Apokrisis, if understanding Forms required tying them to some kind of "energetic change," wouldn't that make them physical in some weird way? — Uber

Of course. But are you prepared to enlarge your notion of physicalism to match?

Again, what is actually happening in physical theory? First biology realised that it is rooted in the informational regulation of material dynamics - the thermodynamical view where genes organise dissipative form. And now physics has been making the same information theoretic shift. As you say, suddenly the macro story of constraints has become basic as we take a condensed matter view of particles and states of materiality.

So this is what I recognise as semiotic - an ontology founded on the complementary reality of matter and information. This is not a dualism, but a dichotomy, as the two are formally reciprocal or inverse. They can be rotated into each other mathematically - the feature that blew everyone's mind about AdS/CFT correspondence.

There is big stuff going on here metaphysically. Action and direction must come to be seen as the two complementary halves of the one reciprocal relation. They must be the formal inverse of each other.

So time has to decide whether it stands on the side of action or direction. Or maybe it stands in the third place - as the manoeuvre which flips from one extreme to the other.

There is a really good post on how this connects with the three Planck constants - Okun's cube of physics - http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/physical_reality_less_more

But quickly, you can see how you need the three things of h (to scale local uncertainty or spontaneity), G (to scale global constraint, or energetic flatness), and then c as the speed of coherence (the rate at which quantum decoherence happens to relate the two opposing things of action and direction).

Can "higher truths" be corroborated intersubjectively such that people can be clearly and definitively shown to be in error if they disbelieve them?


For example some people believe that Jesus is God, and that their faith is not merely a "higher truth", but the highest truth. Do you believe that? If not, are you thereby denying that it is a higher truth? — Janus

I think, in line with philosophers such as John Hicks, that there are many divergent accounts of humanity's 'encounter with the numinous'. So - I don't accept 'Christian triumphalism', i.e. that the Christian religion is the only truth. But I do accept that Christian religion as an instantiation of higher truth, sure. How each person responds to that, is indeed their own concern, but I don't believe, like some here, that the whole content of the religion, and indeed the Bible itself, is simply 'fantasy'. I have discovered many Christian teachers and philosophers that I admire and find inspiring - including John Hicks, Keith Ward, Cynthia Bourgeault, Richard Rohr, and Jacques Maritain (off the top of my head.) But does that mean I think Christianity alone is 'the truth and the way'? No, it doesn't. Does it mean that I think Christianity is an archaic superstition? No, it doesn't. I recognise Christianity's foundational role in Western culture, and I'm starting to think that it's erosion is overall a matter for regret. I do often think about whether I could return to the Christian church, but I'm not a church-goer and I don't think ever will be, although that could conceivably change. But I have an inherently pluralistic view of religions, I see them as operating on the level of archetypal psychology. And I see the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, which most often happens.

There is two other questions I would like you to answer honestly:

Do you actually claim to know for sure that there is a higher truth? — Janus

If I fully knew the 'higher truth' that I think I am trying to discover, then presumably I would be a very different kind of person. I think that, allegorically, the 'myth of the Fall' does describe something real about the human condition. But, whereas in mainstream Christianity, one simply believes in the dogma and hopes for the best, I would like to think that such higher truths need to be discovered through the processes of philosophical reflection and self-realisation.

So - I agree that the human potential movement is like 'ancient philosophies' in that respect. But there's something else that I think needs mention - the pre-modern world was 'religious' in a sense we can't easily imagine now - 'the past is a different country', as a saying has it. That is why some of those philosophical schools you mention, whilst obviously not theistic in the modern sense, might still have had a type of religious sensibility, as many of them viewed 'the world' of the 'common person' (the 'hoi polloi') who was 'deceived by the passions' was precisely the adversary that had to be overcome through philosophy. That is why they were often ascetics (especially by today's standards). And I think there is an implicit dimension of the transcendent in such movements, again, even if not what us moderns would categorise as theistic. None of them would be 'believers' in our sense. But none of them are naive realists, or 'naturalistic' in today's sense. The idea that we have, that nature is somehow inherently 'good', is something very few of them shared (maybe the Epicureans, who were indeed materialists, and whom I am the furthest from in my general philosophy.)

Whereas, our 'cultural empiricism' is such that we can't imagine anything beyond 'the sensory domain'. So, insofar as I am beginning to understand that kind of philosophical orientation, then yes, I do believe there is what I call a 'vertical dimension' - states of being that are qualitatively different and better that can be attained by disciplined philosophical reflection and practice. And I think that is something I am beginning to understand, although obviously I am doing a dreadful job of communicating it.

I'm not trying to be unkind; — Janus

:meh:

I have noticed this is a common tactic with you: to assume that those who disagree with you simply don't understand. I think this is an intellectually dishonest move and actually does you no good service. — Janus

No, I don't assume that. I must have written about 5,000 words in this thread already, I constantly cite sources and references. But then, I do get to points where it's not worth trying to explain or unpack everything. I fully acknowledge many of my arguments are sketchy and my approach is often tendentious - fully acknowledge it, right? Plead guilty as charged. It's a public forum, it's not a peer-reviewed or published journal and everything is written on the fly. But if you say things like 'I just can't see how the idea of a First Cause makes sense', then I'm not going to try and persuade you that it does, even if I think it does.

Do you want there to be a higher truth? — Janus

My conception of philosophy is that there must be a vertical dimension; there must be something to anchor qualitative judgements - as per the above.

So theism becomes fine, even if it is "magical thinking" ... at least in the kind of minds it constructs within certain kinds of worlds. — apokrisis

My [evolving and constantly subject-to-revision] understanding is that the Sky Father is indeed a cultural projection based on an amalgam of archetypes. (Notice, for instance, that the Greek 'Jupiter' is derived from the Sanskrit 'dyaus-pitar' which literally means 'Sky Father'.) Then all manner of father-related functions are attributed to this being - hence 'Our Father'. That is, I believe, the kind of belief that most atheists reject (but then, it's also nothing like what I believe.)

I think there are some plausible points in your arguments. But I need to consider them more carefully before I can fully make a coherent judgment. Some of these arguments are not that familiar to me.

That's fine. You've got a good understanding of stuff from the science side - you kind of got me from the moment you mentioned Karl Friston, certainly the smartest guy I came across when getting into functional neuroscience 25 years ago.

:meh: — Wayfarer

Really??

But does that mean I think Christianity alone is 'the truth and the way'? No, it doesn't. Does it mean that I think Christianity is an archaic superstition? No, it doesn't. — Wayfarer

So, you don't believe that Jesus is God, is that right? The point is that others do and they consider that the highest truth. A related question which you didn't answer, but implied you believed the affirmative: Is Gautama infallible? Do you see how these beliefs must be subjective, since the Christian will say 'Yes' to the first and 'No' to the second, while the Buddhist will say the opposite. Can you give me an example of a higher truth that no one could fail to believe?

You referred to "divergent encounters with the numinous"; what are encounters with the numinous if not deeply affective experiences that then become interpreted in terms of the prevailing cultural symbolism? It would seem that these interpretations are what "higher truths' consist in; but that means they must be culturally relative. Of course there may be emotional, psychological, and phenomenological commonalities between experiences of the numinous, and I have not denied that. What I have been arguing is that such experiences can tell us nothing definitive about the metaphysical nature of reality. The metaphysical differences between different traditions attest to that.

