And knowledge-wise, what prohibits us from knowing necessary connection? A billard ball hits another at a particular velocity, etc., and the struck ball reacts with another particular velocity. The difference between knowing that that is a "regularity" and a "necessary connection" is? — Terrapin Station

Can you give an example of something that is metaphysically necessary? Something that 'must' be the case in all possible worlds? Or something that absolutely could not be the case?

Can you give an example of something that is metaphysically necessary? Something that 'must' be the case in all possible worlds? Or something that absolutely could not be the case? — Jamesk

Are you going to answer my question after I answer yours? (And in a way that I consider an answer to it, unless you're fine considering this question an answer to your questions, since I do.)

If so, I'll answer your questions in another way, too.

Did you reply to my post without reading it? As I said in that post:

The reason why Aristotelian dualism is more advanced, and therefore more appealing, than Cartesian dualism is that it divides reality between the more evident categories of actual and potential, active and passive, or being and becoming, rather than mind and matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

To accept Aristotelian dualism rather than Cartesian dualism, is to dismiss the latter. For various reasons, the two are incompatible.

How are you seeing those as incompatible?

Let's say we divide the world into matter and mind.

Why can't there be actual and potential with respect to both matter and mind, active and passive with respect to both matter and mind, being and becoming with respect to both matter and mind?

For causation to be necessary connection then when A happens B must also happen. When your first ball hits the second one, the second one must move and there is no proof of this being the case.

You can invoke Newton's laws of physics all you want but Newton himself said that all he is doing is telling us what is happening, not why it is happening. We can understand what gravity does but we don't know how it works or why.

For causation to be necessary connection then when A happens B must also happen. When your first ball hits the second one, the second one must move and there is no proof of this being the case. — Jamesk

So we're saying, without proof, that maybe it could be otherwise--maybe when A happens, B wouldn't have to happen, right?

Or if that's not right, we can clarify the distinction better.

We start with one whole, "reality". We either divide this whole according to the two categories of mind and matter, or we divide this whole according to the two categories of passive and active. The two ways of dividing are incompatible unless we equate mind with passive or active, and matter with the other. But, as I explained, this equation cannot be made in Aristotle's dualism. Therefore the two are incompatible.

What's the reason you couldn't logically have passive or active mind, as well as passive or active matter?

Re this, by the way, re Aristotle:

Aristotle's conception
Aristotle gives his most substantial account of the passive intellect (nous pathetikos) in De Anima (On the Soul), Book III, chapter 4. In Aristotle's philosophy of mind, the passive intellect "is what it is by becoming all things."[1] By this Aristotle means that the passive intellect can potentially become anything by receiving that thing's intelligible form. The active intellect (nous poietikos) is then required to illuminate the passive intellect to make the potential knowledge into knowledge in act, in the same way that light makes potential colors into actual colors. The analysis of this distinction is very brief, which has led to dispute as to what it means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_intellect

Natures as inner principles of change and rest are contrasted with active powers or potentialities (dunameis), which are external principles of change and being at rest (Metaphysics 9.8, 1049b5–10), operative on the corresponding internal passive capacities or potentialities (dunameis again, Metaphysics 9.1, 1046a11–13). When a change, or a state of rest, is not natural, both the active and the passive potentiality need to be specified. Natures, then, in a way do double duty: once a nature is operative, neither a further active, nor a further passive capacity needs to be invoked. Even so, as will be clear from Aristotle’s discussion, this general thesis will require a host of qualifications.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/

So In Aristotle, there is passive and active intellect (which someone could easily parse as mind in a nonphysical sense) and passive and active material states (which someone could easily parse as material/physical stuff in the contemporary sense).

Not that you have to agree with the above, by the way, but let's get into why, on your view, you couldn't logically have passive or active mind, as well as passive or active matter?

So we're saying, without proof, that maybe it could be otherwise--maybe when A happens, B wouldn't have to happen, right? — Terrapin Station

If there is even the slightest possibility of there being another outcome then the outcome was not necessary.

Sure. Do we know if there was a possibility of there being another outcome?

First, we shouldn't assume that there is a "primary substance." Among other things, that (exact term) is linked to ideas that are pretty incoherent a la the Aristotelianism that some folks are seduced by around here.

If we're contrasting idealism with materialism, we're implying that idealism is positing stuff that isn't material. So obviously the difference would be that we're talking about material/physical stuff in the one case, and we're talking about immaterial/nonphysical stuff in the other case.

