Haven't looked into them, no.

I want to make a list too: Henry Miller, Nobby Brown, Cioran, Bukowski, Suetonius, Gibbon, Hobbes, Houellebecq, Dawkins, Dennett, Feuerbach, Cantor, Knuth, Freud, Braver, Kojève, Popper, Hofstadter, Lakoff, Bacon, Celine, Saussure...

I omitted authors I know you've looked into, like Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger, Wittgenstein ...

jas0n
191
So, if we're to avoid the pitfall of talking past each other, we must come to an agreement as to what the words we use mean,
— Agent Smith

To do so would require that we use words, yes? Hence the hopelessness of starting from scratch. And what works in math won't work in philosophy. 'Language is received like the law,' and meaning evolves historically. — jas0n

I don't get how Wittgensteinian philosophers can be so certain of their claims when they simultaneously also assert that the very thing they're making the claims with - language - is inadequate for this purpose.

If they say they've achieved clarity, then they're wrong about language, oui?

If the opposite - things are as hazy as before - why put stock into their statements? Nothing has changed.

I wouldnt say agenda. I’d say the eternal transformation of agendas. Is that still an agenda? — Joshs

Well that begs many questions. The erosion of all definite distinctions only leaves behind the generalised pluralism of all the differences that don't make a difference. Thus this is the very same kind of card that the thermodynamic concept of an equilibrium state plays.

But it certainly lays claim to being a totalising meta-agenda. :up:

So freedom is play within an overarching frame? Free variations on a theme? — Joshs

What? Is this too Wittgensteinian?

Yes, everyone has to end up in the same place. Peirce built his probabilistic view of metaphysics out of the notion of individual propensities. Intentionality by another name.

Every degree of freedom that composes a system - as its pluralistic many - is in turn entrained to its overarching intentionality, the oneness of the systems finality.

Necessity and contingency are thus united in actuality. Or good old Aristotelean hylomorphism.

History as pre-assigned boundary conditions of behavior, within which there is freedom to excel or screw up. — Joshs

Yep. One can play the game or cheat the system. And it is the fact that you can play the game that creates the counterfactual that would be instead cheating the system.

If there is good, then you can be bad. Etc.

But look closer at Nature and you find that it seeks the win-win. Life for the sadist is no fun unless complemented also by the existence of masochists.

Or more to the sociological point, individual choice is optimised in the form of the binary of whether to compete or cooperate. Or still more importantly, how to do both within the one long-run frame.

So when I challenge you to a tennis game, I both mean to run you off court and to agree with you when the ball is actually in or out. And afterwards, win or lose, we shake hands and declare it all to be so much fun we must do it again, same time next week.

So don't look for the win-lose in this metaphysics. Understand this is how Nature arranges for the win-win.

A Romantic free-thinking and feeling individual implies more oppressively severe fundamental constraints than an entropy dissipating system. — Joshs

Of course. Nothing could be more remote from the consciousness of Amerikan youth in cultural conflict than that they may be the modern neoliberal/climate denying incarnation of Debord's Society of the Spectacle - a CNN/Fox New curated storm in a teacup while US fracking wells flare 1.48 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, just because ... well, who the hell cares?

So the I that espouses my freedom is not the same I that overthrows my current values. — Joshs

Absolutely! Be the change!

[But how much can you in fact change about anything in this world? I've seen politics and economics up close. I've seen how unequal the stakes are.]

The world of maximum social pluralism and the world of maximum social conformity (authoritarianism) are two poles of a binary, — Joshs

Again, my point is that you want to maximise both within the constraints of a win-win optimisation algorithm.

In ecology, the different balances are theoretically modelled as the three natural developmental stages of immaturity (or explosive, weed-like growth), maturity (or steadier mixed state ecosystem), or senescent (which sounds bad, but simply means something so rich with wise habit that it has become brittle to sudden unpredicted perturbations - like the asteroid that did for the perfectly well adapted dinosaurs).

