we could see all nature ruled by semiosis — apokrisis

I can't see how that can be the case without there being mind in the first place. When Peirce says that 'matter is effete mind', this does seem to be his meaning. As we've discussed, he seems to have acquired this idea from Emerson, Schelling, Kant, and others of that ilk. He is also invariably categorised as an idealist philosopher - actually as an objective idealist.

Semiosis explains immanence or self-animation through an appeal to the dual reality of both matter and symbol. — apokrisis

And if were a duality of matter and mind, then we wouldn't have an argument. I'm saying that the concept of symbol doesn't make a lot of sense without there being mind. But that's the conclusion you're wanting to avoid.

Here you are just trying to win an argument by playing with definitions. — apokrisis

No, I'm making a point with reference to definitions.

The advantage of this pan-semiotic view is that it would properly ground the phenomenon of living being in the world. — apokrisis

In other words, make it potentially available to objective analysis - an object for the sciences. It's still essentially reductionist, in that the principle you're looking for is 'beneath' you, in the sense of being 'something that you explain'. In classical philosophy, the principle is 'above you', in the sense of being 'what explains you'. But I'm afraid this will always be an impasse as far as our discussions are concerned.

Science also does not study generalities; that would be the province of metaphysics and ontology. — Janus

Which is the precise point that I made.

Which is the precise point that I made. — Wayfarer

But it is just stating the obvious. What is the point of that point? I don't think anyone has been claiming that science just is metaphysics. On the other hand can any relevant contemporary metaphysics happen in a vacuum isolated from contemporary science?

So there is no such thing as inanimate being? — Mitchell

It seems an oxymoron to me. Would you refer to the proverbial chair or table as 'a being'? Is a piece of fruit 'a being'? I suppose, arguably, a tree might be an 'insentient being'. But in normal English, humans are generally designated 'beings'. God is designated 'a supreme being'. I don't think this is coincidental - I think the use of the word 'being' is indicative of a genuine ontological distinction between 'beings' and 'objects'.

I don't think anyone has been claiming that science just is metaphysics. — Janus

That was the point I was making and as far as I'm concerned it hasn't been rebutted.

And if were a duality of matter and mind, then we wouldn't have an argument. I'm saying that the concept of symbol doesn't make a lot of sense without there being mind. But that's the conclusion you're wanting to avoid. — Wayfarer

See my response to apokrisis above. The point is that the concept of mind doesn't make any sense without there being matter and symbol. It's a matter of interdependence between elements that constitute reality that only appear to be separate due to our discursive limitations. You seem to be forever locked into your unjustified prejudice that mind (in some vague, imagined "unadulterated" sense) must be fundamental and prior to all else.

That was the point I was making and as far as I'm concerned it hasn't been rebutted. — Wayfarer

The problem is that no cogent argument for your point has been given; and until then any rebuttal would seem to lack an object.

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

You're just expressing your uneducated prejudices, as you even seem to admit at the end of the quoted passage above.

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. — apokrisis

It is both. Aristotle's hylomorphism was, in part, a response to Parmenides. A substance may change while retaining identity (accidental change). Also substances may come into and pass out of existence (substantial change). But in this latter case they are generated from other substances, since nothing comes from nothing.

To be fully immanent, a tale of prime matter and prime mover is not enough. — apokrisis

Yes. And that is because prime matter and prime mover mark a departure from hylomorphism. If, instead, Aristotle's first cosmological cause is hylomorphic then there exists a prime (ground) substance with cosmic potential. This is the universe, the nature of which can be investigated as with any hylomorphic particular.

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

So with prime substance we have true metaphysical immanence. That bootstrapping or self-structuring view of causality just is the universe actualizing its own potential.

Aristotle's first cosmological cause is hylomorphic then there exists a prime (ground) substance with cosmic potential. This is the universe, the nature of which can be investigated as with any hylomorphic particular. — Andrew M

How would 'investigating the nature of the Universe' in this manner, be any different to what science is actually doing?

So with prime substance we have true metaphysical immanence. — Andrew M

Again - is this something which can be detected or known by empirical science? In other words, is there anything which might be used to convince a scientific sceptic that there is such a substance?

Well...

One more try.

I'm one who uses the term "universal", and it seems that I use it in an unconventional manner. So, I'm actually wondering, after having briefly glanced through an SEP article, what counts as being a universal?

I mean, what is the criterion which when met by a candidate(s?) counts as being a universal?

