existence of universals before things in the form of divine ideas existing in the divine mind, but all of them denied their existence in the form of mind-independent, real, eternal entities originally posited by Plato. — SEP - The Medieval Problem of Universals

The "agreed on the existence of universals before things" indicates the Scholastics essentially rejected immanent realism in favor of regarding mind (in this case the divine mind) as the realm where universals reside.

So to answer your question, there are various realist views even within Scholasticism. But I think they ultimately boil down to either transcendent or immanent realism.

"What would you count in the category "universal" that you would also count as real?"

Mathematical concepts & truths; Scientific Laws, (at least) terms for Primary Qualities. Note that 'real' here simply means "not mind-dependent".

I suppose I'm a bit of a relativist in these matters. I would say 1) The Mind is not the same as The Social, and 2) Mathematical concepts and truths or scientific laws are both products of social activity.

They are true. They are mind-independent. And they are social products -- like toasters, legal precedents, and money.

Without us they would not exist. And yet in spite of that dependency they do, in fact, exist -- the same as rocks and beans.


Not sure where modern metaphysics would lead us. I am not educated enough to adjudicate that boundary. But those are my first thoughts.

So to answer your question, there are various realist views even within Scholasticism. But I think they ultimately boil down to either transcendent or immanent realism. — Andrew M

But immanence needs to account for itself by way of some inner mechanism. And Aristotle rather danced around on both sides of the argument.

As Boethius put it, "... Aristotle, however, thinks that they are understood as incorporeal and universal, but subsist in sensibles." — Andrew M

That is a familiar framing of hylomorphism that lends itself to a fairly nominalist reading. Actuality is substantial being. Potentiality is the properties that can be predicated of substance. Materiality becomes some sort of passive brute existence. This is an ontology of a world of already given objects, not one that is in fact a story of immanent development - a process with a self-structuring flow.

To be fully immanent, a tale of prime matter and prime mover is not enough. This is an ontology targeted at recovering the physics of a world already gone cold and congealed - a classical realm of atoms blundering about a void.

It is presumed that substance is ideally understood as a passive, enduring, solid, bounded, state of "matter with properties". That is certainly the world that is most immediately familiar to us, as humans, with human purposes. Our interest in reality revolves around how we can use the world to build things and regulate things. We are looking for the "secrets of construction". And so the idea of a stack of bricks and a set of architect drawings strikes us as the most natural image of natural causality.

But metaphysics has to step back and understand immanence in terms of actual developmental processes. It has to be more like Anaximander and Heraclitus. So bricks are mud that has ceased to be muddy. They are substantial only because they have approached the limit of a process - the entropy dissipating one of drying out and forming tighter mineral bonds.

A truly immanent metaphysics sees the material parts as much emergent as the "immaterial" whole. And so this requires a triadic framework. The part and the whole, the matter and the form, the physical degrees of freedom and the physically constraining laws, must co-arise out of a primordial vagueness or chaos.

Aristotle rather dismissed Anaximander and Heraclitus on this score. And he was right in a way.

There is a secondary story of actuality yielding potentiality in that once the world is substantially formed - once it is a realm of cold and congealed stuff, a clutter of material objects - then constructive causality really becomes a big thing. You have a foundational simplicity - some range of stable substances with their stable properties - that can then start to generate an emergent complexity. You have your world of atoms that start to combine mechanically and build more complicated designs.

So Aristotle is quite focused on that secondary tale - the one where constructed complexity becomes the further possibility immanent in any stable substance. Once you have a lump of wood, you can start thinking about fashioning a table. But give a carpenter a bucket of water, and the lack of inherent stability in the water means there is not a lot of furniture immanent in it. A water bed at best.

There is nothing wrong with telling this follow-on story where potentiality gets switched to become a predicate of substantial actuality.