I've yet to encounter a notion of nonphysical stuff that's coherent, so I can't tell you much about what the properties of nonphysical stuff are supposed to be or how nonphysical stuff is supposed to function, but people who aren't physicalists assure me that they're not (just) positing physical stuff, they're positing something else (in addition if not instead) that's different than physical stuff.

We actually should be better cleaving terms like idealism, materialism, realism, etc., by the way, and specifying the historical contexts we're focusing on, since the conventional connotations of those terms have shifted over the years. — Terrapin Station

I can agree that "substance" itself is a questionable term.

I guess what I'm looking for is the the term we should use to refer to that constant that allows everything to interact and establish causal relationships between what we call "mind" and "matter". In this sense "mind" and "matter" are not the "primary substance", rather they are arrangements of the "primary substance".

"Both mind and matter are processes" doesn't imply dualism. — Terrapin Station

Exactly! Does this not imply that process is the "primary substance" (monism) and that matter and mind are simply different types of processes? Matter and mind are simply different arrangements of the "primary substance". "Process" and "information" are two terms I find useful in referring to that constant I just wrote about.

I notice this, but that's something apprehended by my mind, not my senses. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand. Your mind is composed of your sensory representations. What is your mind without them? Ideas, knowledge, beliefs, language - all are composed of sensory representations. What use is a mind without senses? Starfish and jellyfish seem to have senses without mind (no central nervous system). Can mind exist without senses?

I really don't think I can sense a similarity, because that requires an act of comparison, which is a mental activity. In your example there is a comparison with a prior time, and that requires memory. A difference on the other hand, is a relation between two things, so the difference itself, being a relation, is only one thing, and doesn't require a mental comparison to be perceived. — Metaphysician Undercover

Everything you experience is in the past. Your mind is in the past. Your mind is always a process of memory (working memory). I think your notion of "mind" is incorrect and incoherent and is what is leading to your misunderstanding.

Well, I'm a physicalist/materialist. I don't believe that mind is anything other than matter/processes and relations of matter--just like everything else is. In my view, the only thing mysterious about this is that some people think it's mysterious.

I don't like the "physical/material" or "mental/idea" terms. I simply call myself a monist, and find no reason to explain it further, or to use terms that have dualistic connotation because they stem from incorrect dualistic thinking.

If you can conceive it then it must be possible.

If you can conceive it then it must be possible — Jamesk

I don't at all agree with that. What would be the support of it?

I don't at all agree with that. What would be the support of it? — Terrapin Station

I meant metaphysically possible. That means possible in at least one possible world. I am not saying that I agree with this or the use of possible worlds for thought experiments. But in philosophy for some thing to be metaphysically necessary it must be so in all possible worlds. Seeing as we can only imagine these other worlds all we have as a tool is our conceptions.

I meant metaphysically possible. That means possible in at least one possible world. I am not saying that I agree with this or the use of possible worlds for thought experiments. But in philosophy for some thing to be metaphysically necessary it must be so in all possible worlds. Seeing as we can only imagine these other worlds all we have as a tool is our conceptions. — Jamesk

Okay, but I think all of that has problems. Being able to conceive something simply means being able to imagine it, at least "kinda"--often those imaginings have pretty fuzzy or fudged or sloppy details. We can imagine everything we come up with in fictions, for example. But I don't at all believe that a lot of that stuff is really possible. The Invisible Man and Godzilla and vampires and zombies and Superman and wise-cracking bunnies and Jupiter like it is at the end of 2001 etc. etc.--that stuff is just fantasy. Would it all be impossible? I don't know, but certainly the fact that we can imagine it doesn't imply that it would be possible. (And frankly, I think the treatment of it as being possible just because we can imagine it is simply another sympton of philosophy having a bizarre blind spot when it comes to dealing with fictions. Fictions are pretty simple, but philosophy insists on treating fictions as if they're something other than just "things we can imagine.")

I think that "possible world" talk is problematic in general, by the way. It's certainly worth trying to get down to brass tacks re just what it amounts to for something to be possible but not actualized, assuming that's not just a fantasy, period, but "possible world" talk tends to go off track very quickly in my view.

I also think it's very problematic to say that "what it is for something to be metaphysically necessary is that it's so in all possible worlds." That's problematic due to the nature of possible world talk in general--including the above, that simply being able to imagine or fantasize about something in no way entails that what we're imagining is possible (in any way other than being possible to imagine as we are)--but also because it seems to me, intuitively, that "metaphyiscally necessary" should be able to peg that something was necessary in the given "possible world" that it occurred in.

Like I said I also find it problematic. Can we move back to the original question? Assuming that neither of us can prove or disprove the others theory, which one does the job better? Belief in physics or belief in an ever active God?