Doesn't answering that answer the OP's question? What is the ontological status of universals? Furthermore, is there any way to further discriminate between different criterions; senses; and/or notions thereof?

Have a look at the second half of this post

How would 'investigating the nature of the Universe' in this manner, be any different to what science is actually doing? — Wayfarer

It needn't be. It just characterizes it in hylomorphic terms.

Again - is this something which can be detected or known by empirical science? In other words, is there anything which might be used to convince a scientific sceptic that there is such a substance? — Wayfarer

The universe is something that can be detected or known by empirical science isn't it? If the criteria for a substance is that it exists (materially) with an investigable nature (form) then the universe meets that criteria. So it's a logical implication. Presumably a sceptic would reject that criteria or otherwise challenge it.

I mean, what is the criterion which when met by a candidate(s?) counts as being a universal? — creativesoul

Some things are universal, others individual. By the term 'universal' I mean that which is of such a nature as to be predicated of many subjects, by 'individual' that which is not thus predicated. Thus 'man' is a universal, 'Callias' an individual. — Aristotle - On Interpretation, Part 7

Doesn't answering that answer the OP's question? What is the ontological status of universals? — creativesoul

I would say so.

↪creativesoul Have a look at the second half of this post — Wayfarer

Hey Jeep!

Nice. I find little to disagree with in that. The relationship(s) that subsist(exist) prior to our awareness in particular. Of course, Russel is an influence on me.

I mean, what is the criterion which when met by a candidate(s?) counts as being a universal?
— creativesoul

Some things are universal, others individual. By the term 'universal' I mean that which is of such a nature as to be predicated of many subjects, by 'individual' that which is not thus predicated. Thus 'man' is a universal, 'Callias' an individual.
— Aristotle - On Interpretation, Part 7

Doesn't answering that answer the OP's question? What is the ontological status of universals?
— creativesoul

I would say so. — Andrew M

So then, we could take the position that being a universal is determined by how the word is being used.

Is there another method of discrimination possible? Can we further assess the different senses of universal in a sort of comparative/contrast way? Can we be wrong, not in the sense of using the word incorrectly, but can we both - use the word sensibly and say false things about universals?

I am not sure that Aristotle would accept a distinction between the way we say things are and the way they are. Any Aristotle scholars here?

Hm. I would hope that Aristotle would hold a distinction between statements about the way things are and the way things are.

Notably... I'm not an Aristotle scholar.

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”. — apokrisis

The problem with this pan-semiotic view is that it is completely unsupported by evidence, and is actually contrary to the evidence. The need to assume such a principle, that plasma employs semiosis, which is contrary to the evidence, points to bad metaphysics. Even metaphysics which requires the assumption of God is better metaphysics, because at least God is supported by the evidence rather than contrary to the evidence.

So with prime substance we have true metaphysical immanence. — Andrew M

So where exactly did Aristotle spell out an argument for prime substance? Do you have a reference in mind?

Did you mean something like an Apeiron? I agree that nothing comes from nothing, but also it can't be the case that immanent being is an efficient/material tale of how something comes from something. That way lies only infinite regress.

So the Peircean take is that something definite arises semiotically from a "something" that is its radical "other". A Firstness, a logical vagueness, a bare potential. If the crisply existent reality we now see all around us is composed of a variety of hylomorphic substances, then logic can say that how that state of affairs developed was by some first act that is hylomorphism at its most decomposed. :)

So the first substantial act or occurence would be the least possible state of being in terms of being en-mattered and in-formed - some kind of spontaneous fluctuation.

This Peircean notion most resembles Aristotle's talk about prime matter. But I don't recall there being a reference to prime substance as such.

"at least God is supported by the evidence rather than contrary to the evidence."

Whoa! Although this is a topic for a separate thread, I certainly would disagree with this claim!

Aristotle scholars call it "Prime Matter", not "Prime Substance". See, for example, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/#PrimMatt

(I don't seem to be able to create a link) SEP, "Form and Matter", section 2 "Prime Matter"

Russel wrote:

Consider such a proposition as "Edinburgh is north of London." Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation "north of," which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation "north of," which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

I'm not sure that I agree with the last statement, particularly the part about "like the terms it relates". It has to do with Russel's use of "fact" I think...

(I don't seem to be able to create a link) SEP, "Form and Matter", section 2 "Prime Matter" — Mitchell

SEP article Form vs. Matter

Hyle, matter, in the Aristotelian scheme, is incommensurable with the modern conception of matter, I suspect.

