I don't think SX's fare is of little consequence per se, it's just highly hermetic and theory-/tradition-internal.

And while I can understand your desire to reject the criticism, the sentiment has little import from within the tradition, where you're least positioned to examine its validity.

Of course, we shouldn't expect specialized disciplines always to be accessible to everyone at all times. It's just a matter of how inward-looking you want your inquiry to be. I think there is a broad tension in your posts, SX, in that you object to people who deny the relevance of your highly specific tradition-internal approaches to problems to general concerns, but at the same time base a lot of your philosophical identity on a snobbery towards anyone not versed in that specific tradition. There is a lot of venom toward people who come at things from a different tradition (e.g. apokrisis) on grounds that they can't think broadly enough, but you evince that same unwillingness or inability.

And this results in your doing the same thing you despise. For example, I think your comment dismissing formal logic was embarrassing and parochial. Maybe you don't want to hear that, but that's how I read it, and I think you should study formal logic before dismissing it out of hand.

Know I'm replying late, but:

You are basically saying that my metaphysical model doesn't accord with your belief about the thing in itself - the thing in itself not being allowed to bootstrap ... because that then is in conflict with your own metaphysical logic.

I'm not saying that though. I feel like the thing-in-itself would have to bootstrap at some level. What I'm saying is that you keep measuring the ideas of others against your system, because they doen't satisfy criteria central to your system, but your system itself rests on a brute absolute, exempted from its own criteria. So, yes, you're always going to be right, because you've defined what right is, and defined yourself out of possibly being wrong. It's like you've taken a whole bunch of great insights and turned them into one big parlor trick (or, super-secure self-sealing knowledge edifice, if one wants to get psychoanalytic, which I usually do.)

(I'll add that that doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. It just means the criticisms you've been levying against street/deleuze don't boil down to anything but: I have a different view.)

I'm guessing that capitalisation makes some really big difference that is over my head. You are going all Platonic in response to my un-capitalised pragmatism?

You do understand that a process metaphysics is happy with the modesty of self-organising emergence. It doesn't believe in transcendent being?

Yes, I do understand that. What I'm saying is that what makes Ollie Ollie is not that the Necessary and the Accidental have produced this very being. Caps bc they're principles (or aren't they?). If everything's the necessary and the accidental, then to say ollie, this cat (hey this cat) is the intersection of the two, is to say nothing, at all, about ollie. You could be talking about a star or a cell or a neutron. That's self-evident. Isn't it?

So I like the calculus metaphor. I first encountered in about 8 years ago, and I can't say I totally understand it, but I think I get what it's driving at, and its been useful to me (my math isn't great, but I think, if I had the time, I could mount a passable post about how I understand it.) The problem I see with academic Deleuzeianism is that it has no telos, at all. There are some gestures toward its emancipatory potential, politically, but they're bullshit. It takes everything fun and actually useful about Deleuze and turns it into a complex system of shibboleths (immanence!) and taboos (transcendence! as in: "your post is nothing but old religious ideas, in a new register") you can use to identify outsiders.

I think there is a broad tension in your posts, SX, in that you object to people who deny the relevance of your highly specific tradition-internal approaches to problems to general concerns, but at the same time base a lot of your philosophical identity on a snobbery towards anyone not versed in that specific tradition. — The Great Whatever

I think actually that this is fair, with the caveat that I will always try, as far as space and time allow for, to explain what I mean when I invoke the authors and traditions I do, and explain the relevance of much of what I call in. If my posts tend to be sprawling and long, it's because I'm trying quite hard to make admittedly tough ideas digestible. On the other hand I do expect an equal hearing - even if to register incomprehension - and I will tend to treat bad reading with the scorn or indifference it deserves. Long story short, I'll tend - I hope - to meet like with like.

As for formal logic, I do regret not being more acquainted with it, if only because one ought to know one's enemy to all the better to engage it. But I really do think the subject-predicate form is inseparable from a kind of Aristotelian substance-accident metaphysics that it's almost incomprehensible to me that anyone takes it seriously other than as a kind of engineering tool. And what little I have read of the metaphysics that takes logic as it's base - Ted Sider, David Lewis - has always made me balk, if only because of what seems like it's breathtaking naivety in taking that form itself for granted. I've a strong interest in the paraconsistent guys and gals, but even then I think they're exploring the limits of the field "for" that field. But if you're not invested in it then...

