Would you prefer to receive the response I'm making in the other thread in this one?

Sure.

I get the feeling, just from the Simondon link you sent, that Simondon is proposing a methodological change in the way we think about ontogenesis. From the methodological change, he gives some general guidelines about how to think about ontogenesis in general, and more specific ontogenetic regimes.

Out of the jargon, this means that we have to change the conceptual tools we use to inquire into the way things become what they are. He gives a bunch of examples for academic fields of study.

The central point of the account, with lots of abbreviation, is that in order to look how an individual sustains itself (perhaps "sustains itself" can harmlessly be replaced with "exists?), look at the way it seperates itself from an environment, the way it was seperated from its environment, and the way it transforms and interacts with with its environment. Moreover, these actions should be taken as not just characteristic of the individual - as if they were properties predicated of it -, but more fundamentally constitutive of the individual's being.

Simondon provides a nice example with a crystal. I'll make it a copper sulphate crystal in a very saturated water solution, in a big vat. (a solution is saturated if it's got a lot of shit in it, so much so that all the shit can't dissolve). If you want to understand the copper sulphate crystal, you look at its molecular structure. Turns out it's a big lattice of copper sulphate molecules that accumulate in a regular manner. Hence, for Simondon, the accumulation of the molecules should be taken as a facet of the crystal despite that the accumulation predates the "completed" crystal seen in the water. Furthermore, the "completed" crystal is only finished accumulating molecules for now - if there pressure was right, it would accumulate more. The (individual) crystal thus extends in space and time and relates to further processes: the lab conditions, the scientists who set it up.

It should be said that these difference-making mechanisms (accumulation, temperature gradients) in the coupling of individual and enviroment also include the capacity for the individual to dissipate To illustrate the point, consider a person. Approximately - an individual can die, its being lives on. It would be odd to insist that a person is alive and dead at the same time. This phrasing suggests a duality between the individual and its being that does not appear in Simondon's account. The ontogenetic (and dissipative) processes of a being are inscribed into its being. In a certain sense then, this is at odds with the law of excluded middle - the person is already dead since it dissipates, the person is still alive since it is stable. I don't think Simondon suggests that the law of excluded middle is strictly false, I think he suggests that it is inappropriate or mystifying when trying to understand individuation.

Simondon probably would not like my example using people, but I think that takes me off topic.

So what? All of this is destructive - "thou shalt not think the individual as the end-goal of its ontogenesis", "thou shalt not remove the inscription of the individual into its individuating processes and vice versa". Luckily Simondon has a recipe for turning examples of ontogenetic processes into general descriptions of how they work.

These general concepts are metastability and transduction. There are others but I think these necessitate Simondon's development of the others. Metastability, which is ripped right out of statistical physics and/or systems theory, denotes the propensity of a system to linger in a not ultimately stable state. Think of balancing a ball on your head. If you're shit at it like me, it will eventually drop. The floor is the stable state. The balancing act being able to continue for a while renders the whole thing a metastable system. Transduction is the change of energy from one form to another. Lightbulbs change electricity into heat and light. How do these notions help? How does Simondon modify them? Let's go back to the crystal.

The crystal condences at a certain location in the vat. Why? It's very sensitive to initial conditions (what it's like in the lab, the pressure it's at). There is a propensity for crystallization at each point in the vat given by the local conditions of the molecules there - the local interactions. And the global stuff about the vat- the temperature, the pressure. This propensity changes over time. Eventually, if the conditions are right, the "sensitivity" to initial conditions resolves itself, an imbalance is created in the solution (energy gradient), and the crystal is all "fuck it I'll crystallize there". Now the other molecules are drawn to the crystal, which is now its own local system - with its own initial conditions. I think Simondon would like to call the transfer between the initial, sensitive state (saturated solution) and the stable state (the crystal) transduction - this occurs over time and relates different amounts of stored energy (ordered configurations) within the fluid. Note that this system is also metastable - it lingers about for a while before it crystallizes in the first place!

This is generalized - now transduction acts to relate states in a metastable system in some field of potential. States - molecule configurations. Metastable system - the whole crystallization experiment. Field of potential - energy/particle density differences across the fluid render certain sites more and less likely to be the locus of crystallization.

Does it seem like we're on the same page?

Sounds good to me! I think you're entirely right to say the the LEM in Simondon is not false per se, but simply inapplicable, or rather only applies ex post facto, and cannot be called upon in thinking about ontogenesis. Also a big fan of your equation of 'exist' with 'sustain itself', because it highlights the fact that ex-istence is a continual matter of 'going on', or processuality. I would be weary, however, of the lexical resonance between 'sustaining oneself' and 'surviving/adapting' insofar as for Simondon, the living being does more than simply 'adapt' to a 'given' situation, but rather always remains in a state of productive tension with it: "The living being resolves its problems not only by adapting itself - which is to say, by modifying its relationship to its milieu (something a machine is equally able to do) - but by modifying itself through the invention of new internal structures and its complete self-insertion into the axiomatic of organic problems."

Deleuze, in particular, will take up this notion of 'problems' and reread ontology in it's light, with his own attempt to rethink being along the model of an open-ended problematic: "Being (what Plato calls the Idea) 'corresponds' to the essence of the problem or the question as such. It is as though there were an 'opening', a 'gap', an ontological 'fold' which relates being and the question to one another. In this relation, being is difference itself. Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative; rather, it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question ... Beyond contradiction, difference - beyond non-being, (non)-being; beyond the negative, problems and questions." (Difference and Repetition, p.64)

This is the root of Simondon's (and Deleuze's) critique of Hegelian dialectics, which, according to both, begins from individuals and then tries to think their becoming through negation, rather than beginning with the process of ontogenesis, and inscribing negation 'positiviely' within that process. Simondon: "In this investigation, the above-mentioned course is obliged to play a role that the dialectic is unable to play, because the study of the process of individuation does not seem to correspond to the appearance of the negation that follows as the second step, but rather to an immanence of the negative in the primary state, the precondition for what follows, in the ambivalent form of tension and of incompatibility. Indeed, it is the most positive element in the preindividual being - namely, the existence of potentials - that is also the cause of the incompatibility and the nonstability of this state. The negation is primarily an ontogenetic incompatibility, but it is also the other side of the richness of potentials. It is not therefore a negation that is a substance. It is never a step or a stage, and individuation is not synthesis, a return to unity, but rather the being passing out of step with itself, through the potentialization of the incompatibilities of its preindividual center." (Genesis of the Individual)