Hence we must admit that the relation [‘north of’], like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create. — “Bertrand Russell”

Crucial point. This is something that almost nobody gets. The way thought operates constantly relies on such judgements, that are not dependent on a particular mind, but only perceptible by a mind. They are rational relations and the basis for inference and judgement, and are real, but not physical, in that they’re prior to judgement.

Since we do not have unfettered access to the universe; that our perception of the universe is necessarily partial - we could never recognise a universal if one hit us in the face like a large wet fish.

Hence we must admit that the relation [‘north of’], like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create. — “Bertrand Russell”

It's a crucial point that has been lost ever since the mind has been reconceived as "constructive" by the neo-Kantians - in that they took the mind's function to be adding form onto sense impression, instead of perceiving (the form).

In a way, it's funny (to me) that you have both Plato and Kant as favorite philosophers, because in many ways, they are opposed to each other.

The way thought operates constantly relies on such judgements, that are not dependent on a particular mind, but only perceptible by a mind. — Wayfarer

There we go, this is a realist position and is opposed to the Kantian. According to the latter, "north of" is dependent upon the mind, since it is the mind that adds spatial form to the contents of sense impressions - that gives the experience of whatever is perceived as "in space". It is also this spatial form that puts sense impressions in relations of "north of" etc. to each other.

Plato's position differs from this in that Plato (and Aristotle, and the Scholastics) takes "north of" to inhere in the things themselves. We don't only perceive sensible qualities in things, but also relational ones.

The need to assume such a principle, that plasma employs semiosis, which is contrary to the evidence, points to bad metaphysics. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can't see how that can be the case without there being mind in the first place. When Peirce says that 'matter is effete mind', this does seem to be his meaning. As we've discussed, he seems to have acquired this idea from Emerson, Schelling, Kant, and others of that ilk. He is also invariably categorised as an idealist philosopher - actually as an objective idealist. — Wayfarer

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? — Janus

The pansemiotic claim is tricky. I readily admit that it is a speculative project. So I will try to explain it better.

Straightforward semiosis is no problem. Humans use language to regulate social behaviour. It is just taken as obvious that language is a symbolic activity where tokens or symbols are used so that a realm of ideas can interact with a world of material dynamics.

Then Peirce sought to define what was the "core machinery" by which language could gain this meaningful "modelling relation" with the world. He drilled down to describe it in epistemic terms - understanding semiosis as the logical act of reasoning. So words have their purchase over reality because of a triadic sign relation. There is the world. There are the signs we form that "represent" it. There is then our habits of interpretation - the understanding we form by virtue of a sign-mediated relation with the world.

This is pretty much straight linguistics. It is a more sophisticated take than Saussurean semiotics in being triadic rather than dyadic. Peirce makes the Kantian point that the sign stands between us and the world. And so the sign represents not just the world, but also "us". The signs we form are inherently "self-interested" in that they represent the world in terms that are pragmatic or purpose-imbued, not nakedly of "the thing in itself". So the mediating level of sign - the "umwelt" that forms our "state of sensation" - is a representation of our state of being, our wishes, desires, interests, and history, as much as it purports to be a representation of the world beyond.

Another important wrinkle of the Peircean approach is that he saw sign as itself having an immanent developmental story. It begins as merely a potential relation - an icon. Develops to become an indexical sign. Then only ultimately reaches full-fledged status as a symbol. So first it is just a picture that can be recognised as involuntarily predicting some state of affairs. Then it becomes a more deliberate pointer - like a dog's wagging tail or a road sign. Only finally is there a full "epistemic cut" where the relation between a token and what it stands for becomes arbitrary and therefore a wholly voluntary, or "self-produced", communicative act that requires interpretance.

The word "apple" - either as a spoken sound or scribbled writing - and an apple have no necessary connection. Therefore the habit of understanding the physical mark to mean something becomes entirely "mental". Mentality begins definitely at that point.

So semiosis is straightforward and uncontroversial. Peircean semiosis is pragmatic as it is clearly tied to an epistemology of the self. The sign relation makes us as much as it makes the world that exists for us. It is an understanding of language use and human reason that gets Kant and manages to accept the key part of idealism without rejecting what matters about realism.