Also, there are higher and lower levels just within the immanent milieus of cultures in general, and there may be commonalities between those, too. But that could equally well be understood to simply reflect human nature, that about us which is not culturally constructed, but is genetically or physiognomically determined, as it could be understood to reflect some transcendent spiritual being. That question we cannot answer, so it becomes a matter of faith, either way. In other words, it is a subjective matter to the degree that beliefs are determined by individuals and an intersubjective matter to the extent that beliefs are culturally, not individually, determined.

But there's something else that I think needs mention - the pre-modern world was 'religious' in a sense we can't easily imagine now - 'the past is a different country', as a saying has it. — Wayfarer

I think we simply cannot adequately understand what religion was for the ancients, and that entails that it was not any notion of transcendence that we might currently entertain, even when it comes to the more arcane of the Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism. We certainly have no reason to impute notions of transcendence to the apparently much more secular philosophies such as Skepticism and Epicureanism, and even Stoicism. To do so would be to view them through "rose-coloured glasses".

Do you want there to be a higher truth? — Janus


My conception of philosophy is that there must be a vertical dimension; there must be something to anchor qualitative judgements - as per the above. — Wayfarer

Here again you seem to have deflected and failed to answer the question directly. What I wanted to know is whether you personally desire that there should be higher truths, whether that is important to you such that you would feel that life is devalued if there were no transcendent realm.

I'll give you my answer: I do not desire that there be higher truths, unless the higher truth be that there is no determinate higher truth, because anything else would be an impingement on human freedom. There's a good reason, or perhaps many good reasons, why we cannot know anything about the nature of the afterlife; or even whether there is one.

I don't feel that life would be devalued at all if there were no afterlife. To live in expectation of an afterlife, and with presumptions about how my actions will affect my chances of gaining it, would lead me to focus on myself even more and devalue this life; and this life is all we really know. It's important to be good regardless; and we all know what being good consists in; it is very simple, it consists in being honest with ourselves and kind to others.

In any case, why could qualitative judgements not be anchored in general truths about human nature?

My [evolving and constantly subject-to-revision] understanding is that the Sky Father is indeed a cultural projection based on an amalgam of archetypes. — Wayfarer

Somewhat irrelevant, but surely there is the earth mother also in the metaphysics of any agricultural society? So always that duality of the thunderous law maker and the fecund materiality.

Anyway, my point is that ordinary language has an agential grammar - as it should, as ordinary speech is all about organising our social worlds. But that then creates a rationality, a view of causal relations, predicated on minds with desires and intents. And so theistic metaphysics just super-scales that basic animism. Although - particular in regard to the Western Christian tradition - you had this new thing of a logical grammar, the root of an abstract or philosophical view of causation, enter the theistic picture.

So we wind up with a scholastic hybrid that tries to preserve a super-animism while appealing to Ancient Greek metaphysical rigour, setting up its own later strong conflict with objective science in this regard.

Does Buddhism protect you from the fray? Does it resolve these issues (in the way I say Peircean naturalism resolves them)? Or are you simply deploying the social animism you find there to attack the mechanical view?

The problem with Buddhism (in my view) is that - like PoMo - it avoids clear assertions about the issues. It enjoys and plays with the paradoxes rather than seeks to resolve them. And so it manages not to be found wrong by remaining strategically ambiguous.

But anyway, my point is about how there are two grammatical attitudes at work - the everyday agential one where even the wind seems to either favour or curse us, like another social player, and then the new mechanistic one where the Cosmos is ruled by Logos ... and somehow Flux still has to fit into that metaphysical equation.

The majority of posters here side either with an agential view of philosophy, or a mechanistic one. And probably that is because unless you have that kind of foundational disagreement, what else the heck would give you an excuse to post when the very nature of "a discussion" is the opposition inherent in a dialectic?

Again I come back to Peirce as the guy everyone is happy to disagree with as he takes the third position which is the resolution of all dialectical argumentation. He strived to create a grammar that was holistic - a story of constraints and freedoms, logos and flux. Semiotics is that more advanced grammar. Hegel and Kant were getting there, but Peirce - as also a scientist - sorted out something with foundational clarity.

So throw out these, but keep his understanding of time right? — Uber

Right, have you read his expose on time? Do you understand the difference between time as a measurement and time as something which measured? Are you familiar with Wittgenstein's discussion of the metre stick?

When you say physics provides no means to look at time as something which is measured, you are basically implying that an absolute reference frame of time exists that ticks at the same rate for everything in the Universe. — Uber

No, that's not what it means. It means that the passing of time is a real thing, which can be measured. This does not imply that it is absolute, it just implies that it is a "thing" like other things, like the metre stick, which can be measured. None of the things which we measure are absolute, measurement is to establish a relation between the thing and something else. So there is no reason to believe that time, as a measurable thing is absolute.

The problem appears to be that since time is a non-physical thing, you are hesitant to acknowledge that it is a thing at all. What about space then? Is space a thing to you? If not, then how about space-time? Is it a fiction, or is space-time a thing for you?

Modern physics does allow us to measure time, but it warns us that our measurements do not represent an absolute state of time, merely a relative one. — Uber

I disagree, the concept of time used by modern physics necessitates that there is nothing which is actually being measured. This is necessitated by the constant which is the speed of light. Assuming this as a constant necessitates that no time is passing at the speed of light and therefore the passing of time cannot be a real thing, because it is negated by light speed. And light speed is assumed to be very real, it is not a boundary like infinity. Since this negation of the passing of time is the constant, it acts as the premise upon which any measurement of time is based. Therefore any measurement of time is based in the denial of the passing of time as a real thing, and the measurements employed are arbitrary, based in assumptions other than the assumption of a real passing of time.

It also warns us that time by itself does not make any sense separately from space, hence why we describe events and causes as unfolding in spacetime. — Uber

This is a falsity, the claim that time makes no sense without space. And this is why we must employ logic and reason rather than our senses, to figure this out. It is only this particular conception of time, which you call "spacetime" that assumes time does not make sense without space. But this assumption is completely unfounded because it is not difficult to conceive of time passing with active (immaterial), non-spatial Forms, in the Neo-Platonic sense, with space along with spatial existence, emerging from this. The inverse though, spatial existence with time emerging, is impossible to conceive of because emergence requires time. So it is impossible for time to emerge, but possible for space to emerge.

On this basis, I challenged the notion that Forms can somehow be active in time without being active in space as well. In other words, what does it mean for them to be active, if not in spacetime? — Uber

There are many ways to conceive of space, different dimensionalities, etc.. We can infer from this, that space is not necessarily the way that we conceive it to be. In fact, since there are different possibilities of how to conceive of space, we can infer from this, that space is probably not any of the ways that we do conceive it to be. Therefore, your conception of space, which ties time to space, implying that time makes no sense without space, is probably incorrect, and it is your argument, which relies on this unsound premise, which is unsound, not mine.

Furthermore, reason about what it means to exist cannot develop except through empirical experience. — Uber

How do you know this? If there was a being with access only to its internal self, no senses to sense its environment, would this being be incapable of reasoning about what it means to exist? Why could it not learn things about what is happening outside itself just from understanding what is happening within itself? What comes to be, in the inner space, does not necessarily come through the outer space, and that's one of the quirky things about space which makes the conception of space, and space/time relations so difficult. Where did that fundamental particle come from which just popped onto the scene?

Our "rational operations" in the brain, to quote Wayfarer, depend on the outside world, and then they develop concepts that go along with that dependence, such as existence, theories about the nature of that existence, etc. — Uber

Having said that, I accept that rational human beings rely on their senses for much of the material with which they reason, but not all of it. And this is the issue here, that potion of the reasoning material which is derived from sources other than the senses. It's this material that we need pure reason to account for. You deny that there is such material, material derived from the non-physical, as is common today, but this denial is unreasonable.