So yeah, I find it hard to motivate myself to engage with this stuff, which just seems so - backward. Especially when the sciences seem to be a vastly richer resource for philosophical thinking (and there seems to be an almost inverse relationship between how well one is versed in formal logic and scientific ideas among many of those who use logic as the touchstone for their metaphysics - a relationship I'm guilty of playing into as well, on the other side).

As for formal logic, I do regret not being more acquainted with it, if only because one ought to know one's enemy to all the better to engage it. — StreetlightX

How can you know it's your enemy if you don't know it?

I'm not really a fan of Sider or Lewis as metaphysicians myself, but Lewis' contributions to logic with his logic of counterfactuals, counterpart theory, centered worlds, etc. are not only brilliant technical innovations, but provide tools for formalizing tricky concepts in fresh ways. It may be that I'm biased toward formalism because linguistics needs formalism to survive, far more than philosophy, but to dismiss the really interesting things these guys have done with their logics on grounds of some vaguely felt dissatisfaction with what you think (without really knowing) represents a fundamental metaphysical misconception is naive.

I mean, whether you like it or not, counterfactuals, for example, have a certain logic to them, in the way they license inferences, and in struggling with that Lewis is doing something concrete with interesting formal consequences that, for all their protests, continental philosophers are not doing. This is not to say he's the continental's superior, but just that it needs admission that your 'foe' has resources you don't, and to admit that in many ways he is more sophisticated than you. The reverse might also be true, but then I think the incumbency runs both ways.

I also think drawing indiscriminately from scientific sources has a danger of tourism to it, but maybe that's a separate issue.

And in case it wasn't clear from the above post, I think a lot of criticisms made of continentals by analytic philosophers, even leading ones, are appalling in their ignorance, and I realize that in many other ways continentals are more sophisticated than analytics: for example, the analytic tradition has never really 'gotten' the hermeneutic circle.

I am not demanding that anyone study any tradition in particular, and it's impossible to give equal time to them all. What I am demanding is that these traditions not be insulted in ignorance, and that given that one is interested in a certain narrow scope of philosophy, that others not be insulted for exercising the same prerogative and not reading Deleuze.

So, we are not necessarily living then? — John

I didn't say that. I said that we can claim to be living without knowing what "living" means. How does the assertion "I am living" produce the necessary conclusion "I know what it means to be living"? It is easy to put a name to an activity. It's not so easy to understand the activity. Naming an activity does not indicate that you understand it. So by what means will you describe how to best carry out the named activity, if you've only named it without understanding it?

I dunno, I think you're being a bit dramatic. I've never gone out of my way to comment on formalism without prompting, and my issues, where I do have them, are more methodological than technical: can it be taken for granted the the subject-predicate form is adequate to philosophical thought as a whole? I don't think it can, and this has no bearing on whatever technical magic that takes place 'within' the formalisms themselves, none of which I've said anything about either way.

As for Deleuze, as I said, I don't expect that people 'know their Deleuze' to engage with me, but if - like Apo - you're going to grab a quote (one employed in the OP because I thought it had pedagogical value) and say 'this is all wrong because it doesn't agree with my pre-fabricated POV', then you can expect some push-back on a technical level. Especially when it gets the technicals totally, absolutely wrong.

Surely you see the irony in dismissing someone for disregarding something that doesn't agree with a pre-fabricated POV, and then doing the same to formal logic? What does this amount to other than saying 'yes I'm ignorant, but I don't need to know, because I know enough, i.e. that it's wrong?' It sounds like someone refusing to read the Qu'ran because after all it's Satanic. There's a weird pride in ignorance seeping in here, almost as if knowing less justifies you all the more in a sweeping rejection.

But I didn't begin the discussion of formal logic to begin with - you did. I've tried to make the viewpoint I've adopted re: becoming and relations as clear as I can - do you think they can be formalized? Are there resources in the formalisms to accommodate those views? Given that the POV here is designed to work against any notion of subject-predicate coupling, do you think I am wrong to say that this approach cannot be formalized?