I don't understand. Your mind is composed of your sensory representations. What is your mind without them? Ideas, knowledge, beliefs, language - all are composed of sensory representations. What use is a mind without senses? Starfish and jellyfish seem to have senses without mind (no central nervous system). Can mind exist without senses? — Harry Hindu

"Sensory representations" is only a part of what's in the mind. There are also memories and anticipations. I agree that it doesn't make sense to talk about a mind existing without senses, but it also doesn't make sense to say that a "mind is composed of sensory representations".

Everything you experience is in the past. Your mind is in the past. Your mind is always a process of memory (working memory). I think your notion of "mind" is incorrect and incoherent and is what is leading to your misunderstanding. — Harry Hindu

This is most obviously wrong. Things anticipated are in your mind, and not in your past. So it is incorrect to reduce the mind to memory as you do here. And if this is really the basis of your judgement that my notion of "mind" is incorrect and incoherent, it appears like you have things reversed, because your notion of mind is obviously incorrect.

Like I said I also find it problematic. Can we move back to the original question? Assuming that neither of us can prove or disprove the others theory, which one does the job better? Belief in physics or belief in an ever active God? — Jamesk

I'm a physicalist/materialist, but my view isn't a "belief in physics" per se.

Among the big problems for me with the "God" side of things is that in my view the idea of a nonphysical existent can't even be made coherent, and I find pretty much all of the metaphysical aspects of religious beliefs--the details re various religions, to be absurd. That was only exacerbated by the fact that I wasn't at all socialized into any religious beliefs. I wasn't aware of that stuff at all, really, until I was well into my teens. By that point it was if I had learned that the Star Wars films are in fact meant as historical dramas about extremely long-living aliens, with one of them creating us as their ongoing doctoral dissertation on the social effects of a particular mutation of midichlorians. Imagine suddenly learning that a lot of people believe that. You'd think they were bonkers. That's just how I parse religious beliefs. It's just as much a "You believe what?!? You can't be serious" affair for me.

Sensory representations" is only a part of what's in the mind. There are also memories and anticipations. I agree that it doesn't make sense to talk about a mind existing without senses, but it also doesn't make sense to say that a "mind is composed of sensory representations". — Metaphysician Undercover

And the other, crucial, ingredient, is reason.

As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.). — Edward Feser

From here.

Reason, logical inference, and the like, cannot be understood in terms of physical interactions or things. It inheres solely in the relationship of ideas. Even to argue about or define what the physical is requires the appeal to logic and rational inference. And the intellect is the faculty which grasps those relationships, which are universal in nature; which is why they can’t be material things, because material things are particular, unless they’re a type; but it is their very belonging to a type, which enables the intellect to understand them.

And the other, crucial, ingredient, is reason. — Wayfarer

Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Ha, ha, Harry had me so focused on the things within the mind, that I forgot about the most important thing, the thing which makes it possible for there to be things in the mind in the first place.

If it doesn't matter what we call the primary substance, then why the debate for the past 1000 years? — Harry Hindu

The debate here is really whether substance is primary or emergent. I am saying monism doesn't work, and neither does dualism. The simplest possible workable metaphysics is triadic - the kind in which substantial being, or actuality, is emergent from a developmental process of becoming.

And this kind of self-organising systems approach is what we find as our best current scientific answer. Aristotle got it early on. Peirce picked up the threads in a modern way. And science makes sense of both mind and matter in terms of self-organising systems these days.

It seems to me that the debate stems from our preliminary assumption of dualism and is solved through the realization of monism. — Harry Hindu

You are trying hard to make monism work. And it kind of does work if the "one thing" is the idea of a developmental process in which a fundamental instability becomes emergently self-regulating so as to produce comparatively stable being.

So there is one basic thing. Nature. The cosmos. Physical existence. But it is a systemic process. A logic of development and emergent order. And it thus has an irreducible complexity that can be most simply described in terms of three moving parts. In other words, the form of a hierarchy.

Jumping ahead to the physics, this is exactly how the science has panned out. You can see it everywhere. The Planck scale is defined by just three constants - c, G and h - bound in reciprocal relations to breath measurable existence into space, time and energy. The cosmos is described in terms of its triadic hierarchical structure - a quantum microscale, a relativistic macroscale, and then the good old solid and substantial classical scale that emerges between these two systematic limits.

The very shape of physics expresses a triadic metaphysics.

So the big mistake is to look for a monism without internal complexity. The simplest possible metaphysics that makes sense in actual descriptions of the world is a monism - a presumption of a closed system with all its causality bound up within itself - in which there are enough internal parts in play to explain the emergence of complex stable structure. And hierarchical organisation is the simplest model of a complex system.