Compare Deleuze: "Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference: heteron, not enantion. For this reason non-being should rather be written (non)-being or, better still, ?-being. In this sense, it turns out that the infinitive, the esse, designates less a proposition than the interrogation to which the proposition is supposed to respond. This (non)-being is the differential element in which affirmation, as multiple affirmation, finds the principle of its genesis. As for negation, this is only the shadow of the highest principle, the shadow of the difference alongside the affirmation produced. Once we confuse (non)-being with the negative, contradiction is inevitably carried into being; but contradiction is only the appearance or the epiphenomenon, the illusion projected by the problem, the shadow of a question which remains open and of a being which corresponds as such to that question (before it has been given a response). Is it not already in this sense that for Plato contradiction characterises only the so-called aporetic dialogues?" (D&R, ibid)

In other words, is there in fact some sort of metaphysical guarantee that the process of individuation would have necessarily given rise to this individual, and not another? — StreetlightX

This is what Aristotle outlined as the fundamental question for metaphysics. It is not to inquire of a thing, why it is rather than not, in the most general sense, it is to inquire why it is what it is, rather than something else. The assumption is that when a thing comes into existence, it comes into existence as a particular thing, the particular thing that it is, and not something else. If we put that premise together with the premise that what a thing is, when it comes into existence, is not something totally random, we can conclude that what a thing will be, when it comes into existence, is predetermined.

This leads to Neo-Platonist idealism, which assumes immaterial Forms as the determining factor. We can find a similar position in Deleuze's virtual reality of Ideas. The principal difference appears to be in the Neo-Platonist One, and Deleuze's multiplicity. The difference appears to be based in the way one might approach the concept of potential, or possibility. We can identify individual possibilities, and as such, there is a multiplicity of possibilities, but when we allow that possibility has actual existence, it is no longer individual possibilities, but simply possibility, or potential. I think that from the Neo-Platonist perspective, all possibilities emanate from the One, which is an assumed actuality, made necessary according to Aristotle's cosmological argument. So the existence of what appears to us as a multiplicity of possibilities, is supported by an underlying actuality which is One. This underlying actuality is the determining factor, such that when a particular thing comes into being, it is what it is.

Unfortunately, notes Simondon, the problem with taking the individual as a starting point is that it presupposes that this individual is a necessary outcome of the process of individuation which gave rise to it. In some sense, this is true. Given this or that individual thing, it's clear that it is necessary (on the account of it's being there) that the process that gave rise to it did so. But, the question is whether or not it could have given rise to something else instead. — StreetlightX

This is the key point to understand. The nature of possibility, potential, is such that it will not necessitate any particular thing, the same potential has the capacity to bring about many different things. So the underlying actuality, which is responsible for the thing being what it is and not something else, which actualizes that particular potential, is understood to act as a cause in the same sense as final cause (telos), according to the concept of freedom of choice.

To quote Simondon again, "The individual ... would then be grasped as a relative reality, a certain phase of being that supposes a preindividual reality, and that, even after individuation, does not exist on its own, because individuation does not exhaust with one stroke the potentials of preindividual reality." — StreetlightX

This thought, might be vey closely related to Deleuze's "repetition". If an act of individuation occurs at a moment in time, a similar but different act of individuation occurs at the next moment, the present being the only time capable of supporting the existence of individuals.

One consequence of this thought is that it also requires us to rethink the status of the law of the excluded middle, or indeed logic in it's classical form. For Simondon, unity and identity are the result of an operation which exceeds it insofar as Being, understood in it's full sense, comprises of not just the individual, but also the pre-individual. Simondon again: "The concrete being or the full being, which is to say, the preindividual being, is a being that is more than a unit. Unity (characteristic of the individuated being and of identity), which authorizes the use of the principle of the excluded middle, cannot be applied to the preindividual being... Unity and identity are applicable only to one of the being's stages, which comes after the process of individuation. — StreetlightX

This demonstrates a return to the Aristotelian understanding of "becoming", and "potential". Aristotle demonstrated a deep incompatibility between becoming and the fundamental laws of logic, which produced paradoxes, and allowed sophists to prove absurdities. He insisted that the law of non-contradiction ought to be upheld, and defined the category of potential, in which the law of excluded middle was to be excepted. Hegel offered another understanding of becoming, in which the law of non-contradiction becomes inapplicable. These are two distinct understandings of "becoming", which appear quite different. The issue which may arise though, is with the way that the three laws of logic are tied together, and whether we can simply exclude one, without rendering the other two as useless. Aristotle offered a unique form of identity, which allows that potential may be identified, as matter, but matter itself has no inherent form, so the issue of non-contradiction is skirted, as irrelevant.

It would be odd to insist that a person is alive and dead at the same time. — fdrake

I was interested in the recent case of a woman getting married. Her father was dead, so she asked, to act as the man who 'gives her away', the man who had received her late father's transplanted heart, so that there would be something of her living father in the person doing the job. After all, at heart the man was her father, wasn't he?

This is the root of Simondon's (and Deleuze's) critique of Hegelian dialectics, which, according to both, begins from individuals and then tries to think their becoming through negation, rather than beginning with the process of ontogenesis, and inscribing negation 'positiviely' within that process. — StreetlightX

That was Peirce's switch on Hegel too. First the bare potential - the vagueness as that to which the PNC does not apply - and then its symmetry-breaking dichotomisation and eventual transformation into the stable regularity of a habit.

Simondon says this clearly here...