Oh so you are arguing that the bad guys are the Laplace guys and the good guys are people like Leibniz and Spinoza (to take a completely different 'singularity' insofar as metaphysical thought is situated). By the way, how would we talk about a singularity in language? Because it seems like language is very particular by nature.

I think it's wrong generally to disavow traditions you're ignorant of, which you did before I brought up the topic. I'm not saying you have to study it or even pay any attention to it if you have the feeling it won't be useful to you, but spontaneously discrediting it is dishonest. I was making the point in reference to the larger point about your goals and method of debate.

I think we must be prepared to completely dismiss all terms of logic and mathematics — SX

the entire edifice of formal logic is more or less inadequate to the task — SX

(And how 'dramatic' is this language!) These are things, I claim, that you don't know and can't pronounce on. And then the larger point was about the hermeticism and dismissal you are criticizing others of, and my attempt to show you that this was common in your own posts.

Woah cowboy, that first quote isn't mine (is it?); and yeah, the second quote is quite specific that it isn't adequate to this task, i.e. the one set out in the OP. And Apo isn't exactly some innocent wide eyed lamb whom I've been eviscerating; he's an arrogant nong whose basically trailed me around every other post I've made in this forum to register some antagonism or another. So I'm not exactly predisposed to show him any love.

Oh so you are arguing that the bad guys are the Laplace guys and the good guys are people like Leibniz and Spinoza (to take a completely different 'singularity' insofar as metaphysical thought is situated). — discoii

I guess?

By the way, how would we talk about a singularity in language? Because it seems like language is very particular by nature. — discoii

I'm not sure what you mean by the question.

Woah cowboy, that first quote isn't mine (is it?) — StreetlightX

Yeah, my bad, I misread.

And Apo isn't exactly some innocent wide eyed lamb whom I've been eviscerating; he's an arrogant nong whose basically trailed me around every other post I've made in this forum to register some antagonism or another. So I'm not exactly predisposed to show him any love. — StreetlightX

Fine, but I'm just pointing out he's your mirror image. The issues in the OP don't really matter to me, I just thought the debate about the debating style was interesting.

Well, I mean, the way you described it, it seems like the singularity is essentially of 'non-quantifiable' quantity, because if you quantify anything, it becomes immediately converted to a particular. Yet we still can refer to singularities, like Thatcherism or Caesarism. How is that paradox resolved? Or is there no paradox there and I'm misunderstanding something?

Fine, but I'm just pointing out he's your mirror image — The Great Whatever

I don't think that's fair. My main complaint is that he's erasing the specificity of my position by translating it into terms - his terms - that aren't adequate to it, and then critiquing that improper reconstruction of it; and further, that he's so caught up in those terms, that he can see neither that nor why it's inadequate. If I'm doing the same to him, then I'd welcome some correction.

Well, I mean, the way you described it, it seems like the singularity is essentially of 'non-quantifiable' quantity, because if you quantify anything, it becomes immediately converted to a particular. Yet we still can refer to singularities, like Thatcherism or Caesarism — discoii

Well, proper names kinda just are ways of referring to singular entities. So I think there are resources in language to deal with this.

Indeed the reason you can only think in terms of mutually-constraining limits is precisely because you are unable to countenance exactly this reality of the virtual.

Which is just another way of saying that you are unable to properly consider the process of individuation because you can only ever look at it from the perspective of the already-individuated. And from that POV, all you will ever see is limits and a process of othering.

As usual, you are trying to shoehorn my Peircean approach into some more familiar (to you) metaphysics to which you have a prefab template answer.

If everything begins in vagueness, that is hardly beginning with the already-individuated, Perhaps you are confused because the argument to define vagueness (firstness, apeiron, the indeterminate) is apophatic.

