Notice this rhetorical sleight-of-hand which re-frames necessary truths as contingent. — Wayfarer

That implies intent to deceive or mislead, which I assure you was not present.

Look, I'm between the devil and the deep blue sea here. I've been on almost exactly the other side of this argument, right here on this forum, many times. I have defended philosophy against the encroachment of psychology. I had a long argument with @Metaphysician Undercover over the necessity of object permanence to counting!

I am not *comfortable* allowing logic itself to be something like a fact of our universe -- maybe it is something more like a necessity for any universe, or at least for any intelligible universe.

The reasons for my decision here are several: I have never found an account of the status of logic or mathematics I like, never, and it comes up over and over again; I'm not sure we have much to show for defending our turf against psychology, which seems to have been making more than a little progress without our help; something in @javra's phrasing really crystallized the choice for me, a heaven of eternal logic versus naturalism; and finally I've been reading William James, whose approach to pragmatism really does feel informed by his work in physiology and psychology. James was famously open to the supernatural, to religion and spirituality, even to the paranormal, so his pragmatism is not a matter of dogmatic anti-supernaturalism, but his starting point is always life.

So I think maybe I'm ready to give up the idea of necessary truths. But maybe I'm not, we'll see. Quine waffled on this very issue for decades, with a set of commitments and inclinations similar to mine. It's hard.

Notice this rhetorical sleight-of-hand which re-frames necessary truths as contingent. This is often deployed by way of speculations about the ‘multiverse’. It relativises the issue by suggesting that logic is 'for us', again, something of our own manufacture. — Wayfarer

How do you know that some truths are necessary? How do you know that logic is not "something of our own manufacture"?

I’ve noticed that Apokrisis tends to acknowledge only those aspects of Peirce’s philosophy which are pragmatically useful for modelling semiotic relationships whilst often disavowing his broader idealism. As Thomas Nagel put it, 'Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable'. I think that discomfort is often on display in these kinds of discussions. — Wayfarer

Is that an argument from authority? Are you suggesting that if Peirce was right about semiotics, that he must be right about idealism and/or God? Why would the human mind, being a part of nature not be in accordance with the nature it, according to you, constructs, or according to others is partially affected by, and partially constructs? And why should that be "uncomfortable" for a secular thinker? It's a kind of ad hominem move to attempt to dismiss secular conceptions of nature by explaining them away as being "blind spots" due to being unable to cope with "transcendence" or some such "discomforting'" idea. What you don't seem to get is that not everyone is convinced by the arguments you are, even though they understand those arguments perfectly well enough.

And what are you and Nagel actually even arguing for, if neither of yout identify as theists?

That implies intent to deceive or mislead, which I assure you was not present. — Srap Tasmaner

Not accusing you of that at all. Overall your criticism has been relevant...well, up until the excursion into marine biology. It's the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. A related topic I often explore is the vexed question of mathematical platonism - whether numbers are discovered or invented. The connection between the two questions ought to be pretty clear. The point being that the heavy-hitters in philosophy of maths all decry any form of platonism, on the grounds that it verges on a spooky ability to grasp non-physical truths.

How do you know that some truths are necessary? How do you know that logic is not "something of our own manufacture"? — Janus

The child can always endlessly ask 'why?' — Janus

something in javra's phrasing really crystallized the choice for me, a heaven of eternal logic versus naturalism — Srap Tasmaner

Ha! But then on what grounds would - needless to add, insentient - global constraints on what is and can be (the Heraclitean logos, so to speak, since it would occur in the so called heavens just as much as in the bowels of the earth and in everything in-between) then be validly defined as unnatural? Else expressed, as "non-naturalistic"?

This "heaven of eternal logic versus naturalism" (if I interpret the expression right) so far seems to me a false choice, since to me the two are not mutually exclusive by necessity. Such Heraclitean logos of sorts, if in fact existent, then being part and parcel of nature - the very same by which naturalism is defined.

If I'm missing out on something - other than the implicit status quo stance of materialism/physicalism - I'd like to be made aware of it.

