One way to make sense of 'everything' claims is to treat those claims not as substantive, but as formal. That is, to say something like 'everything is X' is to say that whatever 'there is', 'it' abides by such and such rules, or exhibits such and such properties, and not others. I say this is 'formal' and not 'substantive' because 'everything' here does not designate some kind of positive substance (res cogitans vs. res extensa), but a set of constraints or limits that are operative regardless of the 'stuff' in question. — StreetlightX

This makes sense to me, especially the emphasis on constraints and limits. I still have a reflexive distrust of the idea that any positive claim can be made that would apply to all things outside of some circumscribed domain.

Like all that can be done, on the 'everything' level is an indefinite 'carving' out of reality, chiseling away through statements of the type 'there is no x such that...'


Though maybe you could have a positive claim along the lines of what fdrake's saying, if I understand him. Like maybe the one thing that you could say is that everything that is is capable of having an effect.

So, I don't see monism's peculiarity. It seems like every position, except for silence or "everything is as everything is", is a correction and a "a cognitive project driven by some sort of need". — Πετροκότσυφας

Drawing from Streelight's post. I think what I was trying to say, before losing the plot, is that silence or 'everything is as everything is' is really all you can do at the 'everything' level. Ideas like monism, dualism, pluralism etc are products of the mind's capacity to totalize gone haywire, metastasizing.

But if you start from the modes, and work back to substance - this whole issue (if there is one) vanishes. — csalisbury

Except this lingering conception that stuff has to be 'made of' stuff.

I think I understand your broader picture, but I'm not totally sure because I'm not familiar with the term 'relational closure.' Googling it is bringing me to a lot of math-y articles I'm not sure I'm capable of understanding without a lot of work. Is it possible to summarize the concept? — csalisbury

I'm using it in a mathy way. The concept is quite straightforward in maths. A set is closed under some operation or function or relation just when you can't take elements of that set to some element outside of that set using the operation.

So, the set {1,2,3} is not closed under addition, since 1+3=4 and 4 isn't in the set, but the set {0} is closed under addition, since 0+0 is 0. If we abstract a level to functions, say f(x) = x^2, then the first set is not closed under the function since f(2)=2^2=4, but the second set is closed under the function since f(0)=0^2=0. Abstracting a level again to relations, which are like functions that can map one thing to many things, and defining the following relation R on the set {1,2,3,4}:

0->1
0->2
1->1
1->2
2->2
3->3
3->4
4->3

then the set {1,2,3} isn't closed under R, since 3 can be sent to 4. Neither is the set {0} closed under the relation, since 0 can be sent to 1 and 2. The relational closure would then be the smallest set of all elements that we can't 'get outside' of using the relation. For R this is {0,1,2,3,4}.

Abstract again to some collection of objects X and quantify over a set of relations {R,S,T}, then we can say a set X is closed under R and S and T if and only if it is closed under each of them in the above sense. Now imagine the set of all objects and the collection of all relations (taking any set as its substrate). We can say that the collection of all objects is closed under the set of all relations just when it is closed under each of them. This invites considering the relations first and characterising their substrate as the smallest set they are closed under, similarly to treating modes/interactions first and synthesising to attribute/substance later.

In my example of desire to Schop, we have that desire is a relation of an object to a state of mind, thus whatever the relational closure is must contain both states of mind and objects. This translates mathematically to applying the set of all relations to a set of objects, then applying all relations to what the relations have sent all the set of objects to, and aggregating all elements which are produced in this procedure into one giant set. This set then satisfies the property that all the relations can only send stuff to within the set, in the jargon making a closed category, which I'm identifying with substance through a massive sleight of hand (there are still a pre determined collection of individuals to be transmitted through the relations, and it also construes 'everything' as expressible through mathematics).

And in terms of your OP, when you say 'as opposed to what', this connotes with the domain of the application of a property or concept an exterior domain which does not include it; which must exist on the condition of possibility for the sense of the concept or property. By constructing the above object, we also construct an incredibly generic characterisation of everything, 'it is in the set', but this expresses nothing more than that it, in some sense, is.