Then armed with an understanding of the triadic semiotic relation, we can see that it applies to life as well as to mind. We can see that brains use neurons to encode the world, form a modelling relation with the world based on sign. And the immune system is semiotic. So is the gut. They use a system of molecular receptors to decide what is self and what is non-self. Then the genes of a cell are clearly a coding machinery, embodying a model of the self in a world in their ability to interpret the signs they are getting in terms of the states of being they are trying to achieve.

So science has no problem seeing Peircean semiosis as a completely general account of life and mind. It describes a triadic "world-making" relation that run all the way from the first biological act - the first time a molecule functioned as a message - right up through complex bodies, to bodies with brains, to brains with language, to languages that were logical, mathematical, and capable of "total reasoned abstraction".

Then we can start to talk about pan-semiosis. This would be a continuation of the story beyond the kind of complexity we recognise in living and mindful systems.

Now Peirce did attempt this with his Cosmological semiotics. He described the triadic relation in a way where the Universe's coming into being as a realm of definite law could be understood as the psychological development of habits of regulation.

As Wayfarer notes, late in life, Peirce did become overtly religious - or at least "spiritual". But how seriously should we take that, given that his semiosis arose out of a scientific psychological model, and then out of a logical generalisation of that psychology?

Wayfarer keeps returning to the one quote that is his convenient hostage to fortune. But it is unfair on Peirce to read his incredibly broad-minded approach to a "philosophy of nature" in such a narrow and self-serving fashion. His semiotics provides an intelligible bridge between the divided camps of physicalism and idealism. To claim Peirce is then just an idealist is cheap and slipshod.

Anyway, Peirce's cosmological semiotic is more a "logical poetry" than a physics-based theory. It was inspired by the dawning thermodynamic understanding of his time. It did foreshadow quantum physics in its emphasis on indeterminism and the observer-depend nature of reality. Peirce even foreshadowed general relativity in proposing that an evolving universe might show curvature over cosmic measurement scales - his early career as a scientist meant this kind of measurement issue was exactly his forte.

So the context of Peirce's cosmological argument was that he was fully up to date with the science of his age. And he could see that the Newtonian notion of an eternal Comos with fixed God-given laws was pretty "unnatural" in a world where mind, reasoning, growth and evolutionary development were a central fact.

Thus Peirce created his theory of an immanent pansemiotic cosmology where hierarchically complex existence was formed via a "universal growth of reasonableness".

The story went that in the beginning was a Firstness, a bare potential of spontaneous fluctuation or tychism. The sporting of absolute chance. So there was a vagueness with no particular matter or form. But then that meant there was nothing to prevent accidental fluctuations that were some kind of context-less event - a bare action with a direction of some kind.

Then if something could spontaneously happen once, it might happen again. With nothing preventing it, you would have a host of fluctuations and so now the Secondness of some more definite act of interaction. One fluctuation would react with another. The possibility of a history of collisions, deviations, agglomerations, deformations, etc, could start to form.

Then once you have this random play of interactions, regularities would start to emerge. Over time, a history would start to exist in a way that became generally constraining. A habit or state of equilibrium would result.

This was straight thermodynamcs. Inject a hot particle into a tepid gas standing at equilibrium and the particle will eventually knock about in a way so that its momentum converges towards the general average. A cold particle will get bumped and jiggled to heat it up to the average. So the laws of nature can be understood as nothing more than the kind of rational patterns that emerge as the "sum over histories" of a set of interaction - a prevailing statistics.

The Universe would have been born of unbounded fluctuations - the primal chaos of a Firstness. But it then could not help but to self-organise in the fashion described by both thermodynamics and quantum physics. The first random actions might have any direction, any strength. But then their interactions would thermalise them, tame them, bring them towards some common equilibrium that gave the Universe an overall direction or developmental flow. A collective history become a collective constraint. Existence becomes a single universal habit.

So Peirce's semiotic - the triadic system of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness - is the ontological version of his epistemic triad of world, sign and interpretance. Semiotics in the linguistic or psychological sense is about the symbol~matter distinction - the epistemic cut by which a realm of ideas can come to regulate a world of material dynamics. Now Peirce was using the same causal machinery to explain the physical world as if it had "a mind".

The metaphysical question becomes how much is this just a nice analogy and how much a proper theory of nature and existence? So pan-semiosis would be showing how it is actually a theory more than an analogy.

Well if we look at the way physics went after Peirce's time, we can see how the observer issue moved back to centre stage.