We do have to start with the highly differentiated and highly organised world in which we find ourselves in. Whatever was the "source" of this developed state of being, we at least know what it has to be able to produce. So if differentiation and integration, or material difference and formal organisation, are what are produced, the image of the vague is formed apophatically as that which must "contain" both as its prime possibility.
— StreetlightX

As Deleuze puts it, "Negation is difference, but difference seen from its underside, seen from below. Seen the right way up, from top to bottom, difference is affirmation." In other words, if we reverse the picture and look upon individuation from the perspective of individuation, what you see instead are differential relations - coupled rates of change - and distributions of singularities which define thresholds of mutation. — StreetlightX

OK. So Deleuze's key party trick is to invert Plato - replace identity as sameness with identity as difference. How trivial.

My constraints-based approach instead makes the generating seed of Being a story of integration and differentiation. And how this is achieved - unlike Plato's "participation" or Deluze's hand-waving - is explained in transparent fashion. But you might have to read some books on hierarchy theory to get it.

Of course hierarchy theory does explicitly model individuation in terms of a cascade of phase transitions. Which is kinda what you are saying. But a phase transition or symmetry breaking involves both differentiation and integration.

It begins because a difference makes a difference. Water turns to ice because the balance between thermal dissociation and atomic bond forces pass the singularity of a critical point. But then the freezing stops once a new state of global integration has been achieved. The broken symmetry runs its course until ... a new state of symmetry terminates the change. Keep cooling ice and it doesn't get more crystalline. The atomic bonds have arrived at a state of constraint where the remaining differences of molecular orientation no longer make a difference. The ice state has lowered the general entropy to the degree that it is equipped to "care".

So my Peircean approach is different because it doesn't rely on Plato's pure sameness, or Deleuze's pure difference. Instead it argues for the irreducible complexity of the dynamic duo of constraining sameness (to the degree the sameness matters) coupled to the freely different (to the degree it doesn't matter).

And if you could only realise it, this is how to arrive at a Husserlian notion of thick time. The past becomes the current constraint on future free action. History, having happened, locks in all the accidents of the past and so place crisp limits on what can happen next. But the future is then free to disposed of those degrees of freedom as it wishes. The present is then the "epistemic cut" that relates the two. It defines when the past has stopped - as an event horizon on "prior" interaction - and so when the "to be created" future begins its process of becoming.

One can think of an economic system this way: flows of labour and capital, rates of birth and death, employment and wage (all of which reciprocally determine each other as coupled rates of change), together with thresholds of mutation (environmental carrying capacity, minimum survival income, etc): these are the parameters out of which 'economic individuals' are crystallized from - companies, trade agreements, tax rates, etc. The 'virtuals' here are not 'possibilities' which are then culled by a process of mutual limitation to give rise to actualities: the virtualities are fully real and they engender creativity at the level of the actual. Given these rates of change, given these singularities which define thresholds of tolerance, in what way should 'economic individuals' go about achieving whatever it is they do - in what manner do they become the individuals that they are ? — StreetlightX

But this is what my approach says. The individual is shaped by general dichotomies or coupled relations. These are the constraining boundary conditions on individual possibility.

The difference again is you then want to shoehorn the complexity of a dynamical hierarchical system into your prefab monisms.

To avoid talking about generalities that are Platonic ideas, Deleuze talks about them as virtual differences. But generality makes no sense except as complementary limits on being. And so - as you just did - generalities are identified using dialectical reasoning.

Then what is missing is the further category that is complementary to the general - vagueness. Which is where the power of the virtual to "be" pure difference (in the symmetry breaking form of differentiation~integration) would have to develop out of.

So virtuality fails on two scores from what I can understand of your definition. Its reality is already crisply developed in your telling. And it is pure difference (of some hand-waving brute kind) rather than the dynamical relation of differentiation~integration (with its bootstrapping logic).

Not 'symmetry-breaking' but problem-solving is the model for the process of individuation: — StreetlightX

That's fine for talking about complex being - especially life and mind which indeed is negentropically problem solving.

But if we are talking at the simplest possible level of physical existence, then as I described, symmetry-breaking is a self-limiting process (otherwise existence would disappear gurgling down its own fundament). Symmetry-breaking ends with the arrival of some new state of symmetry - some persistent equilibrium state where all further fluctuations are a matter of general indifference.

Evens: "The function thus takes shape gradually, progressively, as the singular points shift and glide relative to each other, tense and relax to alter their configuration. — StreetlightX

Yep. I noted Evens very shaky grasp of physics. His descriptions of chaotic atttactors is especially off-track.