Thanks, I think I understand what you're saying now, and it does seem to bypass the problem I was trying to identify in the OP.

This might be a naive question, or else betray my misunderstanding, but how does this work time-wise? If we have relational closure tout court isn't that a kind of 'freeze' - as in, doesn't that preclude, by definition, the coming-into-existence of anything new? Since, if something new did come into existence, it would have to be the case either that the 'giant set' did not have relational closure or else that something had been left out?

This might be a naive question, or else betray my misunderstanding, but how does this work time-wise? If we have relational closure tout court isn't that a kind of 'freeze' - as in, doesn't that preclude, by definition, the coming-into-existence of anything new? — csalisbury

Yep. There's no special emphasis on becoming in this picture, transformation is done 'in advance' as the sending of an object to another. There's no becoming separate from its products, held pristine forever in a glorified relational database, an accountancy of being;, an ontology for the insensate, the stubborn and the puritan.

:lol:

Sometimes you just gotta go ham.

Think of it this way. You hand someone a deck of cards. They say, "Ah, you've given me a deck of cards interspersed with spludgemuffikins!" The mere fact that they've said this doesn't imply that it's not just a deck of cards, and especially if you can get no coherent account of what spludgemuffikins are and how you also handed them to the person, you'd probably say, "No, it's just a deck of cards." — Terrapin Station

This analogy doesn't work because cards are a very small subset of everything. If we weren't able to differentiate cards from other things, we wouldn't be able to identify them. Fortunately, for us card-enthusiasts, both differentiation and identification, in this case, is easy. No need to countenance the objections of spludgemuffikin-holders.

You don't leave monism for a monistic-y anti-monism. You leave the very idea of a rational fixed-point. — csalisbury

The other ontic choice is to motor past dualism to arrive at the irreducible triadic complexity of a developmental or process view of "existence". You arrive at a better rational fix-point that either monism or dualism.

The problems with dualities - like mind vs matter - is they don't meet the formal criteria of a dichotomy. Therefore they never really convince.

But a full metaphysical strength dichotomy meets the definition of being "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive". You end up with two poles of being that are formally complementary. They are in fact mathematically reciprocal and thus mutually justified.

Take a classic like discrete~continuous. And understand them as complementary limits of what could be the case - so processes which are about heading in directions rather than states of existence.

To be discrete would be rationally defined as 1/continuous. And to be continuous would be similarly defined as 1/discrete. Each is the measure of the other. The more definitely you have the one, the more definitely you don't have the other. But you always still have to have both to have anything!

So this is the trick which gets you past mere duality. You have a triadic story of a separation into two extremes that is the third thing of an interactively self-defining process.

To be discrete is to measurably lack any evidence of continuity. And so a state of discreteness can only be as definite as that pragmatic metric. You might claim discreteness "for all practical purposes". And that rational position then harbours within it the "other" that is the continuous - rendered now as vague or indeterminate possibility.

So - as CS Peirce said - the full logic of existence is developmental. And it starts with a "monism" of the completely vague or indeterminate. It then breaks rationally towards matched and reciprocal poles of being. Then step back from that and you can see how the whole forms a system, an interacting structure of being, a sign relation.

The familiar duality of matter and mind just doesn't cut it. It compares apples and oranges. Matter is supposed to be talking about the fundamentally simple. But so is mind. And we know that mind is better understood as a complex embodied semiotic process - a modelling relation. It ain't another species of substance - a psychic stuff to rival the material stuff, setting up a disconnected duality of monisms.

However if we want to get at some basic duality that works as a formal dichotomy, we can find it in the modern contrast between entropy and information. One stands for uncertainty or indifference. The other stands for certainty and meaning. And physics finds them to be reciprocal in a way that can be measured. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. And at the Planck scale, they become fused. Order and disorder look like the same thing. It is indeterminate which you have.