Finally, there is absolutely no such thing as metaphysical reason separate from the physical structure of the brain. Let's not equivocate: it is the brain that reaches conclusions about the world. Thank you modern neuroscience. — Uber

Let's not change the subject on this matter. What is at issue is the supremacy of empirical experience, not whether it is the brain which does the thinking. "Empirical" implies specifically data derived from sensation. If we now discuss activities of the brain we need to differentiate data derived from sensation and data derived elsewhere. Once we allow that valid data is sourced internally, through means other than sensation, then the supremacy of empirical experience must be called into doubt. To re-establish this supremacy, as you would like to do, we need to fully analyze and understand the internally sourced data. You can start with that which is hereditary, but you will rapidly find that our understanding is incomplete, and there is evidence to implicate non-physical sources. Unless we can obtain complete understanding of the non-physical, or exclude it decisively, the supremacy of empirical experience over reason must be left as highly doubtful.

Seeking a higher truth may be seeking an ideal, but not all ideals that are sought are higher truths; in fact most are not. People strive towards all kinds of ideals: ideal weight, ideal physique, become the best athlete, musician, artist, writer, businessman, academic and so on; the list is endless. — Janus

Right, and the point I made was that trying to persuade others to work with you toward an "ideal", whether it's a "higher truth", or any other ideal you might have in mind, this is not the same thing as trying to impose your own notion of truth onto another.

I would add that expecting others to share your beliefs and ideals is a form of imposition, even if it is not overtly acted upon, it will show up covertly in forms of passive/ aggressive behaviour. — Janus

This is plainly untrue. Imposition implies enforcement. To discuss ideals, allowing one to judge and decide, by means of one's own free will, is by no means "imposition".

And to take the next step, to reach a theory of quantum gravity that might account for time, the wheel looks likely to turn again towards a constraints-based view where the past is the actualised and the future is the potential. Having spatialised time for so long, we may have a QG theory based on reality's thermal history. — apokrisis

Despite the fact that I constantly harp on you concerning the things we do not agree on (Uber thinks I'm a broken record), I do recognize that we actually do agree on a lot of things. There's just no point in discussing those things.

Is the non-physical simply the unexpressed-as-yet future then? MU will want to be more scholastic and place the forms clearly in the past - prior to that which actually exists. And they might be prior in the sense of being latencies. — apokrisis

Yes, I'd agree that the non-physical Forms could be "the unexpressed-as-yet future". But there's a sense of "prior" here which is difficult to grasp. If the unexpressed future is non-physical, and the past is physical, then the present is the act of expression, whereby the non-physical produces the physical (future gives way to become the past). So if at each moment, as time passes, the non-physical produces the physical, then if this is not instantaneous (which by the nature of "becoming" seems impossible), then we have to account for this expression, as a process. Hence the things which come out of the future first, those which are nearest to the purest of the non-physical, are "prior" in that sense. This order is understood in Neo-Platonism as procession, or emanation.

you don't believe that Jesus is God, is that right? — Janus

I don’t know if I can accept the underlying rationale behind that terminology, and I have always objected to the way that it’s been used to enforce authority in Western history. When studying comparative religion, I read Elaine Pagel’s book on the formation of the Early Church, 'Beyond Belief'. She says that there was a battle between various doctrinal formulations, principally the Johannine sects (centred around 'Gospel of John') and gnostic sects (centred around 'the Gospel of Thomas'). The Johanine faction won out, and 'history was written by the victors' which is why the Gospel of Thomas had been lost until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codex; all this can be found on
gnosis.org site. The Thomas account was far more equivocal about the nature of Jesus and indeed of God - much more 'Oriental', in some ways (online version here.)

A related question which you didn't answer, but implied you believed the affirmative: Is Gautama infallible? Do you see how these beliefs must be subjective, since the Christian will say 'Yes' to the first and 'No' to the second, while the Buddhist will say the opposite. Can you give me an example of a higher truth that no one could fail to believe? — Janus

I think, technically, when you use the name 'Guatama', then you're referring to the historical person. 'The Buddha' is like an honorific, which describes a type or an archetype (as in later Buddhism, it is understood that there is more than one 'Buddha'). But the definition of the Buddha is, among other things, 'gone beyond', 'all-knowing', so on. How could the accuracy or otherwise of such purported attributes be ascertained objectively? What science would that fall under? How would you decide?

As for adjudicating the claims - I notice that many Buddhists are just as 'triumphalist' as are their Christian counterparts, although I rarely participate in such debates. I have some knowledge of Zen Christian teachers, such as Thomas Merton and his successors who do find a way to harmonize the principles of the two faiths.

But that doesn't mean that the claims of either religion are merely subjective, either. It's more that the nature of the discipline is such that it requires a personal, indeed a religious, commitment to them to plumb their depths. Hence,

There's a good reason, or perhaps many good reasons, why we cannot know anything about the nature of the afterlife; or even whether there is one. — Janus

That is true, and why I remain agnostic. But note this Pali Sutta on this very question:

I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying in Savatthi, at the Eastern Gatehouse. There he addressed Ven. Sariputta: "Sariputta, do you take it on conviction that the faculty of conviction, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation? Do you take it on conviction that the faculty of persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation?"

"Lord, it's not that I take it on conviction in the Blessed One that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction....

So - here the Buddha is saying that the ultimate goal is 'a footing in the Deathless'. But the dialogue acknowledges that, for those who have not 'known, seen, penetrated or realized' it, then it has to be 'taken on conviction'. And that, I think, is a pretty succinct definition of religious faith.

What I wanted to know is whether you personally desire that there should be higher truths, whether that is important to you such that you would feel that life is devalued if there were no transcendent realm. — Janus

Yes, definitely. You see that in many threads about anti-natalism, philosophical pessimism, nihilism, and so on. You also see it in many of the social malaises of current culture. I can't see how there can be much wrong with the belief that there is a higher truth, the pursuit of which requires discipline and the cultivation of virtue, even though many seem to regard the whole idea as a ridiculous superstition.

So we wind up with a scholastic hybrid that tries to preserve a super-animism while appealing to Ancient Greek metaphysical rigour, setting up its own later strong conflict with objective science in this regard. — apokrisis

Aquinas never believed that there ought to be or could be a ultimate conflict between religion and religion, and I would like to believe that is true. Of course, the 'conflict thesis' is a major weapon in the armoury of scientific materialism, so they will defend it tooth and nail.

The problem with Buddhism (in my view) is that - like PoMo - it avoids clear assertions about the issues. It enjoys and plays with the paradoxes rather than seeks to resolve them. And so it manages not to be found wrong by remaining strategically ambiguous. — apokrisis

'Come out here and stand still where I can see you, dammit!' :-)

On that note, I really have to log out for a day or two, as have a commercial commitment and am being continually drawn into this dialogue - although I won't say I haven't been enjoying it. Bye for now.

But there's a sense of "prior" here which is difficult to grasp. — Metaphysician Undercover

But doesn't this come back to our usual sticking point? I say the problem with the Aristotelian telling is that is seems to put actuality before potentiality - in time. And Peirce would put it the other way round in seeing crisp actuality arising out of vague potentiality, with the Forms being the a-temporal midwife, so to speak.

So the Aristotelian story - actuality generates the potential - does work in the sense that historically actualised states of constraint do then act to give concrete shape to all remaining future possibilities.

Once a river has forked at a certain place, then that choice tends to persist as it becomes a difficult choice to reverse. And likewise, if I make a cube with six flat sides and which is evenly weighted, then I have an actual die which can potentially fall on any of those six faces with complete freedom.