But true metaphysical immanence is about how the potential produces the actual. And that requires a bootstrapping or self-structuring view of causality.

nominalism depends on an ontology where everything is a material particular. The differentiation of being is the primary fact. — apokrisis

But what ‘being’ is there, in the absence of humans? I think the answer according to evolutionary bioogy is - none that we know of (other than the higher animals.). The aperion is not posited as a being, or pure being, or a divine intellect. So prior to the emergence of human being, if there is simply matter, or matter~energy, or electro-magnetic fields or plasma or whatever - there is no being as such. And the only kind of differentiation could be that which occurs through stellar processes.

One point all the traditional realists agreed on - whether Platonist, Aristotelian, or scholastic - was that matter was the furthest from the real source or origin of being. To Plato, the Idea of the Good was the fundamental reality. In Neoplatonism, is was the One, flowing down to the World Soul; in Aristotle the First Cause. That was the animating principle. But what you’re looking for in ‘immanent metaphysics’ is a self-animating universe, matter that somehow knows how to organise itself without the organising principle that the ancients thought must be behind it.

So, again, the question that occurs to me, is that if there is a top-down organising principle, as systems science seems to be saying, what is responsible for that, because the ‘immanent metaphysics’ model seems very bottom-up, as far as I can understand it (which I readily admit might not be very far.)

Oops! I was in a hurry when i replied earlier, and I've just realized that I misunderstood, and thought that you were quoting Plato, when you were really quoting Feser.

Evidently Feser is one of that large group, the Theists who believe in Materialism, but with human souls, and in which God created a Material world that's really the same as that of the Materialists.

So of course he doesn't like the Plato version of Realism, if, as you said, Feser doesn't believe that there's anything other than Mind and Matter.

Myself, I don't understand that belief. But when I criticize a metaphysics, I save the criticism for plain Scientificist Materialism. No time to criticize all metaphysicses that I don't agree with.

I don't think the world is fundamentally material, I don't believe that God is a being, or an element of metaphysics, "Creation" is an over-anthropomorphic notion. ...as is much of what a lot of Theists, including. Literalists of various kinds, say about God.

Michael Ossipoff

So prior to the emergence of human being, if there is simply matter, or matter~energy, or electro-magnetic fields or plasma or whatever - there is no being as such. — Wayfarer

You seem to be conflating 'being' with 'conception of being'. Prior to humans there was no conception of being (obviously assuming that it is true that no other animals conceive of being). There would also have been no conception of "matter-energy, or electro-magnetic fields or plasma or whatever", and yet all of those things, if they have been independent realities (i.e. if they have, independently of us, been) since the advent of humans would have been prior to humans as well.

Of course, you could object that all of those including being are relational realities that 'exist' only relative to human experience. Will you say that there was then literally nothing prior to humanity? If not, then you must at least admit being as prior to any " matter-energy..." and so on.

(Note: 'being' should be understood as both verb and noun; which allows it to include becoming).

You seem to be conflating 'being' with 'conception of being' — Janus

Not at all. Humans are designated ‘beings’, and other types of things are not, according to naturalism. In ordinary English, whenever we use the noun ‘being’ we refer to human beings, and sometimes to higher animals. If SETI had found evidence of ‘beings’ elsewhere in the cosmos it would be a scientific breakthrough and an enormous news story. But to date there has been no such evidence; to our knowledge, the cosmos does not contain other beings. It does seem to comprise mainly matter (matter-energy, electromagnetic fields, stellar objects and so on) with nary another being in sight.

The nature of being qua being - what the word ‘being’ means - is indeed the subject of the discipline of metaphysics. What I’m drawing attention to is that using the term ‘being’ to signify the domain which is the subject of study by the natural sciences, contains an implicit assumption about the nature of being which I have challenged. If one talks about ‘differentiation in being’, sans reference to human beings, what is actually being talked about, if not simply physical transformations, such as those that take place via stellar explosions, or during the expansion and cooling of the Universe? How does that amount to a ‘differentiation in being’, as distinct from ‘differentiations In the states of matter and energy?

I think there are two distinct domains being conflated which is in line with the ongoing effort to arrive at what is considered a naturalistic explanation of consciousness. So again it is treating the nature of mind or being in terms of phenomena - or at least, that’s what it seems to me.