The point being that the heavy-hitters in philosophy of maths all decry any form of platonism, on the grounds that it verges on a spooky ability to grasp non-physical truths. — Wayfarer

Perhaps, but those same "heavy-hitters in the philosophy of maths" accept without questioning, the axioms (basic set theory for example), which represent numbers as immutable objects. The philosophy of math is full of hypocrisy.

Considering the history of whaling, it's a wonder they don't also fuck with humans. — Janus

Remember Crocodile Dundee and the kangaroo shooting back at the hunters? Love that.

global constraints on what is and can be — javra

I'm not sure we can reach quite that far. There may be a halfway point, a sort of anthropic principle -- if that's the right word for this kind of selection bias -- that I gestured at above, what sort of universe could be intelligible to creatures somewhat like us.

We're pretty far afield here, but I want to mention another way of approaching this, instead of pondering the status of possible constraints on the physics of a possible universe.

We have good reason to believe infants acquire the concept of object permanence before the concept of object identity. Think about that for a moment. That means it is possible for a creature to live in a world in which, so far as they can tell, ducks sometimes turn into trucks, but they never simply disappear. What's going on there? At some point -- I'm not sure how old -- they would no longer accept the possibility of such a transformation, but it appears there is a time when they do. Can they reason yet? Hard to say, but they express surprise when there's no object where they expect one, so the predictive machinery is certainly running already, it just doesn't need object identity to get going.

In effect, small infants live in a different world from us, with different or perhaps only fewer laws of thought. They transition to ours, mostly. Are they discovering more about how our universe works, about how any universe must? Maybe. Are they making richer and more rewarding predictions about their environment? Certainly. But they did live in that other world first, as we all did.

Is that world devoid of reason because the law of identity is absent? Maybe. Must we say so? What would be the point of saying so? There is a class of predictions the infant does not make that we do, and they are the poorer for it, presumably. We can say that, from our position, having been successfully relying on the law of identity; we know, that is, what they're missing out on.

But do we know what we are missing out on? Is it impossible that there are other laws of thought of whose operation we remain ignorant? That to some alien race we might appear like infants unable to conceptualize the simplest facts about our universe?

Still working at your last few posts, @javra. Might help me make sense of them if you compared your use of the terms "materialism" and "naturalism". (I've never been very comfortable arguing the merits of isms, hence my reliance on whales and infants and play-writing hominids.)

Can they reason yet? Hard to say, but they express surprise when there's no object where they expect one, so the predictive machinery is certainly running already, it just doesn't need object identity to get going. — Srap Tasmaner

Object identity is not an identical property to that of what the law of identity stipulates. I'd like to rephrase the latter (for better clarity) in this way: every X that we can be in any way aware of - be it an abstract given, a concrete given, a percept, or anything else - can only be X, this at the same time and in the same respect. This whether or not one is consciously aware of this property of thought (quite arguably as most, if not all, philosophers prior to Aristotle were consciously ignorant of this property - to give just one example). As far as we can fathom, lesser animals, though not consciously aware of this property of thought as a concept, can only think via its occurrence (e.g., unless one considers them to be automatons, a predator thinks, aka reasons - forethought included - in terms of how to best capture prey that is evading and holds the potential to injure the predator, either singularly or by working cooperatively as a team - obviously this without use of language; apes however give the best known examples, including of holding "eureka moments" that occur after strict contemplation in respect to a problem. I know its arguable to philosophers, but I'll uphold this.)

So understood, the law of identity's operation (its praxis, not its theory) is required for an understanding of what an object's identity is, but does not necessitate the latter. The latter is a complex concept and, thus, abstraction regarding what is. So, for those lifeforms that don't recognize the object identity of relevant objects instinctively (unthinkingly, this via genetic inheritance), it only makes sense that the aptitude is learned.

All this, I know, can be debated. But is by no means contradictory to either reason or empirical evidence. Back to the quote above: the "predictive machinery" which is surprised at there not being an object where an object is expected could not function in the absence of the law of identity as praxis. For then there would not be any "X" to be expected in the awareness of the infant.

What's relevant to a law of thought's occurrence is not our conceptual grasp of it as such but that it ontically occurs. It is only in this manner that laws of thought can be discovered - rather then invented - by us.