It is never a step or a stage, and individuation is not synthesis, a return to unity, but rather the being passing out of step with itself, through the potentialization of the incompatibilities of its preindividual center." — Simondon

...so stability is what open-endedly arises when a symmetry-breaking goes as far as it can go in producing the hierarchically organised state of being an asymmetry - a local~global distinction such as represented by a figure marking a ground, an event disturbing a context.

So individuation is a process of coming into being. And it is shaped by the emergent limits of what is possible. The figure or event is possible in being the least like, the furtherest away, from its "other" of the ground, the context. And thus - departing from usual mechanistic thinking - the ground and the context are also coming into being via the production of the figure or event. The symmetry-breaking is a deep one in making a potential duality or asymmetry an explicit or actually present division.

Compare Deleuze: "Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference.... — Deleuze

Compared to Simondon, this seems a lot of blather.

For Simondon - and this is his revolutionary contribution to philosophy - one ought to think of individuation not from the perspective of the individual, but from the perspective of the process which gave rise to it. — StreetlightX

But revolutionary? Metaphysics started this way with Anaximander. Process thinking just got over-written by mechanical thinking - the metaphysics of technology replaced that of biology.

Unity (characteristic of the individuated being and of identity), which authorizes the use of the principle of the excluded middle, cannot be applied to the preindividual being... — Simondon

[Aristotle] insisted that the law of non-contradiction ought to be upheld, and defined the category of potential, in which the law of excluded middle was to be excepted. Hegel offered another understanding of becoming, in which the law of non-contradiction becomes inapplicable. These are two distinct understandings of "becoming", which appear quite different. — Metaphysician Undercover

Peirce employed a triadic logic where the failure of the PNC was definitional of vagueness, and the failure of the LEM was definitional of generality.

So we can sort out things this way.

The pre-individual is the state of pure potentiality where the PNC does not apply - as Hegel and Peirce and Anaximander all agree. Before a symmetry is broken, the two poles of contrary or dialectical being that the breaking will reveal, are not in existence, just in a state of potentiality. So the PNC does not (yet) apply.

The LEM of course also doesn't apply. But the LEM is a stronger constraint. The PNC is a constraint on vagueness, and the LEM a constraint on generality - the constraint that then produces the individual or the particular. So to keep things rigorous, one should only worry about the PNC in defining the pre-individual.

Then we do get the breaking of symmetry which is the dichotomous transformation or phase transition that produces the crisply local and global - the individuated particularity of the event or figure seen against the asymmetric or orthogonal backdrop which is the now also revealed generality of the ground or context.

And here is where the LEM comes into play in more Aristotelean fashion.

The specific example Aristotle used was the problem of the future contingent - who would win the battle tomorrow. The LEM fails to apply to such "potentialities". But this is now potential in a quite different sense - the well-formed and substantial sense of a crisp possibility. We now already live in a world mechanical and organised enough that it offers concrete bifurcations in advance of anything happening. The context is such that the world is going to have to make a choice - even if it has a contingent nature.

So there will be a battle. Two navies are already heading towards an enagement. And there will be a winner. Again, all the grounds for a conflict followed by a resolution are crisply developed and set in place. Thus the LEM doesn't apply right yet, but it soon enough must.

Thus before the battle, only the general statements apply. There will be a battle. There will be a winner. The particular statement that X won, and not Y, fails until the crisp possibility has become actualised.

This Aristotelean way of thinking led him to put being before becoming (and MU to put material cause before final cause). But it is not a wrong way of thinking so long as it is realised that it is logic as applied to a world already crisply individuated and so already constrained to an ensemble of crisp possibilities.

However the modern problem is that the whole of existence is understood as having this character. The world is a state of affairs, an ensemble of trajectories. The symmetry is already broken, now all the rest is a playing out of a deterministic collection of parts thus unleashed to have their chaotic pattern of collisions.

But in talking about the pre-individuated, Simondon is picking up on the deeper notion of Apeiron or vagueness - the ground that is not yet even a ground as individuation is what dichotomously must produce its own ground as part of its deal.

Logically, this is a very difficult and complex concept. That is why it no doubt keeps getting discovered, forgotten and re-discovered. What would be revolutionary would be if the realisation stuck for once. :)

That was Peirce's switch on Hegel too. First the bare potential - the vagueness as that to which the PNC does not apply - and then its symmetry-breaking dichotomisation and eventual transformation into the stable regularity of a habit. — apokrisis

To say that the PNC does not apply to bare potential, is the Hegelian conception, not the Aristotelian conception. Under the Hegelian conception, being and not being are subsumed under becoming. Therefore the PNC can not apply to becoming, as it consists of both opposing properties. Under the Aristotelian conception, becoming is the middle, between being and not being. "Bare potential", such as prime matter is ruled out, as impossible, by the cosmological argument. So as much as it might be a useful concept, like the perfect circle and such, the concept doesn't refer to anything real, it is an impossibility. Starting with bare potential is the Hegelian switch on Aristotle.

The pre-individual is the state of pure potentiality where the PNC does not apply - as Hegel and Peirce and Anaximander all agree. Before a symmetry is broken, the two poles of contrary or dialectical being that the breaking will reveal, are not in existence, just in a state of potentiality. So the PNC does not (yet) apply. — apokrisis

I think Simondon points to the problem with this perspective. If the pre-individual is a state of pure potentiality, then there is no reason for the thing which comes into being, to be the thing which it is. The principle of sufficient reason would not apply, there could be no actuality to cause that thing to be any particular thing, it would come into existence as any random thing.

And here is where the LEM comes into play in more Aristotelean fashion.

The specific example Aristotle used was the problem of the future contingent - who would win the battle tomorrow. — apokrisis

This is the only empirically valid example of potential which we have, the future contingent. To extend the concept of potentiality to include a "pure potentiality" is like assuming a future without any past. If we could imagine a point, prior to the passing of any time, at which point no time has passed to create any sort of actual existence (no constraints), this would be pure potentiality; the possibility for absolutely anything. But assuming this point is unjustified and unwarranted. It is unjustified because to say that there is a future, is to assume that time will start to pass, and this presents a necessity. Such a necessity denies "pure" potential. If we remove this necessity, that time will start to pass, then there is no future, and no potentiality. The assumption is unwarranted because until we gather a better understanding of the nature of time, it is meaningless to speculate about such beginnings. This is speculation about the beginning of something we haven't even established principles of identity for.