Newtonian physics was reductionist in being a realist physics based on just observables. Basically, humans believed they were looking at reality with a God's-eye view of it. There was no issue about where to place the epistemic cut between the observer and the world observed. Naive realism applied. Then came Kant to show the psychological problems inherent in that. And then Peirce - whose career as a scientist was all about science's fundamental issue of how to make an "objective measurement".

But the observer issue became central to modern physics in the 20th century. Quantum mechanics showed something really "weird" was going on as humans just couldn't seem to disentangle themselves from the world they wanted to measure. But relativity was just as weird. Again, an observer was only relatively disentangled from what they meant to observe. And even eventually thermodynamics returned the same metaphysical shock. Chaos revealed the initial conditions measurement issue for describing dynamics. The Newtonian approach to entropy turned out to be also the inverse of a measurement of observer uncertainty - the metaphysical twist that turned physics towards its new information theoretic perspective.

So nature really seems to be trying to tell us something. To understand it, we need a semiotic lens. A fundamental theory of nature will have to include the observer along with the observables in some formal fashion. We can't pretend to have a simple God's-eye view like Newton. The "mind" itself must be reduced in some completely general fashion. And Peirce offers the most general story on how observers and observables - selves and worlds - are developed through the mediation of the third thing of the signs that connect them.

So the metaphysical project is clear. Physics is already charging down that road. But there are still some paradigmatic shifts in thinking that are a long way off for virtually everyone. We can't "get" pansemiosis until we have made some quite significant changes in orientation.

The key one that currently interests me is the importance of material instability to the whole picture.

The usual assumption is that the material part of the story must be about stability, definiteness, concreteness, persistence. It just make sense that the material foundations of being must be sturdy for the more delicate business of symbolically-encoded complexity to arise. You definite parts to start constructing elaborate wholes ruled over by rather immaterial ideas or purposes.

But the recent biophysical revelations about the molecular basis of life show that a cell depends on its fundamental instability. All its molecular parts must be in danger of falling apart to make them in fact easily controllable by the cell's information. So life seeks what was, back in the 1980s, called the edge of chaos, or self-organised criticality. It is materiality at its most fragile or labile that is "living enough" to become the robust foundation of living processes. As what is poised on the point of falling apart is also poised on the point of falling together. All the molecular chaos needs is a steadying genetic hand - enough of a signal pointing in the "right direction" that is the falling together.

So biosemiosis is about this central understanding. Life depends on fragile material. It wants a material foundation so labile that it can then become "completely regulated" by the ideas and purposes remembered at the informational level of the genes. The job of stabilising is owned by the system's information. The mind of the cell - as a collection of learnt habits - is the source of its long-run stability.

So consciousness is often thought of as being centrally about spontaneous creativity and maximum fluidity. But neuroscience has also come to realise it is the same story of a regulation of uncertainty. The mind is centrally about habit formation. And it exists to stabilise a collection of useful physical or behavioural interactions with the world.

Any other model of "the mind" - like a spiritual or freewill one - is fundamentally flawed. Even the linguistic human mind is all about creating a social and cultural stability. Humans - as animals - are a bunch of unstable degrees of freedom. But language is society's way to bind humans into collective organisms. As we see in modern society, personal instability is promoted - we are brought up to imagine that anything might be possible in terms of how we might behave. And then that individuated instability becomes a potent energy that society can harness - keep nudging just enough so that we collectively fall together in some enduring direction while always seeming to be on the verge of catastrophically falling apart.

OK, this story of semiosis as "the stable realm of symbol regulating the instability of material reality" works for life and mind. Then pansemiosis would extend that to the physical world in general.

And again, this is simply just the view that physics has been backing into for about 100 years now. Quantum mechanics tells us the Cosmos is fundamentally indeterministic and then needs "a context" to collapse its uncertainty. What creates material stability is thermal decoherence. And this context, this history, is then "written into" thermal event horizons. The holographic principle shows that the physics of "material events" is ruled by the "information content" that can be encoded on the "surface" of a physical region of spacetime.

So it sounds odd if - as MU does - we try to understand pansemiosis in terms of the Cosmos literally having some kind of mind that is interpreting physical events as symbolic activities. This starts to sound like the pan-psychism of Whitehead and his prehending particles. Atoms are reading each other as signs rather than just colliding like material billiard balls. Spooky, hey?

But still, modern physics actually has rejected the material billiard balls now. Two particles crash into each other and recoil in some far less material way. In quantum language, the collision starts to become a blizzard-like exchange of virtual particles - tiny messages that you are getting too close to me and need to start backing off. The pressure of exchanges increases until the other particle is forced to veer off.