Once you can count to three in metaphysical terms, then dualism or twoness becomes a lot less psychologically threatening to your worldview. You get to have your monism - a monism of one world - but a monism with the necessary complexity to describe a world with internal systematic order and a history of growth and development. Ie: The story modern science again tells since the discovery of the Big Bang~Heat Death developmental arc of our own universe.

So as Peirce laid it out so nicely, existence is a tale of three developmental stages.

You have the primacy of a Firstness or Vagueness - the chaotic initial conditions that is a realm of fluctuations without order or dimension, and thus a state of maximum possible symmetry (or sameness, or indifference - the two being synonymous).

Then if you have a symmetry which is a state of maximal disorder, then you can have the symmetry-breaking which is the phase transition to some new state of regulating order. You have Secondness or duality in which an asymmetry breaks out, allowing the new thing of relationships. You have the emergence of a globally regular difference between parts and wholes, figures and grounds, events and contexts.

Or in terms of Big Bang physics, you get the symmetry-breaking in which local microscopic particles are reacting energetically with each other within the background of a relatively thermally empty spacetime vacuum. You get that vital distinction between events and contexts which yield the further thing of some actual possibility of a history. The past becomes a thing as an accumulation of all the little accidents that define the present. The future also becomes a thing as all the little accidents or degrees of freedom that remain unconstrained and so living possibilities - actions to be dissipated.

In short, from the total disorder of a vagueness, we get the emergence of a dualistic difference between the many aspects of being. There is the concrete difference between the past and the future, the void and its events, the laws of physics and the accidents provided by degrees of freedom.

And because all these "dualities" are actually asymmetries - the product of taking possibilities to their opposing or reciprocal limits - they are really nascent hierarchical structure. As the universe expands and cools, it becomes ever more cleanly separated into its local play of hot events against an empty and inactive void. The bland radiation bath of the Big Bang clears to become a structure of moving particles in a spacetime vacuum.

The classical realm that we then see as substantial is the bit that emerges right in the middle - where enough crud gets lumped together in a shared inertial frame to lose its quantum indeterminacy and behave how we expect canonical substance to behave. Gas clouds can gravitationally clump to form fusion stars. Stars become factories of heavy atoms. Crud at a higher level of self-stable organisation, which eventually gets clumped into planets and spawns further developmental possibilities like symbolically structured life and mind.

So monism - if it is understood in the usual reductionist fashion of finding something primary, a material root to existence - is always going to fail. It didn't ever work as metaphysics. And science has proved it fails as an approach to modelling nature.

The first step out of monism was always dualistic in being some kind of ur-story of reciprocality or symmetry breaking. You need two to tango. And that is why metaphysics was born out of the logic of dialectical reasoning. The modern scientific understanding of existence got going once metaphysics had nutted out all the useful dialectical distinctions - the unities of opposites - like atom~void, discrete~continuous, matter~form, flux~stasis, chance~necessity, one~many, mind~world, and so on.

The mistake then is get stuck with this oppositional stage of metaphysical thought - to do what these kinds of threads always do and obsess about "fixing things" by getting back to some kind of monism. Or worse yet, to enshrine a dualism of substances.

So if the metaphysics winds up in an opposition of the ideal and the material, then the choices are a) argue for materialism, b) argue for idealism, c) argue for the separate and disjoint reality of both of these realms of being.

But all this is standard issue "theology". A legacy of the scientific revolution colliding with the Church. Folk took sides on something 600 years ago and have not escaped the confines of that debate ever since.

There was always another alternative - the one that the Ancient Greeks already expressed and which modern science has again arrived at. And this is the triadic or hierarchical systems view. Existence is a process. Systematic order is what naturally develops from unbound chaos. We now have testable mathematical models of this kind of reality creating organisation. The emergence of substantial being via phase transitions or symmetry-breaking is just a routine thing for scientific theory these days.

So maybe we have the odd thing of modern science - as a systems view - clashing culturally with the received "classical materialist" physics that has become the new folk orthodoxy. Materialism has become the secular theology. Everyone then wants to show they are on the right side by "eliminating" anything that questions their ardent monism. It becomes impossible to understand the scientific revolution that took place in the 20th century because they are still locked in mental combat with 16th century theological doctrine.