But the least action principle is fundamental to the ontology of physics. If you want to call that "problem-solving", I bet you think that your brain does maths to work out how to catch a ball.

Individuation as symmetry-breaking in comparison is an incredibly basic and rather naive approach to the whole issue. — StreetlightX

I think you blew your credibility by quoting Evens describing conformational change as:

one would never suspect the whole network of differential calculations that take place in this instant.

If everything's the necessary and the accidental, then to say ollie, this cat (hey this cat) is the intersection of the two, is to say nothing, at all, about ollie. You could be talking about a star or a cell or a neutron. That's self-evident. Isn't it? — csalisbury

I think you've stop trying.

Talk of similarity and difference could be extended to the level of the genus "Cosmos". But here we are talking just of the already highly constrained genus of "Feline".

It can thus be taken for granted that "my dead cat Ollie" is not a gas cloud undergoing explosive fusion, or something you would need a microscope or particle accelerator to interrogate.

And Apo isn't exactly some innocent wide eyed lamb whom I've been eviscerating; — StreetlightX

Biggest laugh of the day. But whatever keeps your spirits up sunshine. :)

We know we are living, otherwise we would not be able to say we are living, right? And it would make no sense to speak about living well, if we didn't know we are living. So what kind of additional thing do you think we would need to know about what it means to live, in order to enquire into what it means to live well? Can you give some examples of the kind of thing you have in mind?

As for Deleuze, as I said, I don't expect that people 'know their Deleuze' to engage with me... — StreetlightX

Perhaps I'm not a Deleuzean specialist, but I can recognize a potential contradiction when I see it.

The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual [it is] real without being actual — StreetlightX

This appears contradictory, because as I understand "real", to be real is to be actual. Of course we can redefine 'real" so that it is not necessary to be actual in order to be real. But what's the point? We are talking about "becoming" here, which is clearly an activity. If we describe "becomings" as relations, and now we introduce a real relation which is not actual, this new relation is not a "becoming". So we admit that "becoming" is not the broader term than "relation", relations which are not becomings may be prior to relations which are becomings, and we have defeated the primacy of becoming.

Deleuze has produced the very same deficiency (from a different angle) which Apokrisis insists on. Apokrisis claims that time is emergent. But emerging is an activity which necessarily requires time. So we are faced with the contradictory position, that emerging is occurring when there is no time for its emergence. In other words, we have becoming, an activity, which is without time. That is because time has become a spatial dimension in apo's relativistic principles. Apo wants time to emerge from space-time.

This is the problem with Pythagorean Idealism which was exposed by Plato. Spatial relations are understood by geometrical constructions, which are understood by mathematical relations. Spatial relations are conceived of as changing in time, mathematical relations are not allowed (conceptually) to change in time. This supports the unchanging, "eternal" Ideas of idealism. The flaw in this position, as demonstrated by Plato, is within the very nature of ideas. If Ideas are eternal, they are inherently passive, as that which is partaken of. If they are not eternal, then they are actively developed by human minds, and are instances of becoming. This constitutes the prelude to Aristotle's cosmological argument, where he argues that anything eternal must be actual, effectively denying the possibility of eternal ideas. We should consider the cosmological argument, in its original form, as the argument which gives primacy to becoming, by giving primacy to actuality. Becoming, as an activity (therefore actual) may now be conceived of as prior to all mathematical relations which are conceived of as passive and unchanging.

The human approach to ontological reality has been to analyze spatial relations, deriving mathematical and geometrical relations. Then the human beings attempted to establish compatibility between these relations and time, mathematical relations forming an eternal backdrop, to represent an absolutely consistent "time", upon which geometrical changes are mapped. Because the mathematical relations are those which render the changes in spatial relations intelligible, the human being has given priority to the mathematical relations, rather than the 'time", which the mathematical order represents. But this is to neglect the true back drop which is the temporal order of becoming. Now human beings should see themselves as faced with the task of associating mathematical relations directly to time, with respect for the most simple property of becoming, "order", to determine how spatial relations emerge from the backdrop of temporal order.