So in the explosive growth phase, it is youthful exuberance that a society would want to optimise. And Homo sapiens even made extra allowance for that, both in the explosive synaptogenesis of the newborn infant, and in the development of the teenager as a further stage of neural plasticity. Adolescents are tuned by recent evolution to be reckless and exploratory because their frontal lobe impulse over-ride machinery is on hold, giving them more time as junior society members to discover the errors of their way.

Likewise senescence is a further evolutionarily-tuned phase in Homo sapiens - part of the neurobiological adaptation for being a linguistically cultural creature. Women don't shrivel up and die after the breeding is over. Being a wise elder is an important part of social inheritance in a creature organised by oral tradition and living memory.

If you let nature take care of things, it can evolve for the win-win.

But with climate change, suddenly we can look up and see the asteroid.

Oh but wait, someone on the internet said something offensive to my values. I must mount up and joust the dragon once more.

And then there is the overthrow of the system of values: — Joshs

Yeah. Fighting about values is far more important than, for example, getting into the street and making violent noise about ... today being just another day that US fracking flares another 1.48 billion cubic feet of natural gas into CO2 ... because at least all that energy going to waste isn't entering the atmosphere as still more problematic methane.

Oh wait. Has anyone been counting how many cubic feet of methane these fracking rigs also leak?

An even bigger picture begins with the overthrow of a value system which depicts a cosmos structured by specific objective laws, and a history that can be probabilistically calculated. It proceeds from this overthrow to what Nietzsche called a revaluation of all values, not a tolerant pluralism or celebration of subjective freedom but a yoking of current self and value system to a non-calculable other history and other self-to-be, an eternal return of the same , always different self, history and values. — Joshs

Well maybe there is only the one actual existential issue of the day? Maybe everything else pales into insignificance?

probabilistic view of metaphysics — apokrisis

:up:

I like the battle over the continuum. — jas0n

Have you come across Norman Wildberger's dissident maths? He has retired now and is going full rogue. :cool:

Wildberger on infinities and continuums

The basic division in mathematics is between the discrete and the continuous. A largely unquestioning uniformity has settled on the discipline, with most students now only dimly aware of the logical problems with “uncomputable numbers”, “non-measurable functions”, the “Axiom of choice”, “hierarchies of cardinals and ordinals”, and various anomalies and paradoxes that supposedly arise in topology, set theory and measure theory.
While engineers and scientists work primarily with finite decimal numbers in an approximate sense, “real numbers” as infinite decimals are idealized objects which attempt to extend the explicit finite but approximate numbers of engineers into a domain where infinite processes can be ostensibly be exactly evaluated. To make this magic work, mathematicians invoke a notion of “equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences of rational numbers”, or as “Dedekind cuts”.
Each view has different difficulties, but always there is the crucial problem of discussing infinite objects without sufficient regard to how to specify them. I have discussed the serious logical difficulties at length around video 80-105 in the Math Foundations series. For example the video Inconvenient truths with sqrt(2) has generated a lot of discussion.
The idea of “infinity” as an unattainable ideal that can only be approached by an endless sequence of better and better finite approximations is both humble and ancient, and one I would strongly advocate to those wishing to understand mathematics more deeply. This is the position that Archimedes, Newton, Euler and Gauss would have taken, and it is a view that ought to be seriously reconsidered. I believe it is also closer to the view of modern giants such as H. Poincare and H. Weyl, both of whom were skeptical about our uses of “infinity”.
- https://njwildberger.com/2021/10/07/finite-versus-infinite-real-numbers/

Let’s consider here the situation with “infinity”. Most modern pure mathematicians believe, following Bolzano, Cantor and Dedekind, that this is a well-defined concept. By what rules of logic is someone going to convince me of the errors of my ways?
Perhaps they could invoke the Axiom of Infinity from the ZFC axiomfest! As a counter to such nonsense, I would like to propose my own new logical principle. It is simple and sweet: Don’t pretend that you can do something that you can’t.
According to this principle, the following questions are invalid logically:
If you could jump to the moon, then would it hurt when you landed?
If you could live forever, what would be your greatest hope?
If you could add up all the natural numbers 1+2+3+4+…, what would you get?
- https://njwildberger.com/2015/11/27/a-new-logical-principle/

