The concept of universal has the idea of particular built in to it. And vice versa. That's the middle ground I think.

All of these choices of words are psychological terms. A "difference that makes a difference" suggests a difference that matters, a significant difference... by what standard does a difference become a significant difference? Why does this difference matter but not any other? The only non-psychological approach to this I can see is to suggest that "making a difference" means literally, quantifiable more of a difference than something else -- but then what could indifference be in this context other than no difference at all.

Not trying to be confrontational, I just don't get it.

They do indeed, but I think that a proper explanation outlines how they interact and form one and others, like the length and width of a rectangle forming its area. Whether one is properly basic and the other derivative, or both are fundamental or whatever.

By what standard does a difference become a significant difference? — Wosret

Clearly the standard of significant difference here is affective capacity: something's capacity to affect and be affected. The flea is affected by light, heat and texture: anything outside of this it is indifferent to. These are the differences that make a difference for it. Below certain velocities, wind will not exert an affect upon a rock. The rock is indifferent to wind (below a threshold of velocity, all things equal). The only reason to drag intentionality into this is because you're projecting ingrained semantic associations onto these words. But there's no reason to.

Just sounds like perspectivism. Universals would have to be immanent, maybe something like exemplars, and similarity reduced to a historical track of particular effects, and signification.

I dunno... it's basically just physics as metaphysics.

I don't at all follow. You just seemed to have slapped on a bunch of labels using a vocabulary nowhere entailed by the previous discussion. Exactly what difference they make, you seem to have left entirely unspoken.

You don't have much of a bastion between quotes and rhetoric do you?

I'm just playing with some thoughts here:

I have near me a plastic bottle filled with isopropyl alcohol, and a cardboard box filled with paper security envelopes. The contents of each container are in a different phase to one another -- solid and liquid, respectively -- and the cardboard is more porous than the plastic container is. (though, to touch, it has a similar feeling because box has been printed on, and the process makes the outside of the cardboard somehow feel smooth and wax-ish like plastic)

Two measures -- third "things" -- which relate them are both length and volume. Mathematically these are related, of course, but there's certainly a distinction to be had between those ways of relation. The bottle of isopropyl alcohol is 1.66 cigarette packs tall, while the envelope box is 1.2 cigarette packs tall -- and we may ask for some fourth thing to clarify the cigarette pack, such as a ruler, but 'cigarette pack' is good enough for our purposes. Continuing this process it turns out the envolope box is about 1.2 cig-packs cubed, and the bottle is about 1.06 cig-packs cubed. But the appearance and function of the bottle suggests that it is more voluminous than the envelope box. It doesn't fit within my desk drawer as easily as the envelope box does. It also carries liquid, which suggests volume, where envelopes -- while technically having a volume -- certainly do not suggest volume.

Length is a basis of comparison, and volume is calcuable (in limited circumstances) from lengths, but the comparison of length and volume are different between the two objects. What is similar, however, is that 'length' and 'volume' -- both conceptual notions -- are serving as a way to compare two distinct entities. We can further specify these conceptual notions (perhaps you thought that my usage of cig-boxes just wasn't up to the task), but the idea of a "ruler", a third entity functioning as a point of comparison, is only brought in to this process of comparison because we already have a notion of length, and realize that though 'length' is no entity unto itself, it is a notion which allows us to compare entities.


composition -- 'paper', 'plastic' -- and function -- in these two examples, containment -- seem to me to be bases of comparison between entities as well.

I don't know if I'd want to ascribe all that to language use, per se. That seems a bit speculative -- though I could see the ability to pick out entities, naming them (more or less), being ascribed to language use.

We can of course consciously, deliberately construct categories, but we'll just be trying to formalize our intuition, rather than actually describing a literal ubiquitous feature. — Wosret

I think this is a different sort of question from your opening post though, no? Whether we are actually describing a literal ubiquitous feature is different from how we relate, thereby finding sameness, in entities which are different, no?

To properly explain hemispheres, do we need to say whether northern or southern is primary? Because it's obviously the northern.

Thing is though, that a comparison for difference and similarity has to be crisp in my view. Can't be simply a heuristic, as if the thing in question itself were both simultaneously the same and different. Something is similar because it has points of sameness, and points of difference. The different things are different, and the same things are the same.