This Aristotelean way of thinking led him to put being before becoming (and MU to put material cause before final cause). — apokrisis

Matter is potential, so I think it is you who is asserting the priority of material cause.

To say that the PNC does not apply to bare potential, is the Hegelian conception, not the Aristotelian conception. — Metaphysician Undercover

And that was what I explained. Aristotle was talking about potential in a different sense at that point - crisply formed possibility rather than actual bare naked potential.

Although Aristotle elsewhere certainly got the point about Anaximander's apeiron and the impossibility of actual prime matter as already substantial being.

Under the Aristotelian conception, becoming is the middle, between being and not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Can you provide citations that make that clear? I think the point was to avoid the idea that something could come from nothing in fact.

"Bare potential", such as prime matter is ruled out, as impossible, by the cosmological argument. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is this really Aristotle now - who offered a variety of analyses - or more the latter scholastic overlay?

I always see Aristotle as being more open-minded in summing up the various strands of thought as they existed in his time. Then church scholarship read into that the "authorised version" of the causal story that most suited itself.

If the pre-individual is a state of pure potentiality, then there is no reason for the thing which comes into being, to be the thing which it is. The principle of sufficient reason would not apply, there could be no actuality to cause that thing to be any particular thing, it would come into existence as any random thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly. But it is the feature rather than the bug. It brings back spontaneity or Peircean tychism back into the causal picture. The way individuation turns out can include a lot of accidents.

A river "must" have a fractal branched structure. But where it branches is then contingent. So individuation expresses some general constraint - like the second law of thermodynamics - but still, any actual river comes to incorporate a collection of historical contingencies.

In breaking symmetry in a general fashion - as the second law does when it comes to time having a dissipative direction - we can say individuation has a necessary form. With a river, it must be fractal as a Platonic-strength mathematical ideal. But then within that, there are a whole lot of further symmetry breakings that will occur at a fine-grain level which really doesn't matter. The river can fork at any moment in time with equal probability. That becomes a local accident. But it doesn't matter as the overall outcome is still fractal - in fact, that is how the precise pattern we call fractal arises.

So the principle of sufficient reason (with its focus on particular causes determining every particular effect) goes out of the window. It is replaced by a theory of general causes (or global constraints) and particular accidents (or local degrees of freedom).

If we could imagine a point, prior to the passing of any time, at which point no time has passed to create any sort of actual existence (no constraints), this would be pure potentiality; the possibility for absolutely anything. But assuming this point is unjustified and unwarranted. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's your view. I just gave the counter-view. Time in thermodynamics is an emergent constraint - the development of a generalised rate of dissipation that creates a background "dimension".

So time is already being rethought in this fashion as we do our best to leave behind classical Newtonian metaphysics. A thermal view of time is that it is a global regularity that emerges, against which localised departures can be measured.

That is why we can now measure the age of the universe in terms of its general temperature. The cosmic background radiation is spreading and cooling at a constant lightspeed rate. That then becomes the "time" against which local physical degrees can be measured in terms of being "hotter" or "slower".

Can you provide citations that make that clear? I think the point was to avoid the idea that something could come from nothing in fact. — apokrisis

I can't remember the precise context, but he argues, I think in Metaphysics, that adhering fast to the LEM creates absurdities. This is how I remember the demonstration. When an object comes into being, there is a change from the not being of that particular object to the being of that particular object. In between this not-being and being, is necessarily a change. If we ask what exists at this intermediate state, we could identify, and describe another object, what exists between the not-being and being of the original object. But now we must assume a change which occurs between the not-being, and the being of this intermediate object. We could identify another object at this point. And onward, ad infinitum. We never get to the point of actually describing change, or becoming, by following this manner of logic. Instead, we must simply assume a change, or becoming, which takes the middle position between the not-being and being of an object.

Is this really Aristotle now - who offered a variety of analyses - or more the latter scholastic overlay? — apokrisis

I believe this is Bk 9 of his Metaphysics, where he refuted Pythagorean idealism, and certain forms of Platonic idealism already developed by that time. He explains how ideas have the nature of potential. They are only given actual existence by being discovered by a mind. Prior to being discovered, they can exist only potentially. Therefore if ideas are eternal, they are an eternal potential. Then he explains how it is impossible that anything eternal could be of the nature of potential. This would mean that potential is prior to actual, and such a "pure potential" could not have the capacity to actualize itself, this requiring an actual cause. Therefore if there was such a thing as "pure potential", there would be eternally pure potential, without there ever being anything actual.

So the principle of sufficient reason (with its focus on particular causes determining every particular effect) goes out of the window. — apokrisis

Throwing the PSR out the window is not something to be taken lightly. This allows for randomness. Once you allow randomness into your schema, you can't get it out. Then you are left without the means to account for any consistency or coherency in the world. There cannot be a reason for consistency. In other words, any form of apparent consistency in the world would actually be the result of some random, chance occurrence. And this is absurd to think that consistency could emerge from randomness, without any reason.

This is how I remember the demonstration. When an object comes into being, there is a change from the not being of that particular object to the being of that particular object. ....We never get to the point of actually describing change, or becoming, by following this manner of logic. Instead, we must simply assume a change, or becoming, which takes the middle position between the not-being and being of an object. — Metaphysician Undercover

This sounds like his discussion of Zeno's paradoxes. But I would say that more generally Aristotle takes the position that nothing comes from nothing. Being begins in potential and actuality is about the move or change from there towards contrary or dichotomous limits. So non-being becomes then a privation or lack of some predicate - a positive kind of absence or negativity! If a horse can be white, it also can be not-white. That is a potential change that can take place, being a complementary and LEM-like crisp possibility.