In any case, the tension between intuitions of the discrete and the continuous has fascinated me for quite a while. — jas0n

Yep. There has to be some deeper connection. Which is where Peircean vagueness comes in as that to which the PNC does not apply and thus that which can ground the dichotomised as the two oppositions that then get related in the synechism of Thirdness.

So its not a choice between either the discrete, or the continuous. It is how to see the discrete and the continuous (or the infinitesimal and the infinite) as the reciprocal thing of a dichotomy - a case of the mutually opposite and jointly exclusive in logic terms.

The discrete = 1/continuous, and the continuous = 1/discrete. Each exists as the limit of the other. And both exist only to the degree that it is pragmatically useful to keep forcing the issue.

Maths and logic traditionally come from the other metaphysical angle. Reduction to a monism must rule. Mathematical reality can only admit the one grounding choice. Pick your poison. Don't get caught up in nonsense talk about departed Cheshire cats and their still lingering grins.

I can't understand where the 'camera' is positioned when the Cosmos looks at itself, since the inside/outside framing seems to no longer apply, unless it is some kind of Hegelian thing where the stuff on the other side of the concept is itself just more concept and the mental/physical distinction breaks down. What's the relation of this idea to indirect realism? — jas0n

In hierarchy theory, the "camera" is positioned at the reciprocal limits of the large and small, the most global and most local scales. This is where the invariance arises that can thus bound or close a world (of complex variation).

So to put it simply, we exist at a certain spatiotemporal scale of cogency. You and me can be at rest, be at equilibrium, within some shared inertial frame and lightcone.

But then, as we look up to higher levels of cosmic dynamics, eventually we strike a cosmic horizon. There is everything that happens outside the lightcone that can have no influence on us.

If the Sun went supernova right now, it would take about eight minutes for the bright light and sudden gravitational ripple to hit us. A bit of a delay in the news. But if the visible universe is right now beginning to collide with its antimatter double, it would take another 40 billion years or so for either of us to detect anything untoward.

So the point is that the upper bound constraints on our reality can be both dynamic, and yet changing on such a vast and slow scale that they are larger than our local point of view. Like the frog cooking in the pot, nothing seems to change. The global bound of invariance is created where the view completely fills our vision - like standing too close to a blank wall.

Then the lower bound of local degrees of freedom become a cosmic invariance for the reciprocal reason. From a sufficient distance, a highly dynamical small scale of action - like the quantum vacuum filled with virtual particles - will just blur into its own form of continuum. A solid looking ground of invariant being.

So look up, and we see the global spatiotemporal invariance that we call the constraining laws of nature. Our physics encodes them as mathematical symmetries.

Then look down and we see the global spatiotemporal invariance that we call the constructive degrees of freedoms of nature. Our physics encodes them as mathematical constants.

Stan Salthe wrote the best two books on all this from the hierarchy theory point of view - Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution - probably the two most important books I ever read.

Grand statements are delivered which contain important insights and yet the implicit self-subversion of such insights is ignored. Concrete details are mostly omitted. Examples are sparse. Purple haze. — jas0n

I would go so far as to add that the only signal I can pick up from the word salad noise is the distress call of folk stuck in a misunderstanding of dichotomies.

Every PoMo argument ever boils down to saying this thesis leads dialectially to its own antithesis. Therefore ... paradox! Self-contradiction! Logical breakdown!

But then let's not get all AP about it and just dismiss the dichotomy out of hand as (ugh) metaphysics. Let's dance around the corpse of logic in a mad jig of delight, proclaiming now the victory of ... the irrational, the pluralistic, the absurd!!!