Otherwise we have like Humean "bleen" scenarios. Say that "blue" and "green" are not self-identical, but merely self-similar. If the "similarity" between them is always vague, moving, and relational, then five hundred years ago all of the colours everyone else saw could have been entirely different, and nothing at all similar to how they are today.

Hemispheres are not really distinquishable besides through their specific features, and orientations. I mean, the polarity could shift, and the south pole could become the north pole and vice versa.

Magnetically speaking, they could switch, but magnetic positive is pretty crispy.

And yet what does "south" ultimately mean? Aren't the other directions part of it's meaning?

Yeah, it's all part of its meaning. They definitely form each other's meaning relationally, but the relation itself is abstract, and applicable to many things with zero physical, or structural similarities themselves. Is then, up down left and right just shit we made up?

Kant interests me a lot lately. If categories are synthetic a priori, then this implies that all contents can be correlated. The understanding can be completed. See, the way we really arrive at understanding is through reduction to general principles through summary. We summarize information, and then summarize the summary, until we finally arrive at the general principle, whether intuitively or explicitly. It's what we all are always doing, all the time.

Thing is, that Kant was a godbotherer, so he may have assumed that when we've maxed our understanding, correlated all of our contents, then there is nothing left, and we've got to all da secrets now! But, if we're just evolved creatures, then completing our understanding, may not be all that impressive. It also implies that an alien species could be entirely incomprehensible to us. I do prefer the idea that what forms the categories of the understanding are real general features of the world, which are not "for us" specifically.

Thing is though, that a comparison for difference and similarity has to be crisp in my view. — Wosret

I will say that 'bleen' isn't something that I believe needs to be ruled out. I don't believe that this is bleen, or that grue, but "500 years ago all the colours everyone else saw could have been entirely different" is true. Emphasis on "could", of course -- and without specifying to what degree this is plausible, but they could have been.

I'm just noting this to say this is clearly a difference in attitude between us, rather than to say that this is the correct way of looking at things.


But I would ask -- what is a crisp comparison, and how is it different from a vague comparison or a heuristic?

(there's some self-referential problems occuring in this, but I don't think that line of thinking is interesting at first. It's just worth noting that in asking for a comparison between difference and similiarity it sounds an awful like asking for the difference between the two)

Oh, I don't know what's what. I'm just saying ideas and positions I like more, or find more satisfying. Definitely not claiming to know what I'm talking about her. I'm just thinking out loud.

"Crisp" is "yup, definitely that", and "vagueness" or a "heuristic" is "ya.. kinda... close enough".

It's unsatisfactory to say that there isn't a real standard that shoots through all things of a kind, through time and space. Otherwise we may be talking about an entirely different world now than we were then... like literally. If the standard is floating and relational, then nothing keeps it tethered at all, and things could be entirely unrecognizable throughout space and time.

Also, it would call into question the idea of innate categories or dispositions, as there'd be no guarantee that they'd be at all applicable, or helpful through time.

All of this leads to unpalatable places, in my view.

Oh, I don't know what's what. I'm just saying ideas and positions I like more, or find more satisfying. Definitely not claiming to know what I'm talking about her. I'm just thinking out loud. — Wosret

Heh, me either. I'm more asking after your thoughts here than some kind of definition. Your clarification, while vague, is actually helpful. :)

All of this leads to unpalatable places, in my view. — Wosret

That might just be the difference, then. I frequently find myself thinking that people in different times and places live in different worlds. That isn't to say we can't find points of comparison, or become immersed in their world, but to me this is not unpalatable as much as what seems to be the case.

Prior to contact and an attempt to build a bridge -- make a "ruler" of sorts -- we do live in different worlds. We might then say that there must be some underlying sameness that allows us to build such bridges -- the "points of comparison" -- as long as we are able to create standards, like length, I think that we can make sense out of comparing incommensurables.

Length is particularly enlightening, from my perspective, because it falls into this quasi-real category. Length is not an entity, but an abstraction of entities, and yet the length of this or that doesn't change by merely changing the way we measure length.