Might help me make sense of them if you compared your use of the terms "materialism" and "naturalism". (I've never been very comfortable arguing the merits of isms, hence my reliance on whales and infants and play-writing hominids.) — Srap Tasmaner

In brief, to my mind, materialism specifies that everything that is or can be is fully reducible to, and emergent from, insentient material constituents. Naturalism, on the other hand, specifies that all which does and can occur is that which is natural - thereby nature at large - this in contrast to that which is deemed to not be natural (again, for example, angels, deities, forest fairies, etc.). Materialism mandates naturalism of a certain kind, but naturalism is not limited to the possibility of materialism.

How do you know that some truths are necessary? How do you know that logic is not "something of our own manufacture"?
— Janus

The child can always endlessly ask 'why?'
— Janus — Wayfarer

Sure, but you are yet to even begin an argument for necessary truths as far as I can tell. In any case if you did present an argument, I would address it on its own terms, not try to evade the issue by asking further 'why' questions. (Note: the only necessary truths as far as I can tell are tautologies, things true by definition).

And, as usual, you have no answers for the questions I asked...way to engage!

Remember Crocodile Dundee and the kangaroo shooting back at the hunters? Love that. — Srap Tasmaner

:up: Sure do...me too!

What's relevant to a law of thought's occurrence is not our conceptual grasp of it as such but that it ontically occurs. It is only in this manner that laws of thought can be discovered - rather then invented - by us. — javra

I thought that might be what you're saying. That makes such a law a fact about the universe (if I understand "ontic occurrence" as you intended). There are two questions that naturally arise:

(1) What is the real difference between such a law and other natural laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics?

(2) How can we tell whether such a law happens to hold in our universe, or whether it must hold? What would make it necessary, and how could we know?

(Okay the second one's two questions. My bad.)

Naturalism, on the other hand, specifies that all which does and can occur is that which is natural - thereby nature at large - this in contrast to that which is deemed to not be natural (again, for example, angels, deities, forest fairies, etc.). — javra

Huh. For discussion I'll go with it -- especially since all I mean by "naturalism" is, roughly, "amenable to scientific investigation," and that's not much of a definition either. My ersatz definition is essentially an exclusion of magic, behavior that is inherently unlawlike and thus incomprehensible to science. Your version of naturalism countenances immaterial entities so long as -- what exactly? They are not traditionally identified as supernatural?

I am not *comfortable* allowing logic itself to be something like a fact of our universe -- maybe it is something more like a necessity for any universe, or at least for any intelligible universe. — Srap Tasmaner

It ought to help to strip "logic" down to its ultimate simplicities. We do grant it too much psychological status, even though we don't then want to eliminate it as the thread of "cosmic intelligibility" that runs through life and mind too.

The metaphysics of the systems view goes back to Anaximander's apeiron and the general Greek enthusiasm for understanding nature as a dialectic, a unity of opposites.

What it boils down to is the logical principle that whatever doesn't self-contradict is free to be the case. Peirce encoded this in his dichotomy of tychism~synechism – freedoms and the habits of constraint that must emerge once everything starts happening and discovers how that mass of interacting results in its own restricting limits.

If you have to argue against any principle, this would seem the hardest to refute.

Something popping out of nothing doesn't compute. There is no logic in that. But somethingness being whatever is left after a great clash of clashing contrarieties does compute. It is an undeniable conclusion. Everythingness is its own filter as all that is simply symmetric will eliminate itself, leaving whatever is uncancellably asymmetric as a possibility.

If you step one metre left and one metre right, nothing has effectively changed. But if you step one metre left and it is over the edge of a cliff, now you have an event that can't so easily be cancelled out.

This is exactly the logic of the path integral that extracts a concrete world from the probabilities of particle fields. The calculation takes all possible particle events and then discovers the degree to which all the many options cancel each other out.

The vast weight of the possibilities are symmetric – virtual particle pairs that create and annihilate without leaving any trace. But this self-winnowing eventually leaves some "collapsed" actual particle event making its mark on the world.

So both in our earliest metaphysics and our best current physical models, the same deep logical trick is at work. Something emerges out of a self-cancelling sum over everything. We have a foundational truth that we can rely on. Or at least pragmatism tells us no other principle has better survived the test.

I should add that dichotomies encode asymmetries, or hierarchical order.