In so doing, sociologists incorrectly attribute to Saussure (1) the postulate that meaning is arbitrary; (2) the idea that signs gain meaning only through relations of opposition to other signs; (3) the view that there is an isomorphic correspondence between linguistic signs and all cultural units of analysis, ergo culture is fundamentally arbitrary; and finally (4) the idea that he offers a Durkheimian theory of culture (i.e. Saussure was a follower of Durkheim).

Saussure does imagine signs as cutting into an otherwise undifferentiated continuum of thoughtstuff.

////////////////////////////////////////
Psychologically our thought — apart from its expression in words — is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.
...

Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound" implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance.
...
The linguistic fact can therefore be pictured in its totality — i.e. language — as a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas and the equally vague plane of sounds.
...
Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound.
...
In addition, the idea of value, as defined, shows that to consider a term as simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. To define it in this way would isolate the
term from its system; it would mean assuming that one can start from the terms and construct the system by adding them together when, on the contrary, it is from the interdependent whole that
one must start and through analysis obtain its elements.
...
Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine ; their combination produces a form, not a substance.
https://archive.org/stream/courseingenerall00saus/courseingenerall00saus_djvu.txt

But then let's not get all AP about it and just dismiss the dichotomy out of hand as (ugh) metaphysics. Let's dance around the corpse of logic in a mad jig of delight, proclaiming now the victory of ... the irrational, the pluralistic, the absurd!!! — apokrisis

I think you're being a little too hard on it (it's not all wordsalad to me, albeit at the limit of intelligibility a little too often), but I enjoy the sarcasm nevertheless.

it's not all wordsalad — jas0n

:lol:

Have you come across Norman Wildberger's dissident maths? — apokrisis

A little bit. I respect his passion for the meaning of mathematics. Errett Bishop had the same fire.

Mathematics belongs to man, not to God. We are not interested in properties of the positive integers that have no descriptive meaning for finite man. When a man proves a positive integer to exist, he should show how to find it. If God has mathematics of his own that need to be done, let him do it himself.

I like Chaitin's ventures in such philosophy too. Are the real numbers real? Yes yes we have axioms. We have constructions. And yet actual computation is done with a subset of the rationals (actually there are infinities in the floating point system too, which is nice. ) That the incomputables have measure zero is ... troubling, though one can ignore it and return to manufacturing widgets. (

The discrete = 1/continuous, and the continuous = 1/discrete. Each exists as the limit of the other. And both exist only to the degree that it is pragmatically useful to keep forcing the issue.

Maths and logic traditionally come from the other metaphysical angle. Reduction to a monism must rule. Mathematical reality can only admit the one grounding choice. Pick your poison. — apokrisis

One might argue that mathematics is biased toward the discrete in the pursuit of an ideal if not actual machine checkability. You end up using a finite alphabet of symbols when talking about towers of differing uncountable infinities.

Don't get caught up in nonsense talk about departed Cheshire cats and their still lingering grins. — apokrisis

That quote was pretty good. Group theory comes to mind. Its theorems apply to any system which satisfies certain criteria (intuitively I like to think of finite groups as sets of permutations.)

I don't get how Wittgensteinian philosophers can be so certain of their claims when they simultaneously also assert that the very thing they're making the claims with - language - is inadequate for this purpose. — Agent Smith

How does one measure certainty ? As a matter of style, there are only so many qualifications and timidities that can be justified. 'Language is received like the law' is something that is obvious once noticed. You were born into a certain way of doing things, just as I was, and it's only after learning these contingent noises and marks that we can turn around and articulate that contingency which is nevertheless forced upon us if want to be understood. It could have been other marks or sounds, but it wasn't.

Your critique might apply to some exaggerated pomo-monster that claims that meaning is impossible, that truth is impossible, and so on...without any irony. Playfully, I can ask why a defender of private language might ask such a question. If words mean whatever we want them to mean, then logic is helpless or everyone has their own.