I think I'm beginning to stray off topic so I'll just leave it at that until I can think of something more topical to say. :D

I feel like we could never truly understand each other if that were the case, and I find that too tragic...

Similarity and difference are a metaphysical dichotomy. So each is defined in terms of being not the other. Or rather, in practice as the breaking of a symmetry, the least like each other as possible by each being as far apart as possible as states of being or categories.

In being two poles being differentiated, then brings in the further thing which is the vagueness or firstness that they divide. They are both crisply actual - as limits - of what was the purely possible.

This furthere "in reference to" also manifests (confusingly) in the crisply divided outcome. The world that emerges between two opposed limits (here the similar and the different) is iteself everywhere some mixture or equilibrium balance of the two categories. So the world itself does sit in the middle - with this concrete mixture of states being found to be the same blend over all observable scales.

So that is the basic set up - for all metaphysical dichotomies. They speak to the firstness that is their common vague origin (the symmetry that got broke) as well as the thirdness which is their own completely mixed state of being - the further thing of having become broken in the limit and arriving at an equilibrium balance.

Of course it may sound crazy to talk of similarity and difference as being themselves united and divided. Or instead, that they are united in initial vagueness, then concretely divided by a logical symmetry breaking, and then reunited by the emergent symmetry of being as mixed together as they can possibly be, is the feature here. The developmental trajectory involved of firstness, secondness and thirdness describes itself in terms of itself.

Anyway, it means that for there to be a world, similarity and difference must be a division concretely respected over all scales of differentiation (and hence integration).

Now we can get down to the detail of the mechanism.

SX makes the standard semiotic point that to be an actual difference, a difference has to make a difference. So difference itself is divided into the meaningful vs the meaningless, the signal vs the noise, the teleological vs the contingent. Thus now we do bring in the active or causal nature of being.

The alternative view is that existence is a passive brute fact. It has no reasons. Difference or similarity has no meaning. It is all just arbitrary labels for a world that has no developmental story and thus no reasons for its apparently definite state of organisation.

But here I have described a developmental or process metaphysics where existence is an emergent equilibrium state where change keeps changing, but by the end further change can make no difference. It is like a new pack of cards. Once the deck is well shuffled, continued shuffling makes no effective difference. It does make a difference to the exact order, but now such differences are a matter of indifference. When the deck is as random as possible, it can't be made more random.

So yes, this all seems now a rather mindful or psychological kind of metaphysics. Similarity and difference are relative judgements that are about differences that make a difference (in breaking the symmetry of a state of similarity which is another word now for a state of indifference).

But again, that bug is really a feature. It brings minds or observers firmly within the metaphysics of actual being. It unites epistemology and ontology in making meanings and thus purposes part of the world.

The final twist to bring an organic or pansemiotic metaphysics into focus is then understanding the triadic relation in causal terms as the hierarchical contrast between constraints and freedoms. One is top down causality, the other acts in causally bottom up fashion.

So similarity is enforced on natural possibility by general constraints. Worlds as states form constraining contexts. They limit free possibility in particular ways. And all objects or events thus limited are the same in that fashion. They all participate in that particular form.

But then difference stil exists. That is what freedom means. Spontaneous and unconstrained in some regard. So accidents and contingency are also fundamental in this organic picture of nature. They too exist over all scales of being. (The statistics of fractals or power laws being the signature of actual natural systems for this reason.)

So now we have that triadic set up. There are general constraints. And there are particular freedoms. Then there is the rule of indifference in operation that marks the emergent boundary where now further differences fail to make a difference to the general state of things - which, dichotomously, also then defines the differences that do make a difference.

So if enforcing similarity is the telos of a constraint, then that also means that eventually the world becomes equilibrated - like a well shuffled deck - and so apparently only composed of a whole bunch of accidents. The differences that don't make a difference become the apparent ground of being because they are what get left once the development of a world has arrived at the dichotomous satisfaction of it's own symmetry breaking desires.

Contingency rules when organisation has had its say. Existence is a bunch of indifference (a heat death) in the end.

But the story of how it gets to that fate is the bit that is metaphysically interesting.

Thanks a lot for the post, gonna have to give it more thought.

Great. The essential thing is not to be scared of complexity.