So as we extrapolate from the simplicity of nature - the river and its fractal branching - to human mechanistic control, our desire for a "machine" that is a random number generator, we can see how the Form shifts from something that is smeared out in time, to something that is clearly present in a mind that wants to make the thing in question.

The river is feeling the constraint of a global form from the moment it was a first fresh trickle of rain creating rivulets on a new cooling volcanic slope. Over millennia, it carved out some very definite persisting (because self-reinforcing) pattern of channels while operating under exactly the same Form of Being. So the constraints that made the river were there at the beginning - as finality at least. But also as form, as the form is always fractal. And then steadily some river becomes a particular entrenched form - the Nile or the Tiber. So it becomes hard to pin a before or after on the formal/final cause. It is imperceptibly there from the start. And it is powerfully there at the end. But it is always there, shaping things - placing its restrictions on material spontaneity.

But with the die, it got made because some mind saw it as a form that could serve a rather human purpose. Nature breaks symmetries - as in a fractal. But humans can imagine a world in which symmetries get unbroken - as in a perfect Platonic solid. And so randomness can be idealised and thus realised on demand. We can imagine a cube that has six numbered sides, and we can imagine rolling it in a fashion where we "don't care" about the one it lands on.

Of course, a die is an odd sort of machine. Mostly we want to do the opposite of harnessing randomness to produce order. An engine is a system of cylinders, pistons and cranks aimed at constraining a petrol vapour explosion, pointing all its energy in a certain completely predictable direction to do work. But the causal principle is the same. First the human purpose and the form that inspires, then the actual building of a machine that expresses that system of material action constrained to achieve an efficient cause.

So yes, the Aristotelian story - bricks exist because someone wanted to build a house - does reverse the temporal sequence. And that fits with the notion of a creator god.

But I am talking naturalism where formal and final cause are always present, yet also they begin in that radical uncertainty we call the potential, and wind up in that habitual certainty we call the actual.

So the Tiber or the Nile might have had completely different stories. Maybe the first burst of rain could have been on this naked volcano slope over here rather than that one over there. All the water might have carved out a slightly different initial channel pattern. In 40 million years, a very different landscape might be the result - still fractal in its drainage pattern, but your map of the Nile or Tiber would not help you much.

If the unexpressed future is non-physical, and the past is physical, then the present is the act of expression, whereby the non-physical produces the physical (future gives way to become the past). So if at each moment, as time passes, the non-physical produces the physical, then if this is not instantaneous (which by the nature of "becoming" seems impossible), then we have to account for this expression, as a process. Hence the things which come out of the future first, those which are nearest to the purest of the non-physical, are "prior" in that sense. This order is understood in Neo-Platonism as procession, or emanation. — Metaphysician Undercover

The present is where the actualised past is exerting its historical weight of established being on the possibilities that may ensue to mark out its future. So every moment has some limited set of choices. But the choices are free ones - either properly random, at the level of physical nature, or ones that reflect the kind of options that life and mind can construct for themselves in having their own memories, habits and intentions.

You speak of time then passing, and that passage making the difference. But I am talking about the choices actually happening, and thus establishing a further concrete fact about historical existence. Another brick in the wall that further limits future choices. So time - as something global - does not pass exactly. It gets fixed in place as history. Actuality is getting baked in as the still available free potential gets energetically consumed.

But the things that come out of the future first will in some sense have to be the simplest, the purest, the least complex.

And that is the take of the Big Bang. In the beginning, science agrees, the symmetry breaking command was "let there be light". :)

Well actually, light - as electromagnetic radiation - was several symmetry-breakings later. The first act was the organisation that was the splitting of reality into action and direction in the form of a vanilla grand unified theory (GUT) force and a cooling~expanding gravitational backdrop.

Current cosmology speculates about this first Planck-scale act. The potential that came just before would have been a "quantum geodynamical foam" - a mix of spatial blackholes and temporal wormholes. Matter densities and temporal anomalies.

A bit poetic perhaps. But that seems a solid extrapolation from known physical models to start to try to understand these things. As you push right up to the smaller and hotter limits that define the ultimate Planck scale, you start getting fluctuations so pure and indeterminate that we can only recognise them as equal parts blackhole and wormhole.

This is a nice intro on that - http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html

I'm going to make a few remarks addressing some of the arguments in play, then I'm out of this thread. I have more productive things to do than waste time in a dualist cesspool. Philosophy is about reasons and arguments, but it's also about communities and cliques. I have enjoyed demolishing Wayfarer's terrible arguments in two separate rounds now, but I have no further interest in repeating myself to people who have a misguided sense of certainty, blissfully unaware that they will never find it. I refute the central claims of the dualists in the following paragraphs.

On Aristotle and time. Yes I am familiar with Aristotle's thoughts on time. What I am telling you is that there is absolutely no basis, rational or empirical, for deriving our understanding of time from Aristotle, anymore than one should look at him for inspiration on why the Sun revolves around the Earth. Someone who got every major argument about physical reality wrong should be greeted with major skepticism. You are obviously content to wallow in your metaphysical delusions, so instead of greeting him with skepticism, you ask me silly questions that can never be adequately answered. The dichotomy you have invented in your head is a false choice because it asks me to pick between Nonsense #1 and Nonsense #2. Your inability to recognize why your question cannot be adequately addressed just by looking at time alone, as some abstraction apart from the rest of spatial reality, is very much a sign that you need to stop reading Aristotle and start watching a YouTube video on relativity. Of course I could provide such resources, but I already know that it's a pointless exercise. The passage or the measurement of time cannot be analyzed without the broader context of space. Period. So you can keep asking this useless question a million times, rephrase it a million times, and you would still be wrong a million times.

In GR, spacetime is very much a dynamical part of nature, so it is most definitely "a thing," assuming we all understand that word in the same way (see the end of this post about that issue). We also know observers in different gravitational fields measure the passage of time at different rates, because mass and energy, in distorting the curvature of space, also distort the nature of time. Also, denying the postulates of SR, including that observers in all reference frames measure the same speed of light, is tantamount to viewing time as an absolute ticking clock for all observers. Contrary to your drivel, you have in fact proposed that time exists as an absolute for everyone living anywhere. I know you missed all of this stuff in Aristotle, so I wanted to give you an update on things that were endlessly debated in physics 100 years ago.

There was some talk about quantum gravity as it relates to this problem, so let me address that real quick. Quantum gravity at this point is an umbrella term for many different theories and ideas, not all of which agree in their understanding of time. But I don't see how the canonical versions of quantum gravity help the Forms in any way. If spacetime is an emergent property of quantum entanglement, and if the Forms are "active" in spacetime, then that implies that the Forms are themselves just emergent properties of entanglement. In other words if you insist on putting the Forms in spacetime, then that requires the prior and foundational existence of entanglement. So you are making the operation of the Forms dependent on entanglement, and that brings up more questions about how they relate to physical reality. I have no idea what a metaphysics of that would look like, but I'm sure someone here does, because it's very easy to come up with nonsense when you don't care about evidence.

The conceivability arguments about the Forms and space are absolutely infantile, the result of doing too much imagining and too little thinking. First of all, there are very many people who have conceived of just time emerging. There are special versions of quantum gravity where precisely this happens, so it's just not true that it's inconceivable for time to emerge. The only thing that's true here is that you don't want to allow for time to emerge because it ruins your argument. But don't conflate your personal fantasies with what other people can conceive.