I think 'pomo' is as baggy a term as 'metal' or 'country' or 'jazz.' I like some metal, some country, some jazz. But of course not everything in the genre is good. And even the same writer might become more/less interesting as their thinking develops.

The whole anglo-versus-continental thing sucks.

How does one measure certainty ? — jas0n

I don't know. Shouldn't you be the one telling us how to do that? After all, you come off as being very/quite certain about what you're saying, compared to me at least.

Language is received like the law' is something that it obvious once noticed. — jas0n

Then you go on to ask me how we measure uncertainty.

Then you go on to ask me how we measure uncertainty. — Agent Smith

I don't mean to offend you. Maybe the metaphor is obscure. The point is simple. You didn't choose the sounds you chew when you have to talk to strangers and deal with the business of life. You didn't....invent the English language....or do I need to prove that? Am I so bold to be quite sure that neither of us forged the code we are currently employing?

Every PoMo argument ever boils down to saying this thesis leads dialectially to its own antithesis. — apokrisis

A more generous rendition, which maybe only applies to good examples, is that following the implications of a text or system often reveals otherwise unnoticed conceptual tensions in that text or system. 'Text deconstruct themselves.'

Hegel has been described as showing how systems/personalities fail in their own terms and only then change. Rinse and repeat. Pile up determinate negations, a stack of informative failures. You can imagine a personality/system deaf to external criticism (because it unintelligible or lacks authority to/for him) without being able to ignore failure in terms of his/its own criteria/goals.

I don't mean to offend you. Maybe the metaphor is obscure. The point is simple. You didn't choose the sounds you chew when you have to talk to strangers and deal with the business of life. You didn't....invent the English language....or do I need to prove that? Am I so bold to be quite sure that neither of us forged their code we are currently employing? — jas0n

Yup, I didn't choose my language, but I can speak/write it, not that well but enough to get by. I find the concepts/words I use relatable at a very deep level i.e. I understand/know them fairly well. The same is true of you I bet.

What's your point though?

Saussure does imagine signs as cutting into an otherwise undifferentiated continuum of thoughtstuff. — jas0n

Not sure how to translate that. But from my Vygotskian/social constructionist perspective, language was the new medium that structured the "undifferentiated continuum" of the language-less animal mind.

So to actually characterise the difference language made to animal consciousness, we have to also be able to accurately characterise what kind of consciousness that was.

From there, we might tend to judge the animal state as either remarkably undifferentiated, or already remarkably differentiated. So either animals were already thinking as we generally understand that in folk psychology way, hence they just need words to express a worldview already formulated. Or indeed, the logicism built into syntax was such a big revolution - an entirely novel level of semiosis - that we might as well say animals just don't think in the way we would understand thought.

That is, they aren't self-objectivising, past-reconstructing, present-narrativising, future-formalising, emotion-socially framing, etc, kinds of creatures. In all these key regards, we would judge them strangely undifferentiated.

But I may misunderstand your drift.

Psychologically our thought — apart from its expression in words — is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. — Saussure

That is reasonable - if you step back from an animal which is merely living in the flow of the present. And then also unfair to the vividness of living in the flow of the present.

So it again is a point of view whether one sees a flat continuum or a fractal roughness.

Find the unifying dichotomy to dissolve the problem of defending one or either pole as the preferred monism!

There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. — Saussure

Ok. So you are quoting from the text that Stotlz points out is problematic as a representation of Saussure's views....

It is widely known by Saussure scholars that Bally and Sechehaye took many liberties when organizing the student’s notes, by relying mostly on Constanin’s notes, reordering the topics, and coloring Saussure as much more settled on difficult issues.

But anyway, treating this as the Sassurean viewpoint, is this too strong when of course there is something that is both the same in being neurobiological semiosis, and yet is quite different in being now neurobiological + socio-semiosis?

So the animal brain is a self~world modelling system - an example of biosemiosis. And then humans are something extra in that language is a further, more logicist and abstracted - level of semiotic organisation.