Metaphysical analysis always arrives at dichotomous contrasts. Logical intelligibility itself demands a world divided into what is vs what is not. The problem is that this has to work for both sides of the equation. So the "what is not" has to be still something else itself - whatever it is that can make the "what is" what it is.

So analysis sounds like it demands the resolution of a monadic outcome - the arrival at the fundamental via the rejection of all that is superficial, or contingent, or emergent, etc. Yet the fact is the dichotomy - the dyadic relation - is irreducible. You can't have any notion of the "what is" in the absence of the complementary notion of it being precisely "that which is not what it is not".

So there is a doubled or recursive negation at work. Monadicity can only arrive at itself via the denial of its own denying. The essentially self defeating nature of monadic metaphysics is thus revealed. It others othering and thus falls into inconsistency even with itself.

Thus the dichotomy forms the irreducible basis of intelligible existence. It both finds the natural divisions of being, and relates them as each other's other. Each is the others limit.

Having established that, we also establish that we are thinking in active and developmental terms, not passive and brutely existence ones. Existence is revealed as having a necessary history - as divisions must both arise and terminate. Which is where you get the thirdness or triadicity that is the ultimately irreducible metaphysical state. So yes, what is fundamental is not twoness, let alone oneness, but threeness. Three is the number of actual complexity.

A further point is that to cash all this out in terms of some actual world requires a global state of asymmetry - or scale symmetry. That is, if reality is constructed by a symmetry breaking of pure possibility, then this breaking must happen freely and completely across all available scales of being.

In terms of cosmological theory, the results must be homogenous and isotopic - invariant with the scale of observation. That is why fractal maths are found everywhere where nature is at its most simplest. Zoom in or zoom out, the fractal world looks always exactly the same. And that is because the dichotomy or distinction being expressed is being expressed fully over all possible scales. It is the same damn thing - the same damn seed asymmetry - absolutely everywhere.

The Koch triangle shows this in its fractal generator, which is the simple asymmetry of natural log2/ natural log3 (or fractal dimension of .63).

To unpack this, the Koch triangle fractal is a line divided into three and then the middle segment sprouting the two sides of a further triangular bump. So a line buckles in the simplest imaginable fashion. That gives you the seed ratio - the 3/2. And then the natural log simply forces the growth of that act of buckling over every possible scale. You thus have two exponential actions in a constantly specified balance. The result is a mathematical model of perfectly complete asymmetry - or rather, the emergence of a new axis of scale symmetry, a fractal dimension that stands in the middle of two bounding extremes of action (between the flatness of the line that gets radically broken, and then the curvature of the buckling that is a departure from the now radical thing which is to be instead flat and "a line all the same with itself").

So it may seem a bit of excursion to talk about the maths of fractals. On the other hand, it is a fact that the new maths of complexity (fractals, scalefree networks, universality, criticality, etc) gives a picture of reality that is precisely the kind of irreducibly triadic metaphysics I just described.

So don't expect monadic metaphysics to be right. Expect the dichotomies or symmetry breakings that point to the broken symmetries or equilibrated outcomes that are then in turn their natural "scale symmetry" limits (or, the same thing, their states of asymmetric or hierarchical final order).

Ie: The maths of complexity has vindicated this irreducibly triadic vision of nature during the past 40 years.

Yeah, it's all part of its meaning. They definitely form each other's meaning relationally, but the relation itself is abstract, and applicable to many things with zero physical, or structural similarities themselves. Is then, up down left and right just shit we made up? — Wosret

The same situation is there with me and not-me. Us and not-us. Shit and not-shit.

I've still going to have to think about what you've said more, do a little reading on the subject before I get back to you. Probably tomorrow, I've been up for too long to try to read complex stuff right now.

Well, right, left, up down are all positive things. "not-me", "not-us" and "not-shit" are not, and could really conceivably be anything at all except for me, us, and shit..

Imagine that everything in the universe is green. Would we have the word "green?"

Positivity doesn't exist unless it's in the company of negativity. So if we're just dealing with 2 dimensions, left and right are negatives of one another. It's more complicated if we add that third dimension.

Opposites are different than negatives though. Like the opposite of up is down, but the negation of "up" is just "not up" but could be any arbitrary direction besides up.