So in its way, Aristotle's take is the kind of Anaximander/Peirce tale of organic development in which we start with a naked potential or vagueness and then this becomes crisply something by separating towards its own logically dichotomous limits. Change inheres in potentiality in metastable fashion because potentiality is already poised, suspended, between two alternative states of development. The question then is what tips the balance so things move in one direction or the other?

The answer for the process philosophy view is that pure chance can be the initiating spark in this fashion - a fluctuation (as modern theories of spontaneous symmetry breaking explicitly presume). When a river forks, it is a matter of chance where some slight deviation bubbled enough at just the right moment for feedback to cause it to develop into a full-blown bifurcation. As they say about the beating of a butterfly wing, it can cause the storm that appears halfway the other side of the world.

But also - as a world actually does start to develop a history - then a different potential-tipping source of cause comes into play. Instead of pure chance, you now have memory or habit starting to dominate. This is the thesis of pan-semiosis. And it is the flipside of pure chance of course.

If you look at why that particular butterfly caused the storm rather than a billion other butterflies active at the time, now you can say well the world had some particular physical arrangement that determined it to be the case that a chance event right at that point would tip everything else over like a chain of dominoes. Now the world as a whole is seen as being in a state - a state of memory and hence constraint. It was poised in some actual way - a holistic way. So it was awaiting the spark that was inevitably going to happen.

Anyway. The point is that Aristotle's general logical analysis holds. He takes the triadic developmental view that potentiality is metastable, being poised to break in two complementary directions. Nothing can come from nothing. But actuality comes from potentiality as the breaking of its symmetry.

However where Aristotle goes wrong is that he takes reality's basic condition as stasis rather than flux. He was trying to do rigorous physics in an era where it seemed obvious that the basic condition of reality was substantial and material. The world was composed of objects made of stuff, making change the fundamental mystery. The deep question became what could animate this frozen realm of static being?

Today, however, it is quite clear from physics that the mystery is exactly the other way round. The issue is how could stasis emerge from flux.

The most natural state of the universe is that it is a generalised bath of radiation, spreading and cooling, with no action happening at less than the speed of light. So the further symmetry-breaking that created gravitating mass, clumping and blundering about at speeds as slow as "rest", and with temperatures as low as "absolute zero", was the mystery.

And that is why Aristotle's further arguments about things like the prime mover have to understood quite differently to make any sense. In a way, he was quite right to get at the primacy of circular motion as nature's most fundamental kind of symmetry (and so the first symmetry with the potential to be broken). But Aristotle then put this source of change at the fast rotating edge of the physical universe - the outer boundary that causes the largest celestial sphere to spin. Now however, particle physics puts that rotation at the frozen centre of being - point-like quantum spin being the immovable object around which everything else revolves. :)

Anyway, the better way to understand the ontological story is that the unity of potentially becomes dichotomised actuality via the emergence of stabilising constraints - Peircean habits that regulate spontaneity. So the generality of change that is a potential or a vagueness becomes transformed by a polarisation of the sources of change. We get change now of two crisp kinds - chance and determinism, or freedom and constraint.

Stability then emerges from the balancing of these two opposed species of change. Over time, spontaneity becomes increasingly subject to constraint or memory. The Universe gets larger and so colder. The particles in that Universe thus get more stable in themselves and less disruptive of the spacetime that contains them. Change in the end pretty much vanishes.

Throwing the PSR out the window is not something to be taken lightly. This allows for randomness. Once you allow randomness into your schema, you can't get it out. Then you are left without the means to account for any consistency or coherency in the world. There cannot be a reason for consistency. In other words, any form of apparent consistency in the world would actually be the result of some random, chance occurrence. And this is absurd to think that consistency could emerge from randomness, without any reason. — Metaphysician Undercover

Obviously I take the opposite view. But that is also because I am saying randomness is not opposed to potentiality. It is opposed to determinism or constraint. So it is classed with the crisply emergent and not the vague potentiality from which both the determined and the random arise in complementary fashion.

Randomness in the real world is always the product of some system of constraints. It is not pure freedom. Even "chaos" can be exactly calculated from a description of a system's boundary conditions - a description of the global container within which some measure of stuff is being allowed free rein.

If you have a box of particles, you get one kind of emergent statistics - a Gaussian distribution. If you open the lid of the box and let the particles wander, you get another - a fractal or powerlaw distribution.

So any description of randomness turns out to rely on some crisp set of boundary conditions. There is no such thing as true chaos. An utter lack of order becomes simply the vague - the potentiality that grounds these constrasting kinds of order that we might call the crisply "chaotic" (as in mathematical models of powerlaw distributions) versus the crisply "determined" (as in mechanistic action where the constraints are so fixed, the context so mapped out in terms of a domino-like cascade, that a particle or beating butterfly wing has no choice about the sequence of events it appears to initiate in hindsight - as the principle of sufficient reason likes to demand).

This sounds like his discussion of Zeno's paradoxes. But I would say that more generally Aristotle takes the position that nothing comes from nothing. Being begins in potential and actuality is about the move or change from there towards contrary or dichotomous limits. So non-being becomes then a privation or lack of some predicate - a positive kind of absence or negativity! If a horse can be white, it also can be not-white. That is a potential change that can take place, being a complementary and LEM-like crisp possibility. — apokrisis

This is what we observe in the existence of things, the potential for a thing is prior to the actual existence of that thing. However, when we ask, why does the thing come to be the thing which it is, and not something else, we realize that there is a further actuality which acts on this potential.

So in its way, Aristotle's take is the kind of Anaximander/Peirce tale of organic development in which we start with a naked potential or vagueness and then this becomes crisply something by separating towards its own logically dichotomous limits. Change inheres in potentiality in metastable fashion because potentiality is already poised, suspended, between two alternative states of development. The question then is what tips the balance so things move in one direction or the other? — apokrisis

You are simply ignoring an important part of Aristotle's work, in your assertion that he assumed existence starts with a "naked potential". This is exactly the position which he worked to refute with the cosmological argument. As I've explained, according to Aristotle the naked potential is impossible, that is why he assumed eternal circular motion. The eternal circular motion is an eternal actuality which he assumed because he concluded that naked potential is impossible.