Let's consider another angle to your argument. Why can't I conceive of a material Form in non-spatial reality? Alternatively, how can you conceive of an immaterial Form in non-spatial reality? I mean try thinking of one right now. Whatever you thought of either had a material property or a spatial property. Suppose you thought of the number 3 in a completely black background. That does not mean you thought of a non-spatial property. It just means you put that number in empty space. You could have also placed the number in some other background entirely, but either way you are necessarily imagining the existence of spatial dimension. Maybe your 3 even has a color like white, but the only reason why it can have a color is because you have material experience of colors. And the same goes for whatever background you placed the 3 in. Your very imagination of that background having color is the result of material experience. Maybe you aren't picturing anything at all in your mind. Maybe you are just reciting the word for the number 3 over and over. But if so, what have you actually conceived of? All you would be doing is just repeating a word, and I know you don't actually mean to suggest that Forms are words! Thus I have demonstrated that this ridiculous argument falls apart completely.

The question over the existence of metaphysical reason is in some sense what the entire debate on this thread has been about. I have already demonstrated that mind-body dualism cannot be true in any substantive sense. And even philosophers like Chalmers, who fully accept the validity of the hard problem, have resorted to funny and clever labels in their quest to avoid materialism. They call themselves "naturalistic dualists" or "property dualists" or anything else that basically means materialism. Of course most serious philosophers have come around to materialism by now, agreeing with the central conclusions of modern neuroscience: the mind is a physical product of the brain, the operations of the mind depend on brain states, and consciousness cannot actually exist apart from a physical brain.

Let me briefly address the issue on reason, existence, and evidence. Here we have another futile attempt to argue against materialism through philosophical zombies. Richard Brown had the best refutation of this nonsense when he pointed out that the zombie argument is circular. To paraphrase his argument, imagine special creatures called "zoombies," which are nonphysically identical to human beings and lack phenomenal consciousness. Because we can conceive of zoombies, it's possible that they exist. If zoombies exist, then they clearly refute dualism because they show that consciousness is physical. Point being? You cannot use a priori arguments to settle this issue. You have to use evidence! I know that's a horrible idea for some philosophers, but it does give me comfort knowing that there are plenty of philosophers out there who still bother to think for more than ten seconds about this nonsense.

Meaning and reason represent a complex collection of mental operations that emerge in the brain as the latter interacts with the external world, forms memories and experiences, and develops new physical structures and patterns. This dynamical coupling between the brain and the external world is important because it's what allows the brain to learn language, to understand basic causation, to perceive differences, to notice motion, and to observe when things live or die, among many other features and abilities. And these experiences are then not just important, but absolutely foundational in the development of thoughts about existence, meaning, and reason. Additional metaphysical layers, about the independence of rational insight and all that, have no more explanatory power to add and are absolutely unnecessary.

Finally, it's worth noting for the record that this thread has still not reached an understanding of what is physical and what is not. All of the debates on this thread, including my posts, have relied on some hazy and contingent assumptions about what we mean by that term, but the debates reveal very clearly that we really have no clue. And that's ok to the extent that our debates are limited to analyzing certain parts of reality, but a more ambitious project would need a more concrete solution. Maybe apokrisis has provided one. I don't know, but I enjoyed the vigorous exchange of ideas.

You all take care.

there is absolutely no such thing as metaphysical reason separate from the physical structure of the brain — Uber

This is true, but completely useless nonetheless. :wink: To describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes is true. Winword.exe is just that. And yet the useful (and also true) way to define Word is as a word processor. It is still a collection of bytes, but the more abstract definition describes it usefully. I think that matters.

What do you think it means that all our knowledge of the physical - SR, GR, QM, QFT, QG - boils down to what we can measure? The best we can do is say, I have this idea, this conception, of a quality. And here is the semiotic process by which you or I can extract a measurement during our interactions with Nature.

The very epistemology of science relies on the "non-physical" idea to ground any conception of the physics. And the measurement itself is just a further idea in that, in the end, we represent the measured state of the world as a number. We assign a value. At the very least, we tick a box to mark a presence or an absence. So the whole of the epistemic operation involves having an idea of what to look out for in terms of some system of signs, and reading those signs off the world, updating our conceptions of the world accordingly.

There seems some critical duality of matter and symbol, or matter and information, at work here, surely? We don't have direct access to the world - the Kantian thing-in-itself. We just have systems of thought where global conceptions are intimately tied to localised acts of perception. We understand our interactions with reality only in terms of a constructed realm of ideas encoded as signs.

This is the epistemic truth that ought not be buried. And that should be science's great strength - in being founded on the philosophy of pragmatism. It recognises that we only model the world and so, in the final analysis, construct a useful working story about it. Which in turn means - as we consider metaphysics, the ontological story of Being itself that we hope to tell though all our fundamental physical theories - that we have to incorporate this epistemic fact into any telling of that tale.

If we construct physics as a tale of the observables by placing the observer outside the physics - in some nonphysical realm! - then at what point are we going to finish the job and include that observer in the very tale we want to tell?

This is the deep dilemma that runs through all modern physics. It is also the problem for neuroscience. And Aristotle's philosophical pondering on time was pretty deep as it focuses on this as the issue.

He pointed out that change looks to be what we are really talking about. Things are not still, but dynamic. There is difference in terms of one thing becoming another thing. But that seems continuous. It is always the case. There seems some sort of constant flow where the past is fixed, the future opens up, and there is no now, no present moment, that interrupts.

But to measure time, we have to start counting intervals. We have to start numbering differences. And we want to number the past and the future in the same way - even if one is the already actualised, the other some kind of unactualised possibility. So we start counting time in terms of spatialised passage of moments. We impose a conceptual framework on our experience that allows us to imagine change happening "in time". There is a crisp stopping and starting to events.

Or critically, there is the stopping that is our ability to shout out "now!", while watching the hands sweep the numbered dial of a clock. A continuous world gets stopped, then started, then stopped, by a ticking second hand ... in the world that is now the one conjured up by our scientific imagination.

So I think you risk rushing right past the basic philosophy of science issues that any talk of "the physical" must answer. And Aristotle was certainly on to it.

Of course most serious philosophers have come around to materialism by now, agreeing with the central conclusions of modern neuroscience: the mind is a physical product of the brain, the operations of the mind depend on brain states, and consciousness cannot actually exist apart from a physical brain. — Uber

But a lot of folk still believe that consciousness is an informational, or indeed computational, state. It is a kind of form - in the Aristotelian sense even - in being accounted for by a functional ontology. Consciousness - in this view - would be multi-realisable. You could build a "brain" out of tin cans and string so long as it replicated the functionality that is the processing structure of the actual human organ.

So a really modern neuroscientific understanding would dispute this. Or at least, it would say there is something special about the hardware of brains that the hardware of computers lacks. Computers are machines and so depend on completely inert and stable parts. Bodies are organisms that depend on the opposite thing of all their parts being in a state of generalised critical instability.

That is how life and mind bridge the "explanatory gap" of causality. States of information can regulate states of material organisation because it takes virtually no effort to nudge an unstable system in a desired direction. The cell is a thermodynamic storm of material structure constantly about to fall apart. And life is the trick of just delivering the right well time nudges to, instead, keep it constantly falling back together. The mind does the same balancing act in terms of behaviour.

But anyway, the point is that some kind of dualism - that seems very much like a form vs matter, or non-physical vs physical debate - runs through both the epistemology and ontology of science. So any scientist, who cares about the big picture being painted, can't afford to simply brush away the issues as somehow anachronistic and not still top of mind.

The way we have constructed our own physical model of the world has ultimately left us standing on the outside of that construction. We got there by sharply dividing the observer from the observables.