Would the smell of peanuts, the taste of coffee, and the feeling of freshly laundered cloths all be green too? Is justice green?

I've still going to have to think about what you've said more, do a little reading on the subject before I get back to you. — Wosret

No problem. I understand it is a dense issue. But as SX indicates, we can deal with actual similarity and difference in the world with an apparent intuitive ease that belies the underlying metaphysical complexity.

And that complexity is what gets revealed as soon as we instead start to ask how a difference comes to make a difference. That question is like finding the loose end of a woolly jumper and beginning to pull.

Well, right, left, up down are all positive things. "not-me", "not-us" and "not-shit" are not, and could really conceivably be anything at all except for me, us, and shit.. — Wosret

This illustrates particularity. We seem to start metaphysics with a brute something. There is the positivity of some concrete proposition - that is then either true or false.

But look closer and you can see here that the brute somethingness points to an "otherness" of two possible kinds - the more general, or the more vague.

All the not-As might accounted for as by a concrete generality of some constraint that then defines the nature of what may count as a certain genus of particular. It might be the "me" that is a subset of the "we", or the "shit" that is defined in contrast to the undigested banquet.

Or the not-A might simply refer to the indeterminism that is by contrast the generalised lack of such a determining context. Or in other words, it refers to the freedom or contingency that is also an equally inescapable aspect of reality. It might be the random seeming collection of "me, apples, tanks, galaxies". The "other" being spoken of via the logical construction of "not-A" could be just every kind of stuff. So just, in semantic effect, a vagueness.

Thus once more, a complex triad is revealed at the heart of conventional monistic thought.

From the particular - viewed as some brute substantial particular - you can talk about the "other", the not-A, as either the vague or the general. So that is something to be further specified in any attempt to apply logic to ontology.

Peirce made the difference clear enough. He argued that the law of the excluded middle does not apply to generality, while it is the principle of non-contradiction that fails to apply to the vague.

So within the (triadic) laws of thought, this important distinction between generality and vagueness is perfectly well defined (along with particularity as being that which to all three laws of thought then do apply).

Would the smell of peanuts, the taste of coffee, and the feeling of freshly laundered cloths all be green too? Is justice green? — Wosret

Just things people can see.

Positivity doesn't exist unless it's in the company of negativity. So if we're just dealing with 2 dimensions, left and right are negatives of one another. It's more complicated if we add that third dimension. — Mongrel

Symmetry broken simply is symmetry broken on just a single scale. So it is easily reversed. There is no real separation of what just got separated and so there is nothing stopping a distinction immediately erasing itself.

That is what literally happens with "positivity and negativity" when it comes to fundamental particles. They pop out of the quantum vacuum in opposing pairs (as the conservation laws derived from symmetry mandate) and then annihilate so fast that physics ends up calling them virtual.

To get a persistent symmetry breaking requires a "third dimension" - a breaking over scale that creates an effective state of separation or asymmetry. Stuff has to be put far enough apart from itself so it can do something else while it takes its time to - by the end - just annihilate.

With our actual Universe, there is a complex charge asymmetry built in because "raw matter" could fall into several different local symmetry-breaking arrangements. You could have the quarks with their eight-fold way that left a sufficient excess of positive protons. Then you had the leptons which - after an entanglement with the further symmetry-breaking of the Higgs fields - eventually left a sufficient excess of negative electrons.

So right there - in a series of complicated symmetry breakings that turned out to have the makings of an actual asymmetry - you have an illustration of reality being a something because it got separated across scale (thermal scale, as heat all this asymmetric residue and you can return it to its Big Bang equilibrrium where all particles are simply virtual fluctuations of a vanilla force).

I was just playing around. I don't know if we would have a name for it at all. I imagine that nothing actually would be visible without contrast, quality, saturation, shading a such, so that even if it were all "green" there would have to bee different kinds of green, I would assume.

Not to be pedantic, and miss any points. Besides that, I dunno.

Peirce strikes me as less than interesting. Most significantly, he doesn't actually explain in any way how objects constrain their signs. I also don't quite get the unbroken symmetry concrete vagueness... which really just seems to be saying "the relationship between singularity and unity is unclear, because it just is objectively unclear".