So monism equals ontological reductionism. And dualism arises by recognising that any ontic distinction - no matter how universal - has to arise as a dialectical contrast to its "other". If you individuate in some ontic direction, you also - reciprocally, measurably - have to be just as definitely leaving some other place behind.

Is everything stasis? Well, can't see any flux right now. Is everything chance? Well, can't see any necessity right now. Etc, etc.

So symmetry breaking involves moving towards a metaphysical limit by demonstrably leaving behind its metaphysical other. Limits can only exist if they are opposed. And being opposed, they have to be the third thing of holistically related. That gives reality a perfectly rational irreducible complexity. You have to have a triadic, or hierarchical, story to give an intelligible account of existence.

This is a very fixed point. :)

But it includes your own epistemic distinction of the one vs the many. Pluralism is just another complementary extreme. If the whole is defined by achieving the limits of cohesion or integration, then the parts are defined by achieving the counter limit of being incoherent or differentiated.

This again will seem a problem. The instinct remains to protests it has to be either all about the integration or the differentiation.

But instead, a triadic worldview says what we should hope for is a functional balance. States of affairs can only exist if they persist. And they can only persist if they find a complementary balance. The global cohesion and the local differentiation must be in some sense forming a feedback loop. The more of one results in the more of the other. You have a system that essentially freely grows to become both more unified, and more diverse, at the same time, due to the very relation causing their existence.

And again, maths and science now give us robust formal models of exactly this - which match what we observe in nature. We have all the maths of fractals, dissipative structures, scalefree networks, constructal theory, etc, that tell us this triadic/developmental ontology maps to the world as we know it.

Triadicism has won. Structuralism is in again. The news is just taking a while to filter out.

As a monist, the correct response to the claim that "everything is mind, or matter" is "So what?" Why do we have to name the "everything" anything at all? — Harry Hindu

That's fair. I should have been saying 'substance monism' or 'substance monist' not 'monism' and 'monist'

Triadicism has won. — apokrisis

Hats off to Triadicism then.

I am curious -to what extent are you willing to take that hit ( the lack of novelty) ?

I don't know what you mean, really.

I just mean: how ok are you with a metaphysics that means nothing new can come into existence?

Off of this

This might be a naive question, or else betray my misunderstanding, but how does this work time-wise? If we have relational closure tout court isn't that a kind of 'freeze' - as in, doesn't that preclude, by definition, the coming-into-existence of anything new? — me

yep — fdrake

@fdrake

I guess there's also a silent presence here. I tried, over a half-decade ago, to understand Badiou, and I didn't. I know you've read him. When we bring set theory, oneness, novelty, Spinoza etc together, that makes me think of Being and Event, and that the inconsistency of the 'giant set' is somehow relevant. I wish I understood Badiou better but the feeling in my bones is that B&E is dealing with something problematic in the account you presented.

I just mean: how ok are you with a metaphysics that means nothing new can come into existence? — csalisbury

Nah. I think it's a result of bad framing. It's an interesting failure though, I think fundamentally it doesn't work very well because the operation which creates the fuckoff big object, just as in Spinoza, is a relatively unmoored conceptual operation taking little inspiration from more local problems. So in one breath I was criticising him for a focus on intellection in grasping an eternal and infinite substance, in another I derived a similarly inert and timeless material solely through reason. Sometimes it's fun to be a hypocrite.

I guess there's also a silent presence here. I tried, over a half-decade ago, to understand Badiou, and I didn't. I know you've read him. When we bring set theory, oneness, novelty, Spinoza etc together, that makes me think of Being and Event, and that the inconsistency of the 'giant set' is somehow relevant. I wish I understood Badiou better but the feeling in my bones is that B&E is dealing with something problematic in the account you presented. — csalisbury

Badiou was in my mind when I was writing that post, I think the relevant distinction he has is between 'counts-as-one' and 'non-all'. Counts-as-one is a intellectual/practical operation which treats something as a unity; an intelligible whole; which stands out against the inconsistent/intelligibility resistant real; the non-all.