However where Aristotle goes wrong is that he takes reality's basic condition as stasis rather than flux. — apokrisis

The problem is the same, or very similar whether you take reality's basic condition as stasis, or flux. The problem is the problem of change. Whether it is a static thing which changes, or a motion which changes, the issue is the same. As a static thing, the issue is the intermediate between being and not-being of the thing. As a motion, the issue is acceleration, the intermediate between moving in one direction, then moving in another direction. Just like there must be a cause which acts in the interim between being and not-being of the thing, there must be a cause which acts in the interim between moving in one way, and moving in another way.

Your proposal that there is a "problem" involving an intermediate state between being and becoming or between the being and non-being of a thing, seems to depend on a view that posits that being must be static. On a dynamic view being just is becoming, and identity is a formal heuristic stasis imposed upon the flux.

As I explained to apokrisis, if you take a process perspective, the same problem arises with respect to change in motion, acceleration. If at one moment, the object has X value of momentum, and at the next it has Y value. We need to assume that a change has occurred between X and Y. We could assume an intermediate, Z, but then we head to infinite regress.

Furthermore, our understanding of motion, always is such that it assumes that there is something, a static thing, which is moving, even if that "thing" is just energy. So it is very naïve to think that we can get rid of the assumption of a static thing, by assuming a "dynamic view of being", because in all of our conceptualizations of activity, there is always that underlying static thing.

This is exactly the position which he worked to refute with the cosmological argument. As I've explained, according to Aristotle the naked potential is impossible, that is why he assumed eternal circular motion. The eternal circular motion is an eternal actuality which he assumed because he concluded that naked potential is impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I understand it, Aristotle's argument was that change could not have a beginning in an efficient cause. So the alternative had to be that there was no beginning to change and the cause of change was instead the eternal finality of a prime mover that thus acted constantly to "stir things up" from the outer edge of cosmic existence.

So I think you are mixing up two things. Aristotle did talk about change in general terms of the symmetry breaking of a potential, and so that is a view that fits well with the world as we know it today. And then he also had this other first cause issue with cosmic existence itself - and came up with an answer there that doesn't really work.

The problem is the same, or very similar whether you take reality's basic condition as stasis, or flux. The problem is the problem of change. Whether it is a static thing which changes, or a motion which changes, the issue is the same. As a static thing, the issue is the intermediate between being and not-being of the thing. As a motion, the issue is acceleration, the intermediate between moving in one direction, then moving in another direction. Just like there must be a cause which acts in the interim between being and not-being of the thing, there must be a cause which acts in the interim between moving in one way, and moving in another way. — Metaphysician Undercover

But flux is much more than merely motion.

Motion is a first derivative of rest or stasis, acceleration the second derivative. And you can keep stacking up more such departures without really arriving at an ontology of flux. Acceleration presumes constant speed as its static baseline. So every derivative is starting with the stasis of some reference frame and not doing the other thing of accounting for stasis as a constraint on chaos.

The problem is completely different depending on which end you come from. You can construct motion bottom-up from stasis, or you can constrain flux from the top-down to arrive at an equilbrium (the stasis that results from continuing change no longer making a difference).

So two different start points and two different end points to how we imagine ontology unfolding. They are fundamentally different ontic hypotheses.

If at one moment, the object has X value of momentum, and at the next it has Y value. We need to assume that a change has occurred between X and Y. We could assume an intermediate, Z, but then we head to infinite regress. — Metaphysician Undercover

As John points out, to make these kinds of measurements is no simple because it presumes taking a snapshot view of a world in motion. And to do this, we - as the measurer - have to plant our feet firmly somehow to take that measurement.

So right away we are into the physics of the observer issue - the way relativity demands the fixing of a reference frame and quantum theory demands the mysterious collapse of the wavefunction. You are continuing to apply a Newtonian conception of measurement that has had to be abandoned.

And thus - departing from usual mechanistic thinking - the ground and the context are also coming into being via the production of the figure or event. — apokrisis

What you say that this is a sort of poetic act? That beings are disclosed by/as new concepts of things-background pairs?

What you say that this is a sort of poetic act? That beings are disclosed by/as new concepts of things-background pairs? — Hoo

Personally, I wouldn't because it would be something I believe on rational~empirical grounds rather than poetic or aesthetic. And a Peircean pragmatist in particular would take the ontic view that reality itself is rational~empirical in its own process of coming into being. Existence is summed up as the universal growth of reasonableness (or intelligibility).

So sure, one can certainly have feelings about this fact. You can find it awesome, surprising, exciting, or whatever. But a Peircean wouldn't appeal to aesthetic grounds as such. Indeed, Peirce was a little notorious in struggling to have much to say about aesthetics beyond that it boiled down to ... the universal growth of reasonableness being the highest good.

That would be one reason why Pragmatism seems "dry" and "unromantic".

But on the other hand - taking a social constructionist view of human emotions - it also seems pretty plain that such emotion talk is essentially coercive. Humans use this kind of language to make people conform to socially-sanctioned behavioural scripts. An appeal to "aesthetics" as the grounds for why another should behave in a way you want them to behave is essentially fascist and totalitarian (see what I did there. :) ).

So I can enjoy romanticism as culture. It makes good escapist entertainment. But I think we differ in that you strongly self-identify with the existentialist hero script, where I would take it ironically.

Wouldn't you say that life often feels like being on stage in a melodrama where you know the part you are meant to be playing, the poses you are meant to strike - and it is all kind of fun. But also it is a bit worrying to be surrounded by other actors who are taking it all a little too literally? They actually believe they are the characters they are playing?

Anyway, that is why - when it comes to actual philosophy - aesthetics has no place. The fact that aesthetics has many "philosophers" in its grip is simply evidence that philosophy is a fairly tolerant academic club. Its "open mic" tradition lets the romantics have their turn in front of the crowd.