So, again, the question that occurs to me, is that if there is a top-down organising principle, as systems science seems to be saying, what is responsible for that, because the ‘immanent metaphysics’ model seems very bottom-up, as far as I can understand it (which I readily admit might not be very far.) — Wayfarer

The Peircean position which I take would see this matter - like a plasma - as the simplest form of actualised substance. Then human being stands at the opposite pole in being the most hierarchically complex form of actualised substance that is currently known by us.

So plasma is animated by top-down telos and order, as you would put it. It is hylomporhic substance. It is not bare stuff but stuff shaped by entropic purpose and lawful structure. Both a plasma and a human are fully developed, fully actualised, fully hylomorphic, substances. They just stand at opposite ends of a spectrum that defines the fundamentally simple and the massively complex.

So far, so Aristotelian. The physical difference between a plasma and a human is one of degree, not kind.

The Peircean twist would be then to question what makes life and mind distinctive. A human is not merely just more complex. A human is semiotic - a living organism in a modelling relation with its world. So there is this extra symbol~matter twist - the epistemic cut - that goes now to a difference in kind.

However then - a further now metaphysically speculative slant, as it is not quite yet mainstream science - we could see all nature ruled by semiosis. Even a plasma may have this irreducible structure in some meaningful sense. And so we would be able to track a continuity of kind (to some degree) as we go from living organisms back across the epistemic modelling divide to regard the simple material world again.

The advantage of this pan-semiotic view is that it would properly ground the phenomenon of living being in the world. It would articulate both what is the ontic difference, and also what is the basic dynamical causal mechanism “all the way down”.

Semiosis explains immanence or self-animation through an appeal to the dual reality of both matter and symbol. And it is nice if we can understand the symbol part as being there at the fundamentally simple level too - as we discussed in your thread on physics’ turn towards information theoretic descriptions.

"In ordinary English, whenever we use the noun ‘being’ we refer to human beings, and sometimes to higher animals"

So there is no such thing as inanimate being?

Janus is right. Here you are just trying to win an argument by playing with definitions.

Sure you can identify being with mind, consciousness or spirit if you are asserting ontic idealism. But the metaphysical understanding of “being” is the general one here. Idealism is just one of the possible ontic positions.

Humans are designated as "human beings' in distinction to other kinds of beings. Stars, galaxies, planets, are all different kinds of beings; they are usually considered to be non-living beings as distinguished from living beings. In any case this is not relevant to what I said, because I said you seem to be conflating being with the conception of being, and this would extend to conflating beings with conceptions of beings, and you have failed to address this criticism.

Being is not the object of study of the sciences, obviously, but beings, both non-living and living, are. Of course "differentiation in being" (producing all the different kinds of beings, both living and non-living) is an idea of "physical transformations"; what else could it be? I am not seeing how anything you have said addresses, even remotely, my previous points.

Also, it's not clear on what basis you equate the "nature of mind" with "being".

This idea of matter/symbol as fundamental certainly has appeal. Substance, then, would not be matter or mind but matter/mind (where mind is understood not as a kind of empty 'container' of symbols, but rather constituted by symbolic function or process?

So, the reader or interpreter of symbols, and thus of form and matter, is herself exhaustively constituted by matter/symbol ('symbol' here understood in the broadest sense as inclusive of sign, icon and symbol). Matter/ symbol reads itself?

I'm becoming increasingly interested in biosemiotics and just acquired Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer, so hopefully reading that that will help me increase my understanding. :)

Being is not the object of study of the sciences, obviously — Janus

How would it be possible that 'being is not an object of the study of the sciences', if there were no difference between 'being' and 'beings'? What is it about 'being' that makes it NOT the object of study of the sciences? And if it's not the object of the sciences, then what discipline does it concern?

'Being' is a generalization from our perceptions of beings. Science studies perceived beings; particulars and their attributes and relations (i.e. it is empirical). It certainly generalizes, but it does not study generalization. The study of generalization could be part of linguistics or analytic philosophy. Science also does not study generalities; that would be the province of metaphysics and ontology. The tools of metaphysics and ontology are imagination, intuition and logic.