We know we are living, otherwise we would not be able to say we are living, right? — John

No, we can say whatever we like, without actually knowing what we are saying. And if we can convince others to accept what we are saying, then what has been said is justified. But the fact that what has been said has been justified does not mean that what has been said is known.

So what kind of additional thing do you think we would need to know about what it means to live, in order to enquire into what it means to live well? Can you give some examples of the kind of thing you have in mind? — John

You can make an example out of any activity. Suppose you want to describe what it means to behave well, don't you need to define what it means to behave first? How about eating? Suppose you want to say what it means to eat well, don't you need to make some specification as to what "eating" is first?

But emerging is an activity which necessarily requires time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or instead, emergence IS time, time being what we call a sequence of change or development.

Apo wants time to emerge from space-time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I would want a model of thermal or thick time that is consistent with the theory of relativity. And spacetime really is a thing in physics, despite your horror of all metaphysics that is post Newtonian.

Or instead, emergence IS time, time being what we call a sequence of change or development. — apokrisis

But time is not "a sequence of change or development", it is a means by which we measure such. The abstraction is not the same as the thing it is abstracted from. A metre is not the same as a thing which is a metre long. If our only means for measuring change and development is change and development itself, then we are trapped within the vagueness of self-reference.

Well I would want a model of thermal or thick time that is consistent with the theory of relativity. And space-time really is a thing in physics, despite your horror of all metaphysics that is post Newtonian. — apokrisis

If you could show me a way past the contradictions I've indicated, then perhaps I wouldn't be so adamant that the description of the relationship between space and time produced by special relativity is fundamentally flawed. But it isn't the fact that this relationship is fundamentally flawed, which is horrifying, as it is a very useful relation in many applications. It is the fact that the vast masses of humanity accept this relation as ontologically sound, without referencing ontologically sound principles, which horrifies me.

Plato was a dualist. Deleuze wanted to collapse his dialectical distinctions to be a univocal monist. Peirce was a triadicist who argued instead for an irreducibly complex or hierarchical relation as the basis of being.

So for Peirce, actuality is a process, an eternal coming-to-be. It can be talked about as being monistically "one relation". And it also "starts" with a monism in the grounding notion of Firstness, or Vagueness. But through a principle of incompossibilty - not everything that might want to be, can be, because it clashes and contradicts in a way that suppresses its actualisation - it describes how regulation or constraint emerges to organise a world bound by habits.

So similarity or generality emerges to organise difference itself. Vagueness is not nothingness, but chaotic everythingness - unbounded fluctuation without structure. In Deleuzean fashion (it seems), vagueness is multiplicity - but more than multiplicity as it includes even the actions that coming-to-be must suppress (through incompossibility).

Vagueness is thus an ultimate kind of difference - the difference of an infinity of disconnected impulses that sum to nothing.

And then from that chaos you have developing the regularity of actuality. The raw energy falls into dissipative patterns as the wildness of possibility falls away and the sum over possibility - the least action path - emerges. Difference changes character so that now it is regulated and well behaved - repetitive in the way that properties and attributes are the developed habits of concrete beings. Development ends up producing a classical world of atomistic material objects at play within a blank void - the spacetime backdrop that is all those other now well-suppressed fluctuations or opportunities for action.

So that is the triad. Vagueness is every possible difference (and thus a state of utter indifference and lack of constraint). But as soon as differences start to react against each other (the Secondness that follows Firstness), you get a collective or emergent effect. Some differences cancel each other away, other differences reinforce each other by feedback. (This is all standard non-linear physics or chaos theory.) And so in short time you have the beginnings of self-organising global regularity or generality.

As with the water draining out of your bath, a vortex begins as a slight suggestion of a symmetry breaking. In the beginning, the twist could be to the left of the right. Both are going to be happening - it doesn't make any difference which way the symmetry breaks. But the breaking of the symmetry - spin left or spin right - then makes a big actual difference. It quickly locks itself in, completely suppressing its "other" as an accidental fact of history.