And then as we really step back to a quantum field description, the reason why two particles bounce off each other becomes just some kind of statistical effect - an completely informational one. The probabilities of where the two particles ought to be becomes exponentially "anywhere except as close as this". Even the last material connection of virtual particles has vanished. The quantum picture has switched to one of pure sign. All the physics can properly describe is the abstract image of a completely generic wavefunction. Somehow an observer must then intrude "physically" to tell us what actually happened on this or that particular occasion with the same kind of probabilistic set-up.

So I accept that pan-semiosis sounds weird. But reality is weird! And pan-semiosis is a metaphysics weird enough to account for all of the phenomena that science is most concerned about. It is a metaphysical machinery that can span the gamut from the quantum to the cosmic, the physical to the mental. Even if physics ends up calling it something else, it will still be pansemiotics as Peirce originally envisioned it. And it is quite nice that in theoretical biology at least, a conscious connection to Peirce has been forged in the public embracing of "biosemiosis" over the past 20 years.

Holy shit this is a book. >:O

Wayfarer keeps returning to the one quote that is his convenient hostage to fortune. — apokrisis

Hey, not fair. I've read the Pattee paper, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics numerous times, and also a longish essay on Peirce's idealist philosophy by an academic, Nicholas Guardiano, and other materials. What I'm saying is that there is an idealist conception of 'mind' that is implicit in Peirce, which you are trying to get rid of, because it doesn't sit with the physicalist side of your project.

it is unfair on Peirce to read his incredibly broad-minded approach to a "philosophy of nature" in such a narrow and self-serving fashion. — apokrisis

Exactly the same can be said about you. Remember that review I found, 'Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism':

Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually attributed to William of Ockham, 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

My underline!

Yet, you say my reading is tendentious! But, keep coming! You're more than halfway to NOT being physicalist already, you're only an epiphany or two away ;-)

Aristotle scholars call it "Prime Matter", not "Prime Substance". — Mitchell

Yep. That was my point. I was puzzled Andrew was calling it prime substance. But then I guess that the problem is Aristotle was ambivalent about the status of prime matter in exactly the way I tried to describe.

In places you can read him as trying to talk about pure potential. The material aspect of reality would be no more than "the accident of a fluctuation" - the possibility of an action in a direction, without yet a definite context - if we dial existence back to its first bare beginning.

But then - I agree - that even a fluctuation is already "formed" in some matchingly minimal sense. So you can’t escape this Firstness as being substantial as well.

It sounds paradoxical. My own reply is that at least Firstness or vagueness is our conception of whatever it is that could count as being the least substantial state of being. It is a suitably apophatic description. We can get some kind of useful handle on the Big Bang "pure materiality" this way.

Then also it feels right to assert that matter comes before form when taking this approach. If prime matter is a substantial state, it is the least substantial form of material/effective causality in lacking yet a world with a history that might provide any proper regulation. The full form of that world is not going to be completely revealed or expressed until "the end of time".

So finality, or the prime mover, is placed where it should be, at the other end of existence's journey. The Cosmos has to grow into its Being, even if - through mathematics - we can understand that Being to have retrospective necessity. If the beginning was a symmetry, then only certain ways of breaking that symmetry were ever possible. And so the form of the Cosmos can be regarded as latent in prime matter. It could be considered "prime substance" on that ground.

It's all very tricky. And the "prime problem" is that Aristotle was focused on how actuality creates potentiality, rather than the more truly foundational issue of how potentiality creates actuality. Or perhaps even just that the scholastics were interested always in arriving at that interpretation as they wanted to bend Greek philosophy towards the central purposes of their theistic metaphysics.

Yet, you say my reading is tendentious! But, keep coming! You're more than halfway to NOT being physicalist already, you're only an epiphany or two away ;-) — Wayfarer

Never going to happen. Not unless I get a brain tumour or something. 8-)

From SEP article of Form and Matter

"Aristotle does in fact use the expressions “prime matter” (prôtê hulê) and “primary underlying thing” (prôton hupokeimenon) several times: Physics i 9, 192a31, ii 1, 193a10 and 193a29; Metaphysics v 4, 1014b32 and 1015a7–10, v 6, 1017a5–6, viii 4, 1044a23, ix 7, 1049a24–7; Generation of Animals i 20, 729a32."