Here again you seem to be demanding that a process that may be seamlessly variant, both temporally and spatially, must consist in series of static moments, and an aggregation of discrete parts. As apo remarked earlier you seem to be concerning yourself with Zeno- like paradoxes; and I would add that your demands for absolute determinability seems to be confounding you. If the process we are attempting to understand is not 'really' constituted by static moments and discrete parts, and our analyses consists in reducing it to discrete parts so as to model it, then there will always be a paradoxical or 'aporiac' remainder; our understanding can thus never be perfect, but only 'perfect'.

Here again you seem to be demanding that a process that may be seamlessly variant, both temporally and spatially, must consist in series of static moments, and an aggregation of discrete parts. — John

What do you mean by "seamlessly variant"? Perhaps that's an oxymoron? Anyway, the way that we understand such a reality, is descriptions which apply at the moment. Unless you allow that there is some reality to such states, then you are assuming that our entire understanding of reality is baseless, and wrong. Further, you are claiming that reality is fundamentally unintelligible. This is contrary to the philosophical mindset, which is a desire to know. If we assume that reality is unintelligible, as you do, we kill the desire to know.

As I understand it, Aristotle's argument was that change could not have a beginning in an efficient cause. So the alternative had to be that there was no beginning to change and the cause of change was instead the eternal finality of a prime mover that thus acted constantly to "stir things up" from the outer edge of cosmic existence. — apokrisis

Yes, I agree, that was Aristotle's solution to the issue raised by the refutation of Pythagorean idealism, i.e., the cosmological argument. Aristotle assumed an eternal prime mover, as an eternal efficient cause. The Neo-Platonists however resolved the issue by assuming a final cause as first cause. History shows that the Aristotelian solution was dismissed, while the Neo-Platonist solution was upheld.

So I think you are mixing up two things. Aristotle did talk about change in general terms of the symmetry breaking of a potential, and so that is a view that fits well with the world as we know it today. And then he also had this other first cause issue with cosmic existence itself - and came up with an answer there that doesn't really work. — apokrisis

I agree, the Aristotelian solution doesn't really work. The Neo-Platonist solution does work, while respecting the principles of the cosmological argument. Your solution is to throw away the cosmological argument.

Seamless variance in a spatial sense is instanced by any surface which is not homogeneous, but which shows no clear boundaries between the different areas. A landscape is seamlessly variant. Of course, boundaries in any pattern may be more or less distinct.

Sure, we understand things by dividing them into moments and parts with which we can produce determinate models, but those moments and parts, and the models themselves cannot ever be anything more than approximations.

Why could there not be isomorphisms between seamless actualities and determinate models of them? If an isomorphism were perfect, of course the model would then be identical (except for spatial location) to the thing itself, perhaps scaled down but not lacking in any detail.

So, I am not claiming that reality is unintelligible, but more modestly, that it is not perfectly or exhaustively intelligible. I am not trying to "kill the desire to know" by saying that knowledge is impossible, but rather to temper the hubris of discursive knowing, by saying that it cannot be perfect. Put another way, the contention is that knowing itself is a continuum and that it cannot merely be a dichotomous polarity between knowledge and ignorance.

I think you misunderstand me. Perhaps I didn't provide enough context. The word poet evolved from the word for creator. I was thinking instead of:

[World disclosure] refers to how things become intelligible and meaningfully relevant to human beings, by virtue of being part of an ontological world – i.e., a pre-interpreted and holistically structured background of meaning. This understanding is said to be first disclosed to human beings through their practical day-to-day encounters with others, with things in the world, and through language. ..

"[T]he world is not a possible object of knowledge – because it is not an object at all, not an entity or set of entities. It is that within which entities appear, a field or horizon [that sets] the conditions for any intra-worldly relation, and so is not analysable in terms of any such relation. " (Mulhall)

The implication is that we are always already "thrown" into these conditions, that is, thrown into a prior understanding of the things which we encounter on a daily basis – an understanding that is already somewhat meaningful and coherent. However, our understanding cannot be made fully conscious or knowable at one time, since this background understanding isn't itself an object:

"All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument... as the element in which arguments have their life." (Wittgenstein)

— Wiki

So being-disclosure enlarges the system. This reminds me of the "commonsense" background presupposed by abstract thought. Or unconscious inferences...

I agree, the Aristotelian solution doesn't really work. The Neo-Platonist solution does work, while respecting the principles of the cosmological argument. Your solution is to throw away the cosmological argument. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. My solution is to focus instead on other models of development within Aristotle's writings - like the symmetry-breaking of potential by the separation towards contraries.

In that view, finality acts as a final cause in being the global limit that thus emerges to mark an end on change. Or at least an equilbrium state in which change no longer makes a difference.

So we are on opposite sides of this argument still.

In that view, finality acts as a final cause in being the global limit that thus emerges to mark an end on change. Or at least an equilbrium state in which change no longer makes a difference.

So we are on opposite sides of this argument still. — apokrisis

Yeah sure, we're on opposing sides of the issue, because I'm convinced, and you're stubborn. Look, you place "final cause", as the end of change. But then it is not a "cause" of change at all, it is the effect. To properly understand final cause. as a cause, it must be understood as prior to the effect. That is why we understand it as the intended end, the objective.

If you had any respect for the cosmological argument, you would see the need to assume a first actuality, as the cause which makes particular things the particular things that they are, and not something else, when particular things come into existence. We could do as the Neo-Platonists did, and associate final cause ("the good") with this first actuality, or we can proceed toward a more progressive understanding of this first actuality, in light of scientific advancements. But placing "bare potential" as first, only stymies any such progression, because one then proceeds to build an ontology on this unreasonable premise. .

Look, you place "final cause", as the end of change. — Metaphysician Undercover

At the cosmological level, time itself is emergent and so talk of before and after doesn't work out for me quite the same as it does for you with your Newtonian concept of time as its own eternal backdrop dimension.

But finality is called finality for a reason. Change can cease once it has achieved its purpose.