I've yet to encounter a notion of nonphysical stuff that's coherent, so I can't tell you much about what the properties of nonphysical stuff are supposed to be or how nonphysical stuff is supposed to function, but people who aren't physicalists assure me that they're not (just) positing physical stuff, they're positing something else (in addition if not instead) that's different than physical stuff. — Terrapin Station

I think mind or spirit is usually imagined (to reverse Peirce's metaphor) as a kind of effete matter, an attenuated ineffectual matter that, because it is not governed by physical laws, cannot have physical effects. So it must, rather than interacting with matter, run parallel with matter, per Spinoza.

So such a notion is coherent, insofar as it is logically possible and imaginable. But this leaves us with the notorious interaction problem. That it leaves us with this problem is itself a problem, and also it can be criticized on the grounds that it does not, in fact cannot, provide us with any cogent explanation of anything ( which of course is a corollary of the interaction problem).

The only thing in its favour is that it appeals to our feelings, imagination and intuition. It is (or at least may be) an eminently poetic, that is to say affective, idea. People may be divided into two primary groups; those who have (or allow themselves to have) such feelings, imaginations and intuitions and those who don't. Those who do can then be further divided into those whose discursive thinking about the nature of nature is affected by those feelings, imaginations and intuitions, and those whose thinking about the nature of nature is not.

It's all pretty subjective really!

So such a notion is coherent, insofar as it is logically possible and imaginable. — Janus

Re the idea of it being coherent, it just seems like a set of words to me. What would "matter not subject to physical laws" be, exactly? Where would we find it? Why wouldn't it be subject to physical laws?

I have no difficulty imagining it, and since it, as imagined, does not interact with physical matter (or at least its interaction is unimaginable) I wouldn't expect to "find it" anywhere. It wouldn't be subject to physical laws because that is how it has been imagined.

Think of the popular idea of ghosts that, for example, simply pass through physical matter. Of course imagining them as being seen is inconsistent, unless you posit that seeing itself is (or at least some kinds of seeing are) something more than a merely physical interaction.

People may be divided into two primary groups; those who have (or allow themselves to have) such feelings, imaginations and intuitions and those who don't. ... It's all pretty subjective really! — Janus

What about those of us who believe that it being so subjective is the reason why the freedoms of the imagination must be regulated by the discipline of acts of measurement?

Peirce, after all, was the founder of Pragmatism. We conjecture and then we test. It works out pretty well as history has shown.

I think mind or spirit is usually imagined (to reverse Peirce's metaphor) as a kind of effete matter, an attenuated ineffectual matter that, because it is not governed by physical laws, cannot have physical effects. — Janus

That's exactly what you want to avoid. You must arrive at a duality that retains an interaction - which is indeed being generated from the start by that interaction.

So if you employ any form of words that arrives at a conclusion of two disconnected realms, you already know you took a wrong turn. You have managed to trip yourself up along the way.

The right approach is always a reciprocal relation, and hence dialectical or dichotomistic. The weakening of the one aspect is by definition the strengthening of the other.

You could argue that the discrete is "maximally effete continuity". But then also that continuity is "maximally attentuated discreteness". Thus each pole is linked to the other by the third thing of a spectrum. You can have strong continuity to the degree you can have weak discreteness, and vice versa.

This makes perfect sense for robust metaphysical dichotomies, like discrete~continuous, flux~stasis, chance~necessity, matter~form, and so on.

But it fails for mind~matter. And that is telling. It means a wrong turn got made and we should simply give up a dichotomy that doesn't actually work as a dichotomy should.

Now self~world can work as a dichotomy - one describing the epistemology of neurocognition, for example. We experience the world as "other" to precisely the degree that we also experience "being a self". All day long, we can be so engrossed in the flow of the habitual that the distinction is highly situated an enactive. We can chew our food, not bite off our tongue, and never see any big deal. While at other times we can step back and think about ourselves as "conscious beings" in a "material world", or some similar culturally-useful, socially-pragmatic, dichotomy.

But standard issue dualism - the theistic kind - has just failed as metaphysics because it made a very wrong step and wound up with a disconnected pair of parallel realms.

This doesn't say there is some actual hard problem that must confound science and everyone else. It just says you guys did some bad metaphysical modelling. For social reasons, you pushed a line that broke the sound rules of systems thinking. Go back and start again. Look for the triadic complexity which allows two poles to be each others' "other" in transparent and obvious fashion.

I wouldn't expect to "find it" anywhere. — Janus

But see that's not coherent to me. I don't think that the idea of existents with no location makes any sense really.

With ghosts, yeah, they'd need to have a location, too, and then we have to just kind of go, "Well, they're a bit like invisible people that can pass through items that normally we can't pass through" without thinking about the details of how that would work very much, where we pretend that somehow being able to see and hear and think doesn't inherently depend on having particular body parts, etc.