The departure point of my account creates a ghostly intelligibility where in fact there is none; to be real becomes equated with membership in a gigantic constructed set; precisely what Badiou uses Russel's paradox to highlight the flaw in. Moreover, the distinction between counts-as-one and non-all is roughly a distinction between intelligibility and the real; the former an operation which synthesises unities given a circumscribed context (and indeed circumscribes those contexts), and the latter that which disperses all such syntheses.

Nah. I think it's a result of bad framing. It's an interesting failure though, I think fundamentally it doesn't work very well because the operation which creates the fuckoff big object, just as in Spinoza, is a relatively unmoored conceptual operation taking little inspiration from more local problems. So in one breath I was criticising him for a focus on intellection in grasping an eternal and infinite substance, in another I derived a similarly inert and timeless material solely through reason. Sometimes it's fun to be a hypocrite. — fdrake

Hah, alright. I couldn't tell to what extent you were endorsing those ideas.

Badiou was in my mind when I was writing that post, I think the relevant distinction he has is between 'counts-as-one' and 'non-all'. Counts-as-one is a intellectual/practical operation which treats something as a unity; an intelligible whole; which stands out against the inconsistent/intelligibility resistant real; the non-all.

The departure point of my account creates a ghostly intelligibility where in fact there is none; to be real becomes equated with membership in a gigantic constructed set; precisely what Badiou uses Russel's paradox to highlight the flaw in. Moreover, the distinction between counts-as-one and non-all is roughly a distinction between intelligibility and the real; the former an operation which synthesises unities given a circumscribed context (and indeed circumscribes those contexts), and the latter that which disperses all such syntheses. — fdrake

I think this is more or less how I'm thinking of things at the moment. I think its close to what Street is saying too.

If we weren't able to differentiate cards from other things, we wouldn't be able to identify them. — csalisbury

Are you able to identify "everything"?

That's fair. I should have been saying 'substance monism' or 'substance monist' not 'monism' and 'monist' — csalisbury

I don't see how that helps. What is a "substance"?

But these illusions are happening in the bigger "illusion". Everything that takes place, is a priori taking place in the illusion (of representation, of consciousness, of experience, etc.). That is to say, it grounds all other things we might analogize to it, and thus eludes the analogy in a big way. — schopenhauer1

I don't know what this means. I don't think you know what it means either as you put "illusion" in quotes.

I explained that an illusion is a misinterpretation of sensory data. It's actually a miscategorization of sensory data. The straw isn't bent. The light is. Seeing a bent straw is exactly what you would expect for animals that use light as a source of information about its environment. There is no illusion once you categorize your sensory data properly.

You seem to be saying that the sensory data itself is an illusion. What does that even mean? Effects are not their causes. To imply that the mind is the world, and not an effect of the world, is the illusion - that category mistake I spoke about.

Though maybe you could have a positive claim along the lines of what fdrake's saying, if I understand him. Like maybe the one thing that you could say is that everything that is is capable of having an effect. — csalisbury

Yeah, it's pretty delicate, and my use of positive/negative isn't quite on the mark, because a constraint can well be understood as a positive claim anyway. Perhaps a better distinction might be something like nominal vs. operational - as in, it's all very good to call something a substance out of which everything 'is' (Mind, Matter, res extensa etc), but the meat of any such distinction is what such a substance can do that another substance can't. This is the usual: what difference does the difference make?

With respect to the conversation between you and @fdrake, part of my initial response was motivated by trying to rephrase Lacan's logic of the ('feminine') not-all: 'there is nothing which is not...'; which is set against what he calls the 'masculine' logic of universality: 'everything is...'' - the latter being a claim of identity (X=...), while the former leaving the identity of X somewhat indeterminate, and simply 'qualifying' it in some way. Also, as I was reading a bit to formulate this very paragraph a bit better, I realized I more or less borrowed wholesale from a Zizek discussion of this very topic (I kinda had this at the back of my mind when I wrote the initial response, but only dimly! ... Went searching and hey -) :