Again, because you think the cosmological issue is to get change started from a position of stasis, to tip existence into motion, you are always going to want to place some cause at the beginning of a change.

But I take the opposite view that the cosmological issue is how to place constraints on chaos. So now we have a symmetry breaking or phase transition story where finality begins with imperceptible first hints of regularity, and then develops until finality is fully expressed.

So finality is there from the first instance as the barest hint - but like the butterfly wing, you would never spot it. And it is there at the end as the clearly satisfied purpose. Now there is no mistaking the intention as change has ended.

But placing "bare potential" as first, only stymies any such progression, because one then proceeds to build an ontology on this unreasonable premise. . — Metaphysician Undercover

It works for me as the most reasonable cosmology. You can't argue with science after all. ;)

At the cosmological level, time itself is emergent and so talk of before and after doesn't work out for me — apokrisis

I've told you this before, to say time is emergent is oxymoronic. To emerge requires time, so things only emerge if there already is time. This means that it is contradictory to say that time emerges, because there must be time prior to anything, including time, emerging.

You can't argue with science after all. — apokrisis

Why not? It appears to me, like many things which "science" presents as truth, change to be not true, after fifteen or twenty years. This is what drives philosophers to seek stability in knowledge.

To emerge requires time, so things only emerge if there already is time. This means that it is contradictory to say that time emerges, because there must be time prior to anything, including time, emerging. — Metaphysician Undercover

In my view, time is change. So time as we know it is part of change as we know it. Thus time as we know it is wedded to space and energy. It doesn't then make sense to talk about time existing alone before there was space and energy. So it doesn't make sense to talk about time in a conventional way before the Big Bang. (Or even a divine creation, if it comes to that.)

Eternal means changeless. And that raises the question of what could be both changeless yet result in a change? A vagueness is neither changing or changeless. It is simply vague regarding such a dichotomy.

But that in turn means a vagueness has the potential to become divided into the changing and the changeless. The least bit of flux or change must produce also the least bit of stasis or the changeless as that which makes the change apparent as in fact a change. For there to be a disturbance, there must be then the something which is by comparison the still.

So we know we exist in a world where change and changelessness are both crisply real. That is not a problem. We know that there is flux to act as the yardstick of stasis, and stasis to act as the yardstick of flux. And that is what legitimates an inquiry into how this mutually exclusive state of affairs must have looked if we add the requirement that it had to develop or arise.

The alternative of course is to accept that sharp distinction as brute fact - claim existence never began but is instead eternal - changeless. And already in saying that, we can see that such an assumption not only contradicts the facts (either scientific, or biblical), but it also contradicts itself in saying there could be the crisply changeless (an eternal existence) in the absence of a contrast - a changing existence - that would be the definite yardstick needed to make the eternal a crisp fact.

Without the presence of its "other", characterising a world as eternal is a hollow notion. An eternal world can only exist in that kind of sharp contrast to a non-existent world. And as I say, we know that our world exists, so to talk about nothingness as a real possibility is the ultimate empty talk. And if that is so for talk about nothingness, it also becomes that for talk about the eternal as its ontic contrary.

So logic returns us to the fact something exists in a certain way. We are in a world that is divided into the relatively changeable seen against the backdrop of the relatively changeless. Then the only way to resolve a division is to seek its origin in some more primal state. That primal state must merge the oppositions that arose out of it. And so change and changelessness must have looked the same - been indistinguishable - at the point "just before" they started to separate.

If they are now crisp polarities, originally they must have been just one unbroken vagueness.

It appears to me, like many things which "science" presents as truth, change to be not true, after fifteen or twenty years. — Metaphysician Undercover

What important cosmological discoveries did you have in mind here?

And given that you cling on to a classical Newtonian conception of time, space and force, don't you appreciate the irony in doing that?

In my view, time is change. So time as we know it is part of change as we know it. — apokrisis

So how would change emerge then? Doesn't emergence imply change, such that if something was emerging, change was already occurring? If time and change emerge, as you say, then prior to change, there would be no change. What could have possibly caused this first change, which is the emergence of time? Perhaps there was absolutely nothing before time and change, but this implies something coming from nothing. If there was something, what kind of thing could that be, without any time or change? It must be eternal, being outside of time. But if it is eternal, it must be an eternal changelessness, so how could change emerge from eternal changelessness?

What important cosmological discoveries did you have in mind here? — apokrisis

Hey, you made the blanket statement, "you can't argue with science after all". I wasn't referring to cosmological designations, though they are prone to change, (like Newton to Einstein), I was referring to more simple, basic things like 40 or 50 years ago when science determined that butter is bad for you, and margarine was supposed to be the saviour. Now it seems like science says the opposite. Who really trusts what "science says" these days?

So how would change emerge then? — Metaphysician Undercover

By the emergence of its other - the lack of change that stands as the backdrop which makes it, with counterfactual definiteness, "a change".

If time and change emerge, as you say, then prior to change, there would be no change. — Metaphysician Undercover

But also no lack of change either. There would be no stasis to speak of.

Perhaps there was absolutely nothing before time and change, — Metaphysician Undercover

Well that ain't logical is it? What would this "nothing" measure its nothingness against?

But if it is eternal, it must be an eternal changelessness, so how could change emerge from eternal changelessness? — Metaphysician Undercover

You see how you keep dropping stasis out of the discussion. You simply presume the thing that gives the idea of "change" any crisp meaning can be taken for granted.

Once you start honestly asking yourself about how stasis could be the case, then the lightbulb might go off.

Hey, you made the blanket statement, "you can't argue with science after all". I wasn't referring to cosmological designations, — Metaphysician Undercover

But clearly I was.

It works for me as the most reasonable cosmology. You can't argue with science after all. — apokrisis

I was referring to more simple, basic things like 40 or 50 years ago when science determined that butter is bad for you, and margarine was supposed to be the saviour. Now it seems like science says the opposite. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or maybe the science was never binary in this fashion. It was simply the science reporting, meeting a simplistic public expectation, that presented such a crisply binary answer.