And then our best neuroscientific theories have been probing what that means. And the upshot is the emerging dissipative structure or infodynamic view, where life and mind are understood semiotically as the informational management of material instability. Form shapes material plasticity to create substantial being - Aristotle's hylomorphic view of "the physics".

Then even fundamental physics is undergoing a revolution where information is being granted some kind of physical reality. It is intelligible form, structure or constraint that shapes plastic material potential. Again, Aristotle's hylomorphism is being cashed out finally. Or at least ontic structuralism is top of mind in fundamental physics.

As you say, the deep assumption seems anti-dualistic. Information and matter must together compose the one world somehow. The mind is somehow still a product of the brain (or the structure of the brain a product of a lifetime's habit of being mindful?). The Universe is still a product of local material events - even if in the end, there is nothing at all but the blackbody radiation sizzle of cosmic event horizons, the zero-degree excitations being produced by the rather immaterial holographic bounds of a de Sitter spacetime.

So physics wants to reject actual dualism, and yet it can't do without the dialectically divided. Just as the Ancient Greeks got science going by establishing the basic dialectical divisions of nature.

And so - as Peircean pragmatism argues - the only other choice is Hegelian synthesis. If you want one-ness, and have to get there by incorporating a two-ness, then the only way to resolve that is hierarchical three-ness. The holistic or systems view. Which again would be Aristotle's answer with hylomorphism.

So the marvel is how quickly the Ancient Greeks got down to the metaphysical basics. And science has been a long time working back around towards that ontological framework.

Yes, definitely. You see that in many threads about anti-natalism, philosophical pessimism, nihilism, and so on. You also see it in many of the social malaises of current culture. I can't see how there can be much wrong with the belief that there is a higher truth, the pursuit of which requires discipline and the cultivation of virtue, even though many seem to regard the whole idea as a ridiculous superstition. — Wayfarer

OK, you still haven't really answered the other questions directly, but at least you have answered this one.

The point I am trying to make is that, even if it is true that some people are unhappy if they believe there is no overarching meaning to life (I say "some people" since I think it is arguably true that many, perhaps most, people simply don't care about such questions), I am not at all convinced that the social malaise you refer to stems predominately from that. I would say it stems from many, many other factors in modern life.

If you think there is a pre-given, overarching meaning to life, the problem still lies with any attempt to objectify that meaning; that is to say, to claim that it is one absolute meaning, it is like this, and so on. No one can actually say what the meaning is, and people have conflicting ideas about it, as is evidenced by the different religions. So, whatever the meaning might be, it cannot be known because it is indeterminable, and there is therefore simply no alternative for any individual but to trust their feelings about it, and place their faith wherever their feelings lead them to. I think this is as true of people with a secular bent, as it is of those with a religious bent.

So, I think, for me at least, the most intellectually honest thing to do is suspend judgement on the whole matter. I say "for me at least" because I don't know what experiences others might have that may lead them to some religious faith or other; Christianity for many Westerners (and increasingly Easterners) and Buddhism for some others, such as yourself. We are accountable only to ourselves as to how convincing we find our own intuitions and experiences; in this regard only the individual can really judge her own intellectual integrity and honesty when it comes to matters of faith.

The experiences of others are not directly known to us, and so should not convince us except through feeling of affinity which could only come from our own experience; in the absence of our own experiential feeling for them arguments from others' experiences are empty for us.

I think placing faith where feeling leads is what everyone does, ultimately, even the so-called "enlightened ones". They cannot know an indeterminate meaning any more than any one else can; they just have a greater sense of the numinous and heart-felt commitment to the cultural forms which have become entrenched by tradition. I think that to imagine they have some 'secret knowledge" beyond that is pure fantasy. I would never want deny anyone's right to entertain such a fantasy if they want to; but it would take solid evidence and a very strong argument to convince me that it could be anything more than a fantasy.

No one can actually say what the meaning is, and people have conflicting ideas about it, as is evidenced by the different religions. So, whatever the meaning might be, it cannot be known because it is indeterminable, and there is therefore simply no alternative for any individual but to trust their feelings about it, and place their faith wherever their feelings lead them to. — Janus

Just quickly, the problem here is that you still treat meaning as something to be discovered. You simply place that discovery in the individual, rather than the collective, view.

But what if - pragmatically/semiotically - meaning is something to be constructed. And so the objective part of this is the correct understanding of that process of construction.

The issue isn't what, but how. Once we have a model of the how, we can run the process to produce the what.

And this is how we get into a developmental naturalism where we can see how individual psychology is dependent on both the naturalism of a linguistic social super-organism and a genetic biological super-organism. We, as individuated beings, have to participate in semiosis taking place at two quite different levels - the cultural and ecological. We have to situate our selfhood with the systems of both nurture and nature, as it usually put.

And the general problem - for this selfhood - is that the two systems are not that well aligned in the modern world. Hence all the moaning about an existence lacking clear meaning.

So it ain't about discovering meaning itself, but about discovering the natural process that produces meaning.

From there, we can see how being a human individual is semiotic, but a semiosis that relies on two general levels of semiosis - the linguistic and the genetic. And the obvious philosphical project is to get these two levels of self-making in better alignment ... given we all seem to agree that they are rather out of alignment to some degree that causes dissatisfaction.

My argument with @Wayfarer is that he dismisses biology's general goal of entropy dissipation. That kind of denial prevents progress on the problem.

What if human biological flourishing is defined by psychological flow - the rush that is smoothly managed energy expenditure? Maybe driving a fast car is as much the point of life as much as anything could be?

But of course, ecosystems thinking relies on there being limits. If we want a long-run future, culture needs to find some way to make a flow psychology work within the ecological constraints. Then again, if technology can remove those constraints, what then spells a meaningful and flourishing life?

However, until we have a clear model of the reality of flourishing, a clear view of its semiotic mechanics, we can't address the useful questions. Neither the self, nor the society, are going to discover anything, just blunder on helplessly into whatever eventuates.

But doesn't this come back to our usual sticking point? I say the problem with the Aristotelian telling is that is seems to put actuality before potentiality - in time. — apokrisis

That actuality is put before potentiality is the logical conclusion produced by Aristotle's cosmological argument. The argument is very simple, and once understood it is very forceful. Simply put, it states that if at any time, there was only potential, there would always be only potential, because if any actuality comes into existence it requires an actuality as its cause. However, we observe that there is actual existence, therefore it is impossible that potentiality is prior to actuality in an absolute sense.

The argument was intended by Aristotle, to demonstrate that anything eternal is necessarily actual, and it appears to produce an infinite regress of actuality. That's why Aristotle introduced the eternal circular motion. as the representation of this eternal actuality. In modern times, many monists will posit an infinite regression of the co-existence of actuality and potentiality. Neo-Platonists, and Christian theologians reject infinite regress as repugnant to the intellect, infinite regress is produced by misunderstanding. So they maintain a dualist separation between the actuality which is prior to time, and the temporal actuality which exists in time.

These two different perspectives produce two distinct meanings of "eternal", and consequently two distinct interpretations of "time". From the monist perspective, eternal means extending forever in time, infinite temporal extension, and this is what is dismissed in theology as repugnant, unintelligible. In the theological representation, eternal means outside of time. The meaning of "time" is the same here, it is a concept derived from physical motion. But when eternal is understood in the theological way, as outside of time (as derived from physical motion), then we need to reconceive "time" to allow that the things which have been designated as outside of time can interact with temporal things.