"The statement "material reality is all there is" can be negated in two ways, in the form of "material reality is not all there is" and "material reality is non-all:' The first negation (of a predicate) leads to standard metaphysics: material reality is not everything, there is another, higher, spiritual reality. As such, this negation is, in accordance with Lacan's formulae of sexuation, inherent to the positive statement "material reality is all there is": as its constitutive exception, it grounds its universality. If, however, we assert a non-predicate and say "material reality is non-all;' this merely asserts the non-All of reality without implying any exception - paradoxically, one should thus claim that the axiom of true materialism is not "material reality is all there is;' but a double one: (1) there is nothing which is not material reality, (2) material reality is non-All.'" (Less Than Nothing)

:cool:

With respect to the conversation between you and fdrake, part of my initial response was motivated by trying to rephrase Lacan's logic of the ('feminine') not-all: 'there is nothing which is not...'; which is set against what he calls the 'masculine' logic of universality: 'everything is...'' - the latter being a claim of identity (X=...), while the former leaving the identity of X somewhat indeterminate, and simply 'qualifying' it in some way. Also, as I was reading a bit to formulate this very paragraph a bit better, I realized I more or less borrowed wholesale from a Zizek discussion of this very topic (I kinda had this at the back of my mind when I wrote the initial response, but only dimly! ... Went searching and hey -) : — StreetlightX

Do you think you could indulge a selfish request? How is a unity male and a multiplicity female? I can never get past my WTF barrier with Lacan.

You seem to be saying that the sensory data itself is an illusion. What does that even mean? Effects are not their causes. To imply that the mind is the world, and not an effect of the world, is the illusion - that category mistake I spoke about. — Harry Hindu

I don't know, you mentioned everything is information, not matter or mind- which causes dualism, or something like that. I thought you were saying that mind is an illusion, like the illusion of the bent straw, but maybe you weren't. My point with the illusion thing was that some people (maybe not you), like to say that mind is an "illusion", just like X illusion (a mirage perhaps), and thus, wipe their hands and think they are done. The ground of understanding anything in the first place though, would be this "illusion" that is the very thing to be explained. By the fact that it grounds everything else that we know, makes the idea that it is an illusion silly. Illusions happen within the general framework of cognition, the very thing that is first necessary to say it is an illusion. Illusion needs the general backdrop of cognition to understand that this particular phenomena is an illusion. What is the general backdrop of cognition but itself?

Now, more sophisticated versions of this "illusion" (non-answer) is the idea of information. Language bootstraps matter into a logic that has many feedback loops that become "experience" or "consciousness". There are so many holes in this, it doesn't hold water. Language may be a big part of the equation as to how cognition functions (if you are inclined to believe computationalist models of sorts), but how it bootstraps matter into awareness, is not explained without assuming the very thing it is explaining.

To be honest, I've tried to read into this and I still haven't found a satisfactory answer beyond 'because Freud was a Victorian'. I'm sure someone better versed in psychoanalysis could offer some kind of lovely sophisticated answer, but the only codicil I can really offer is that both the feminine and the masculine (and not, note, male and female) are - in Freud as for Lacan - responses to an original 'failure' of symbolization: both 'unity' and 'multiplicity' are (productive) failures: jury-rigged responses to something not working well to begin with.

The only avenues I've found that grant me some semblance of understanding, though it's probably very different to a true psychoanalytic exegesis, are through Beauvoir and, ashamedly, Jordan Peterson. Though I've not read much primary literature on either, which is a shame in the first case but a mercy in the second. So this is probably butchery.