In Peircean terms, the world (or the draining bathwater) is now ruled by the Thirdness of persistent habit. But Thirdness itself is a monism in that it incorporates Secondness and Firstness. We are talking about the wholeness of a relation. So just because there is one symmetry breaking that gets things started doesn't mean that the new state (this singularity, as SX terms it after the notion of a phase transition) can't break again.

Vague potential will still remain within the system. Reaction could set in. A higher level of organisation could break out that regularises this grounding action, gives it shape, turns it into a repetitively generated action that constructs a more complex state of habit or law.

Biophysics shows how life and mind arise as that kind of further semiosis. The "vortexes" of chemico-physical gradients can be harnessed and turned into the complex hierarchies that are bodies with cells and organs.

Anyway, it is foolish to talk of doing away with similarity to found metaphysics on "pure difference". Instead we must recover difference from difference by way of similarity. Vague difference (that is of course not even a difference, being a differencing lacking any relations) must be turned into crisp difference by a general relation (a habit of constraint, a principle of least action) that sorts difference into its various forms of dichotomous actuality. So for instance, we can speak with definiteness of differences that are purposeful versus those that are accidental.

So Deleuze gets some things right. If we are going to make something fundamental, it has got to be process, change or development. Plato needs to be inverted to make sense.

But then just to invert is only half the story. It is the invertibility of all things that is the foundational relation. So really, Being is still founded on stasis. It is just that it is equally founded in flux. While your metaphysics has to explicitly include an axis of development (as in the vague~crisp), it also has to have within itself a matching axis of "equilibrium balance" (as in the stable local~global, or part~whole, hierarchical structure that Thirdness describes).

So Deleuze makes the mistake of simply "othering" to arrive at a reductionist monism. And the error can be seen in that he ends up - like Plato - lacking the resources to account for how differencing actually happens. Plato could only say rather weakly that matter ends up "participating" in the ideal forms to achieve an imperfect repetition of similarity. Deleuze - as channeled by SX - is burbling something about virtuality as the (Platonic sounding) multiplicity which generates difference as its eternally different actuality.

The Peircean view places differencing - or dichotomisation, or the secondness of reaction - in the middle of a hierarchical sandwich. It is the individuated or particularised actuality that arises from vagueness - possibility in its rawest sense - in interaction with generality or habit, the emergent order which provides the other "eternal" thing of a system of constraints or "transcendent" necessitation.

But time is not "a sequence of change or development", it is a means by which we measure such. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well we can count the changes, can't we? Or is "sequence" a notion alien to you?

And the reason we can count changes is because they are locked into as history. When changes stops (when it is equilibrated and looks to change no more) then we can count the change as "being over" and "part of history, not part of the future".

A metre is not the same as a thing which is a metre long. — Metaphysician Undercover

Merde! The French bureau of standards have a problem with that strip of metal they've got locked up in temperature controlled vault then.

It is the fact that the vast masses of humanity accept this relation as ontologically sound, without referencing ontologically sound principles, which horrifies me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. MU right. Humanity wrong. Sounds legit.

But you don't seem to get that spacetime relativity is God's way of preventing everything happening all at once. It creates the separation between events that is ontically essential for there to be anything interesting in the form of a "world". If forces acted instantaneously and without dilution across any span of time and distance, where would we all be, hey?

So if you want to talk about sound principles, begin with the fact that physical action needs to have an interesting structure. Things must divide and connect, differentiate and integrate. There must be separation, but only relatively speaking.

I don't think SX's fare is of little consequence per se, it's just highly hermetic and theory-/tradition-internal. — The Great Whatever

Right, I agree and I would not say it is of little consequence per se, I just can't, for the life of me. see its broader philosophical significance. I allow that it may be I cannot see the latter due to my lack of familiarity with the arcane subject matter, but I think it is more likely the problem with such material is that it cannot be expressed in sufficiently simple terms such that it can be understood by the intelligent lay person.

Understanding in this context always seems to be reliant on complex, hard to penetrate webs of academic reference, and I am not willing to spend the time to acquire the requisite familiarity, because I fear the intellectual effort would not be sufficiently repaid. Having said this SX probably just wishes to engage those who are familiar enough with the material to understand his points, so I can see where my opinion would be quite irrelevant to him. I probably should not have weighed in on it in the first place.