If we are alert, we ought to be able to spot the trend towards the complete abstraction and God's eye view that mathematico-semiosis would eventually usher in. It was inevitable - given the presumption of the pragmatic payoff - that humans would take the next step of reducing words to numbers, and grammar to logic.

Words evolved to describe possible social worlds - capture those as thoughtstuff. Then number anchored the capacity to describe possible material worlds - capture the sacred realm of Platonia as a thoughtstuff.

With words, we large construct our selves as social selves. With number, we can dare to construct the physical worlds as if it too were an anthropic reflection of our "inner being".

We can domesticate a planet, fill it with the pigs, cows, sheep, dogs and cats which best reflect the what it means to be "human". Or turn the geography of the world into signposted networks of highways and carpentered, interior decorated, habitats.

Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound" implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance. — Saussure

This seems to go the long way round and never reaching the destination - which is the fact that the human vocal tract imposed a syllabic serial structure on our normally holistic neurobiology. In making emotionally expressive noises - very important in any social creature - there evolved a new facility for injecting some song-like structure into the vocalisation. (Darwin's singing ape hypothesis indeed.) And from there, is was a short step from making nonsensical yet still emotionally interpretable sounds (ouch, eek, yuck, arrgh) to logically-structure speech acts involving grammar and reference.

So a less fluffy exposition would cut to the chase of how serial vocalisation evolved as an extension to primate emotional communication and became the surprise exaptation that opened the door to human rationalised thought patterns.

Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound. — Saussure

Again, too vague and fluffy. This is the epistemic cut issue. The switch (as the physical instantiation of a sign) must bridge the divide between the logic of the model and the material actions of the physical world.

So yes, this is Janus faced. The switch has a foot in both worlds. But the thought is the logical model - which in the Bayesian brain view, sets the switch in advance as best it can, then discovers the degree to which reality has tripped it the other way, spelling some error in the prediction.

So what can't be divided is the three way deal of the model, the switch or sign as the interface, and the world. The mind predicts, the world corrects, the switch mediates this triadic interaction.

Thus you can see that if this is the Saussure that informs Derrida's own further rewriting of what Saussureanism ought to mean, then yeah, just give it the flick. Start again with Peircean semiosis.

.
Well I was justifying my 'certainty' that language is received like the law. But take it from a linguist.

The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.

The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other. This fact, which seems to embody a contradiction, might be called colloquially "the stacked deck." We say to language: "Choose!" but we add: "It must be this sign and no other." No individual, even if he willed it, could modify in any way at all the choice that has been made; and what is more, the community itself cannot control so much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language.

No longer can language be identified with a contract pure and simple, and it is precisely from this viewpoint that the linguistic sign is a particularly interesting object of study; for language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent. — Saussure

(it's not all wordsalad to me, albeit at the limit of intelligibility a little too often) — jas0n

I'm genuinely curious as to what you can get out of it except a bemused poetry? It poses as something that ought to be intelligible, but I am certain that it leads nowhere deep.

This week I've been dealing with GUT theories of Big Bang symmetry breaking - whether leptoquarks would be SU(4) or SU(5) theories. Now that is at the edge of intelligibility for me. But then also, every day brings waves of insight. You can see when something is going to lead somewhere as it has a basis in mathematical rigour.

Not sure how to translate that. But from my Vygotskian/social constructionist perspective, language was the new medium that structured the "undifferentiated continuum" of the language-less animal mind.

So to actually characterise the difference language made to animal consciousness, we have to also be able to accurately characterise what kind of consciousness that was. — apokrisis

I agree that it makes more sense to think in terms of evolution. Humans weren't dropped into the garden with undifferentiated thoughtstuff.

Ok. So you are quoting from the text that Stotlz points out is problematic as a representation of Saussure's views.... — apokrisis

Well one can get the different copies of student lecture notes, but yes I have the fusion (Course) and a book by Culler, which gives some background and is pleasantly to-the-point.