So Beauvoir locates women as occupying the position of the other. In order to partake in the play of symbols that constitute discourse, a woman has to forsake that otherness and speak with their stolen tongue; within a symbolic system whose condition of intelligibility and usual function excludes sexual difference as something to be negotiated linguistically, as already incorporated, rather than perturbed through sexual difference from within; femininity is only ever a linguistic trope rather than a regime which organises intelligibility. In this sense, femininity is a void buttressed on all sides through elision; an annihilation, through exclusion, of sexual difference. That this difference remains unarticulated is constitutive of the role of the other, despite the nascent intelligibility it can obtain through phenomenological and literary analysis, as with Beauvoirs' writings. To think the feminine then requires bending your mind orthogonally to the usual social, normative and philosophical modes of variation; it requires opening a space in which femininity can dwell and thus express itself through the articulation of sexual difference. In essence, femininity is not metabolised through discourse, it is skimmed over through already articulated concepts. Though whether this otherness, being as it is an interpersonal category rather than a ontological one, can be equated or treated as exemplary with the indifference of multiplicities to intelligibility/synthesis rather than analogised to them makes me pause for thought. It looks like a greedy generalisation, filtering too much and saying too little of the domain of concepts Beauvoir was working in.

And Peterson, where to start in this philosophical/psychological pot-luck? Masculinity is order and logos, femininity is disorder and pathos. For Peterson, the feminine is necessary interruption in the masculine, a never sated problematic and the impetus behind every life project; the dragon of chaos is the snake beckoning from the tree is taste of the apple. These are the inverted mirror of masculinity as anima and animus, a never fully integrated limit point which completes the mind through its inclusion, which spurs order forwards through its incompletion. This conception of the feminine as an interruption connotes the event as a motivating force for change which is never fully articulated, and thus multiple.

I can kind of see where transposing these concepts into ontology might lead, but I'm hesitant to brand them as anything but errors (my errors) in context recognition.

I don't want to derail the thread, so I'll reply in PM.

Fair.

I don't know, you mentioned everything is information, not matter or mind- which causes dualism, or something like that. I thought you were saying that mind is an illusion, like the illusion of the bent straw, but maybe you weren't. — schopenhauer1

Exactly. You didn't really read what I wrote and went about making an argument against something that I never said. This is a very common occurrence on these forums.

My point with the illusion thing was that some people (maybe not you), like to say that mind is an "illusion", just like X illusion (a mirage perhaps), and thus, wipe their hands and think they are done. The ground of understanding anything in the first place though, would be this "illusion" that is the very thing to be explained. By the fact that it grounds everything else that we know, makes the idea that it is an illusion silly. Illusions happen within the general framework of cognition, the very thing that is first necessary to say it is an illusion. Illusion needs the general backdrop of cognition to understand that this particular phenomena is an illusion. What is the general backdrop of cognition but itself?

Now, more sophisticated versions of this "illusion" (non-answer) is the idea of information. Language bootstraps matter into a logic that has many feedback loops that become "experience" or "consciousness". There are so many holes in this, it doesn't hold water. Language may be a big part of the equation as to how cognition functions (if you are inclined to believe computationalist models of sorts), but how it bootstraps matter into awareness, is not explained without assuming the very thing it is explaining. — schopenhauer1

Well, what is an illusion? When we experience an "illusion" for the first time, we don't call it an "illusion". We believe that what we experience is real, or has a cause external to the mind. It doesn't occur to us that we are experiencing an "illusion".

When we know that it is an "illusion" and aren't fooled by it any longer, is it still an "illusion", or is it something for which we simply have a the correct rule for interpreting sensory data (this is bent light, not a bent straw)? It is no longer an "illusion" when we understand that we see light, not objects. Seeing bent straws is exactly what we're suppose to see.

I don't see how you can say, or question, how language "bootstraps" matter into awareness when you don't even know what matter is and how it differs from awareness, or mind for that matter. The only way you know of matter is through awareness. What I've been saying is that matter and mind aren't illusions, rather they are types of information.

What I've been saying is that matter and mind aren't illusions, rather they are types of information. — Harry Hindu

Then this obviously needs to be fleshed out in order for me to agree or critique it. The question at hand is what is mind. The hard part is the very awareness that mind provides is needed to investigate itself and anything else, thus making it different than analogies which live inside the awareness, if you will.

What I've been saying is that matter and mind aren't illusions, rather they are types of information. — Harry Hindu

I agree. And fundamentally, they are types of empirical data.

Are you able to identify "everything"? — Terrapin Station

I don't think so? I'm not sure what that would mean exactly though.