This is why I cannot accept that principle you derive from your interpretation of Peirce. To place potential as first is to violate the very simple logic of Aristotle's cosmological argument, and so it is illogical. The monist approach unites potential and actual as one, making them co-dependent. This may appear to be acceptable, but it renders time as unintelligible. The separation between past and future, the boundary, is lost because there is no real difference between potential and actual, as this is just two different ways of looking at the same thing. There is no real beginning and end as there is a beginning of the past and an end of the future when we allow for a real division, so intelligibility is lost to infinity.

The present is where the actualised past is exerting its historical weight of established being on the possibilities that may ensue to mark out its future. — apokrisis

This is the way of thinking about time that I think we need to avoid. It views the impetus of motion as "historical weight", inertia, The way that something has been, in the past, will force it to continue to be that way in the future. But this notion is just derived from our perspective, our memories of how things were, our observations of consistency, and our inductive reasoning. In reality I think, what determines how things will materialize at the present, is the Forms which are prior to the present. We observe these patterns of materialization as consistent, and inertial, but the real "cause" of how things exist at the present is the Forms which are prior to the present, causing things to come to be at the present, the way that they are. And in an inverse way, due to our observations and induction, we attribute "cause" to historical weight, the past, as if what has already past has causal power. But what has already past has no real power to affect the future.

So every moment has some limited set of choices. But the choices are free ones - either properly random, at the level of physical nature, or ones that reflect the kind of options that life and mind can construct for themselves in having their own memories, habits and intentions. — apokrisis

Consider that every moment has in principle, an unlimited number of choices. But the choices by which the universe may materialize at each moment are limited in a way similar to the choices that a human being makes are limited. The human being's choices are limited by the ideas in its mind, and the possibilities for the universe are limited by the Forms which are existing in the universe. Now we approach the need for the second type of actuality which is the basis for dualism. We must assume something which chooses the possibilities to actualize. In Aristotle's biology, this is the soul. The living body consists as potencies which are not necessarily actualized. They are classed as potencies because they are not always active, but when activated they proceed in the same way, like a habit. The habitual activity is not occurring all the time, it lies in potency until it is activated. The point being that we must assume an actuality (the soul), as that which activates the various potencies. From this perspective, the living body exists as a conglomeration of potencies, it is produced and maintained by this further actuality, the soul.

But I am talking about the choices actually happening, and thus establishing a further concrete fact about historical existence. — apokrisis

Remember, a set of choices is meaningless without something which chooses. Possibilities will come and go, but unless there is something which chooses, some form of actuality (like the soul), which can actualize one possibility rather than another, the whole structure of possibilities is meaningless.

I have more productive things to do than waste time in a dualist cesspool. — Uber

The preacher has left the building. "Conception" and "imagination" have the same meaning to you. Where lies reason in this confused mess, which is your mind?

Finally, it's worth noting for the record that this thread has still not reached an understanding of what is physical and what is not. All of the debates on this thread, including my posts, have relied on some hazy and contingent assumptions about what we mean by that term, but the debates reveal very clearly that we really have no clue. — Uber

Then why preach as if you have it all figured out, and those who don't agree with you are speaking infantile nonsense?

Just quickly, the problem here is that you still treat meaning as something to be discovered. You simply place that discovery in the individual, rather than the collective, view.

But what if - pragmatically/semiotically - meaning is something to be constructed. And so the objective part of this is the correct understanding of that process of construction. — apokrisis

I agree; if there were an objectively real overarching meaning then it would be something to be discovered. But absent that (which seems to be obviously the situation for us) our own meanings are to be created by us.

This is true, but completely useless nonetheless. :wink: To describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes is true. Winword.exe is just that. And yet the useful (and also true) way to define Word is as a word processor. It is still a collection of bytes, but the more abstract definition describes it usefully. I think that matters. — Pattern-chaser

I'm not sure it's true to describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes. The source-code archive is as much Word, and with different computer architectures, the collection of bytes will be different. Whatever Word is, it is not just a collection of bytes.

My concept of the non-physical is phenomena that cannot be detected by our senses and the scientific extensions of our senses and which cannot be explained by existing scientific paradigms. The non-physical is associated with our current state of scientific knowledge. For example, prior to the work of Maxwell and Hertz, electromagnetic radiation was non-physical, but became physical as a result of the knowledge that they generated. At the present time, self-aware consciousness is non-physical. — johnpetrovic

As far as I can see the term ''non-physical'' has an empty extension - there are no non-physical things.

Consciousness is just a pattern arising from a specific permuation of matter and energy. Think of it like neon lights. They're physical but may be used to spell out the name. The neon lights are physical and the name it spells out is just a specific pattern of the physical elements of the lights. The brain-consciousness could be something similar.

What does it even mean for a physical object (us) to think of non-physical stuff?

Perhaps we need to redefine ''existence'' and try to include non-physical stuff but how would we even understand things like that as language itself seems to be inextricably bound to our senses. Look at our language. The words of perception, necessary for comprehension, always, in any language, are sensorially meaningful. For instance a synonym for ''understand'' is ''see''.

May be we need a different language...I don't know.

Nice summary.
Clear, coherent, concise, and imbued with profound understanding, in short; very well written.
Also, I am in general agreement with the concepts as presented (though my own concept of time is largely undeveloped).

This is true, but completely useless nonetheless. :wink: To describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes is true. Winword.exe is just that. And yet the useful (and also true) way to define Word is as a word processor. It is still a collection of bytes, but the more abstract definition describes it usefully. I think that matters. — Pattern-chaser

I'm not sure it's true to describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes. The source-code archive is as much Word, and with different computer architectures, the collection of bytes will be different. Whatever Word is, it is not just a collection of bytes. — tom

Any computer program can be correctly and accurately described as a collection of bytes, but it doesn't matter. Addressing the details of my analogy ignores the point I was offering. There is a large abstract-level gap between a stream of bytes and a word processor. The gap separating brain and mind is much bigger. It's just too large a gap for us to bridge, when we try to think about the mind in terms of the brain. If/when we have filled-in some more gaps, things might be different. But today, now, we can't usefully describe the mind in terms of the brain.

N.B. I don't dispute the relationship between brain and mind; I'm concerned with understanding, particularly ease of understanding. You see? :up: :wink:

Any computer program can be correctly and accurately described as a collection of bytes, but it doesn't matter. — Pattern-chaser

It can't, no more than a rhinoceros can be correctly and accurately described as a collection of the letters A, G, C, and T.

There is a large abstract-level gap between a stream of bytes and a word processor. — Pattern-chaser

Which is one of the main reasons an abstract entity cannot be correctly or accurately described as a collection of bytes, or base pairs.

It's just too large a gap for us to bridge, when we try to think about the mind in terms of the brain. — Pattern-chaser

Yet we manage to distinguish between the word-processor and the hardware. The mind is software.

My argument with Wayfarer is that he dismisses biology's general goal of entropy dissipation. That kind of denial prevents progress on the problem. — apokrisis

I don't think it amounts to something philosophically meaningful. What I think it is, is the most high-level, general cause which is recognised by the physical sciences, and which, therefore, more or less occupies the role formerly assigned to the 'First Cause'. It's what remains when the 'divine intelligence' is removed from the picture.

You can see how that developed historically - how the tradition of science in the West developed out of the original Platonist/Aristotelian/Medieval precedents, and then over time, as the scope of natural science changed and expanded, the very conception of what amounted to science changed with it.

Whereas in the original conception, there was in intrinsic connection between meaning, purpose and value and the principles that were being sought by science, one of the consequences of modernity is just the abandonment of that sense, and its replacement with a purely instrumental or physicalist account. It comes from the early modern period, with the relegation of mind to the 'secondary qualities' and the treatment of what is mathematically quantifiable as being fundamentally real. But that leads to something more than just a theoretical construct - or rather, it actually is a metaphysic, but one that we're so embedded in that we take it for granted.