So yes, this is Janus faced. The switch has a foot in both worlds. But the thought is the logical model - which in the Bayesian brain view, sets the switch in advance as best it can, then discovers the degree to which reality has tripped it the other way, spelling some error in the prediction.

So what can't be divided is the three way deal of the model, the switch or sign as the interface, and the world. The mind predicts, the world corrects, the switch mediates this triadic interaction. — apokrisis

I like your presentation of the triadic approach above. Model/switch/world.

Saussure had different priorities ? Shows his age? Note that he thought in terms of 'form not substance' on both sides.. The phonic 'image' is something like an equivalence class of actual pronunciations. It's not sound.

In end the sounds themselves don't matter for the system at all. All that matters is the difference between them. This difference is unheard. Each signifier is 'essentially' the negation of all the others. It doesn't matter what the chess pieces look like. Only relationships mater. This is in the phonic realm. In the conceptual realm of the signified we have something similar. Mental is not-physical, male is not-female, etc. Switches. As opposed to the meaning of 'male' or 'true' or 'real' being immediately grounded by something other than difference (an intuition in the mind of god or the 'same mental experiences' of Aristotle, a beetle in the box, the 'transcendental signified.')

One might argue that mathematics is biased toward the discrete in the pursuit of an ideal if not actual machine checkability. You end up using a finite alphabet of symbols when talking about towers of differing uncountable infinities. — jas0n

I would indeed argue the same. God invented the integers, as they say. Or at least the identity elements of 0 and 1 around which arithmetic swivels.

So what works as maths is the ability to cash out the continuum - Peirce's synechism - as another atomism. And hence another mechanics.

Peirce and other systems thinkers protest that reality at the fine grain is naked fluctuation. There is no certainty as a base, just the continuous blur that is the vagueness of an uncertainty.

But maths just swoops in and say we will turn all the uncertainty into certainties by axiomatic fiat. We will turn every entropic microstate into a bit of information. Every fluctuation gets its own number.

This seems madness to the organicist. The world can't be treated as a machine!

But then this mathematical mechanics turns out to work. It is a view of reality which lets you treat it very much as just a machine. And bugger the organic niceties.

Group theory comes to mind. Its theorems apply to any system which satisfies certain criteria (intuitively I like to think of finite groups as sets of permutations.) — jas0n

OK. And I just said this week I've been delving into the murky depths of permutation symmetry as the very thing that generates the Cosmos we all know and love. The ontic structural realist revolution in metaphysics (which seem to have been born and then died within the space of the publication cycle of its one manifesto). :rofl:

Funny old world.

Thus you can see that if this is the Saussure that informs Derrida's own further rewriting of what Saussureanism ought to mean, then yeah, just give it the flick. Start again with Peircean semiosis. — apokrisis

I'll check out more of Peirce. But recall that Derrida criticized Saussure in his own terms, praised Peirce, and showed how the dyadic sign broke down, connecting Saussure's 'phonocentrism' to one of the oldest prejudices of philosophy. The aspect of that prejudice which I tend to focus on is the supposed presence of some kind of sign-independent pure meaning stuff before the gaze of a pure subject. This is maybe the 'deepest' ghost story of them all.

Can I get back to you later. Thanks. Have a good day.

Peirce and other systems thinkers protest that reality at the fine grain is naked fluctuation. There is no certainty as a base, just the continuous blur that is the vagueness of an uncertainty. — apokrisis

I understand Derrida to call out the play/ambiguity of our signs. Since they primarily refer to one another (describe the blur of reality with a set of finite switch-positions like mind/matter or male/female), they aren't grounded in anything but our flexible reapplication of an old sign in a new context. This allows for drift. I read him with Wittgenstein, as a linguistic philosopher I suppose.

Can I get back to you later. Thanks. Have a good day. — Agent Smith

:up:

Saussure had different priorities ? Shows his age? Note that he thought in terms of 'form not substance' on both sides.. The phonic 'image' is something like an equivalence class of actual pronunciations. It's not sound. — jas0n

I have nothing at all against Saussure. He was indeed influential on me when I was looking into why language made such a difference to the human mind.

So within the linguistic space - which was the space he was aiming at - it was all good stuff.

All that matters is the difference between them. This difference is unheard. Each signifier is 'essentially' the negation of all the others. — jas0n

Yep. That is how I would argue it.

The perfect switch implements the laws of thought. Everything divides into A and not-A. And even if it doesn't in fact divide so crisply and easily, the switch is the Procrustean bed that forces such a division on the world.

Language - verbal or numerical - reduces the analog reality to a digital recording. But hey, digital recordings can be as good as the real thing for all practical purposes. And they can be better if you don't like the scratching and hissing of vinyl, or you want the most compressed recording possible.

Yep. That is how I would argue it. — apokrisis

That's what I take to have been inspiration for the difference that Derrida misspelled and generalized. But it's already in Saussure.

the switch is the Procrustean bed that forces such a division on the world. — apokrisis

Exactly! Yes. And you can see how Saussure's own distinctions are not erased but at least destabilized. If the signifier 'actually' refers to other signifiers and not to a signified, then the dyadic sign is not so dyadic after all. One has instead a system of 'traces,' neither mental nor physical, but that which makes distinction possible in the first place. A trace is like a sum of negations of other traces, hence the metaphor.

Language - verbal or numerical - reduces the analog reality to a digital recording. But hey, digital recordings can be as good as the real thing for all practical purposes. And they can be better if you don't like the scratching and hissing of vinyl, or you want the most compressed recording possible. — apokrisis

Yes indeed. And I think of reality being modeled by digital simulations with tiny step sizes. I've programmed stochastic gradient descent in various ways. It's based on a pure math proof. Or so it seems. One could empirically discover a good algorithm. A proof in pure math is not obviously/simply a proof about the world or actual computation. We have our symbol games which primarily prove themselves practically.

But recall that Derrida criticized Saussure in his own terms, praised Peirce, and showed how the dyadic sign broke down, connecting Saussure's 'phonocentrism' to one of the oldest prejudices of philosophy. — jas0n

I understand Derrida to call out the play/ambiguity of our signs. Since they primarily refer to one another (describe the blur of reality with a set of finite switch-positions like mind/matter or male/female), they aren't grounded in anything but our flexible reapplication of an old sign in a new context. This allows for drift. I read him with Wittgenstein, as a linguistic philosopher I suppose. — jas0n

You are managing to make Derrida seem like a reasonable guy. The question is what kind of sociology would encourage the torture of the accepted PoMo academic style?

It is a first principle of clear writing that global or abstract statements are then always anchored/evidenced in the conviction of supporting particulars. You give the general principle and offer the specific examples that support it.

But both your PoMo texts were all abstractions, no particulars. They never touch the ground and just flu along unchecked by material fact.

As a hierarchy theorist and pragmatist, this can be criticised on formal structural grounds. Understanding is the dance between the local and the global, the detail and the whole, the concrete and the abstract, the measurement and the theory.

And in PoMo, I see no such dance on the whole. Again I wonder what sociological advantage that gives PoMo texts - except to play the poseur too clever to be understood by the likes of me and you,

But hey, you clearly value it. Which makes me curious as to how you don't appear to have had your thoughts scrambled by it.

You are managing to make Derrida seem like a reasonable guy. The question is what kind of sociology would encourage the torture of the accepted PoMo academic style? — apokrisis

Well, given how disliked he is, I'm motivated to defend my own appreciation for him and to prove to myself that I'm squeezing some juice from those indulgently difficult texts. Looking at some revealing video interviews online, it seems Derrida was inspired/gripped (lots of emotion!) when he came up with his big first idea. It came out hot. So he was maybe like a French Nietzsche at the time. Do you like Nietzsche at all?