'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Many assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed. Yet that is the secular view of secularity, its own self-understanding.' ~ David Loy.

So, I think, for me at least, the most intellectually honest thing to do is suspend judgement on the whole matter. — Janus

But this is what I take philosophy to be about. It's why I study it.

Surely this is the lesson of Galileo's confrontation with the Church: in the empirical domain, explanations derived from verifiable empirical data (particular form) supercede explanations derived from theology.

I would even go so far as to say that explanations derived from verifiable pure data (general form) supercede explanations derived from theology.

Religion is a social institution, a means of social control which has conformity (ultimately, social stability) as its goal. This goal is antithetical to the scientific enterprise.

For me, it makes more sense to keep theology out of science (let each have its appropriate domain), and dedicate it to explanations regarding the spiritual domain (which is non-physical).

So, I think, for me at least, the most intellectually honest thing to do is suspend judgement on the whole matter. — Janus

We can suspend judgement on all principles, as doubtful, and this is the way of skepticism. But it is possible to reach the bottom, a principle which is uncontrovertible, and on the uncontrovertible principle we can construct a reasonable ideology. For me, this is Aristotle's cosmological argument. It's a logical principle describing what cannot be otherwise, if we accept the validity of empirical evidence.

I don't see doing philosophy, at least metaphysics, as being a matter of reaching conclusions, but of gaining an ever more comprehensive grasp of the problems and possibilities. Most important is to gain the critical ability to do philosophy for yourself and not merely study what others have done.

MU, if it is accepted that there must be a uncaused cause for all things, what does that tell us about the nature of that uncaused cause, other than that it is not caused by anything within the Cosmos? Or, on the other hand, why can the Cosmos itself not be the uncaused cause of all things?

Nice summary. — Galuchat

Thanks, Galuchat. Much appreciated.

Simply put, it states that if at any time, there was only potential, there would always be only potential, because if any actuality comes into existence it requires an actuality as its cause. — Metaphysician Undercover

But didn't you slip up in presuming that time always exists? My approach says it emerges. So when there is only the originating potential in "existence" (which of course, can't be existence as we normally mean it), then there is no actual time. At best, time is one of the possible emergent outcomes of a process of cosmological evolution, along with space and energy.

So there is a suppressed premise here - that time exists before the existence in which I say it emerges.

The argument was intended by Aristotle, to demonstrate that anything eternal is necessarily actual, and it appears to produce an infinite regress of actuality. That's why Aristotle introduced the eternal circular motion. as the representation of this eternal actuality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right. And I reject the premise of eternality, and so I can stop looking for outs that don't work, like a cyclic cosmology. For me, infinite regress is solved by the starting points turning radically vague and indeterminate. Exactly as suggested by Big Bang quantum physics.

In the theological representation, eternal means outside of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

And outside space and energy too. Outside existence in general. Hence the abstract realm of Platonism.

Doesn't really work, I'm afraid.

It views the impetus of motion as "historical weight", inertia, — Metaphysician Undercover

The actual physical argument is way more interesting. There is in fact a limit to the constraint of motion. You can suppress action - breaking its symmetries - right down to the point you arrive at the fundamental symmetries of translation and rotation. So a Cosmos exists because, in the end, there is a concrete limit to the symmetry breaking. You arrive at motions so simple in the form of inertial spin and inertial motion, that they can't be made simpler.

You are taking the view that motion could be completely eradicated and so absolute rest would be the natural baseline state of existence. But inertial motion could be used as proof of my constraints-based approach. The fact that spin and straight-line motion are energy conserving symmetries - symmetries that can't be broken - shows that your atomistic assumptions about absolute rest can't be right. Physics has concrete proof against your metaphysics.

But didn't you slip up in presuming that time always exists? My approach says it emerges. So when there is only the originating potential in "existence" (which of course, can't be existence as we normally mean it), then there is no actual time. At best, time is one of the possible emergent outcomes of a process of cosmological evolution, along with space and energy. — apokrisis

If there is no time, then emergence, which is a type of change, is impossible. So it doesn't make any sense to say that there was potential before there was time, this unintelligible, incomprehensible. This is why Aristotle's metaphysical principles are highly acceptable, he makes "potential" intelligible by restricting it, or constraining it, with time. It is a temporal term, having no meaning outside of time. Putting "potential" outside of time renders the term unintelligible, without any real meaning.

So that's exactly what the cosmological argument does, it demonstrates that it is logically impossible for pure potential to be prior to time. Think about your proposal. There is potential, with no time passing. Something has to start time in order for time to start passing. It is impossible that potential itself can cause time to start passing, because it is just the potential for time, and any potential needs something to actualize it for it to become actual. There is an act required.

So there is a suppressed premise here - that time exists before the existence in which I say it emerges. — apokrisis

It is not a "suppressed premise", it is the conclusion, and it's not begging the question. The argument is based on what the terms "change", or in this case, "emerge" mean. The nature of "emerge", or in Aristotelian physics, "change", is such that it requires time. Time cannot come into existence from change, it cannot emerge, because time must already exist in order for any change or emergence to happen.

You are taking the view that motion could be completely eradicated and so absolute rest would be the natural baseline state of existence. But inertial motion could be used as proof of my constraints-based approach. The fact that spin and straight-line motion are energy conserving symmetries - symmetries that can't be broken - shows that your atomistic assumptions about absolute rest can't be right. Physics has concrete proof against your metaphysics. — apokrisis

Do you not see that you are contradicting your own premise here? Your premise, "potential without time", is exactly what you deny here, "absolute rest". So you propose "absolute rest", disguised as "potential without time", to counter the cosmological argument, then you turn around to say that physics has concrete proof against this. If you truly believe that physics has concrete proof against "absolute rest", then drop your contradictory proposal of "potential without time".

The cosmological argument says nothing more than what you say physics has concrete proof against, that absolute rest is impossible. Pure potential, without anything actual is exactly that, absolute rest. Since absolute rest is denied, the Neo-Platonists take the premise that there are active Forms (in Christian theology God and angels) which are prior to any potential, "potential" being a word used to refer to a non existent motion. Non-existent motion is rest.


Isn't it necessary to reach conclusions in order to gain a comprehensive grasp? How can you say that you have grasped anything if you haven't reached any conclusions?

MU, if it is accepted that there must be a uncaused cause for all things, what does that tell us about the nature of that uncaused cause, other than that it is not caused by anything within the Cosmos? Or, on the other hand, why can the Cosmos itself not be the uncaused cause of all things? — Janus

It is not necessarily represented as "uncaused cause". I think that's a misrepresentation of Aristotle's cosmological argument, because "cause" is an ambiguous term, as Aristotle demonstrates with the "four uses of 'cause'". The argument is against those like apokrisis, who place potential as prior to actual, in an absolute way. This category of premise, placing potential as first, comes in two types, idealists like apokrisis who put the potential of ideals (symmetry) as first, and materialist who put the potential of matter as first.

Right. And I reject the premise of eternality, and so I can stop looking for outs that don't work, like a cyclic cosmology. For me, infinite regress is solved by the starting points turning radically vague and indeterminate. Exactly as suggested by Big Bang quantum physics. — apokrisis

In your kind of model the radical vagueness or indeterminacy is not only "there" at the beginning of time but "always", no? It is the eternal out of which the temporal forever emerges? Do you presume it to be radically indeterminate in itself or merely for us?