If everything simply self-cancelled, then that would indeed leave nothing. So what can survive all the cancellation is the dichotomous order that gives reality two complementary directions in which to be forever moving apart from itself.

Again, that is the metaphysics of the quantum view. The Universe is eternally cooling and spreading – spreading because it cools, and cooling because it spreads.

In any instant, from the level of individual quantum vacuum fluctuations, the world has grown both larger and cooler. This in itself is enough to promote some of the self-cancelling virtual pairs to long-term reality.

At the event horizon of a black hole or the edge of the visible universe, you have even the briefest-lived self-annihilating pairs being separated for just long enough to find themselves existing in different lightcones or world lines.

Back during the hot dense fury of the Big Bang, inflation itself was separating virtual fluctuations with enough vigour to keep even a lot of very short-lived particles going. There was a lot of crud to spill into a rapidly cooled void and reheat it with the matter we are familiar with as the lucky survivors.

So the objection to maths and logic is largely to do with the way these fields have wandered off as their own research subjects, remote from the concerns of natural philosophy - the tradition that connects ancient metaphysics to modern physics.

Maths is hell of an arbitrary exercise in the freedoms from physical reality that it grants itself. The logic choppers likewise have strayed from the constraints of pragmatics.

But what we mean by an intelligible cosmos is in fact so simple in terms of its logic and maths that this isn't a great problem. The Darwinian principle of cosmic self-selection tells us somethingness is the product of a symmetry-breaking so rigorous that it left behind only uncancellable asymmetry. The dichotomy that results in the hierarchy.

In the end, the cooling~expanding Universe will end in its Heat Death. All the crud will get broken down into the faintest rustle of a quantum vacuum and exported across cosmic horizons. It will still be something of course, but as near to absolute nothingness as we can intelligibly conjecture.

What it boils down to is the logical principle that whatever doesn't self-contradict is free to be the case. — apokrisis

If I'm following this, one point is that logic (at least in these sorts of discussions) is often conceived primarily as a constraint, contradiction is forbidden, non-identity is forbidden, and so on, but that's clearly not the whole story because you need some generative principle as well. (Hence tychism?)

But much of what you write is about how constraints themselves are generated, rather than simply being given, and this is where symmetry breaking comes in, yes?

It would certainly be more satisfying to have a story in which a single process gives rise to the constraints on its continued operation. Without such a story, you in effect imagine the universe to exist within a bigger universe in which there are already certain rules in place -- the rules of universe creation, these laws of thought -- and you simply decline to explain that one. You would face a similar problem if anything simpler and more general than your story were conceivable -- but you knew that going in and have aimed at maximal simplicity and generality.

Do I have any of that right?

That makes such a law a fact about the universe (if I understand "ontic occurrence" as you intended). — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, its an accurate interpretation of my view.

(1) What is the real difference between such a law and other natural laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics?

(2) How can we tell whether such a law happens to hold in our universe, or whether it must hold? What would make it necessary, and how could we know? — Srap Tasmaner

As apokrisis illustrates, these questions will be contingent on one's - hopefully self-consistent and explanatory power endowed - metaphysical worldview. (I'm myself still working on expressing the worldview I have in mind. It's a very long ways from being finalized, but it's what the website in my profile points to - this to be transparent and not seem to be posturing. Rather than trying to engage in detailed explanations of my, sometimes unorthodox, metaphysical perspectives in a forum format, I'll just point to that website and leave it at that.)

As to (1), I follow Peirce's view and hold that the former is existentially fixed while the later is in a perpetual process of (very gradual) development - such that the latter depends on the former, but while I take both to be fully natural.

As to (2), as I've previously expressed, the optimal explanatory power that will result from such a worldview would in this case evidence (always fallibly) that the law must and does hold in our the universe (or in the cosmos, if one prefers).

Whatever the correct, reality-conformant answer to these questions might in fact be, however, in relation to this thread, the pivotal issue remains: how can materialism and physicalism uphold their own rational validity when their rational validity is (for reasons so far discussed) undermined by the very metaphysical stance they maintain?

Your version of naturalism countenances immaterial entities so long as -- what exactly? They are not traditionally identified as supernatural? — Srap Tasmaner

Can you better explain what you mean by "immaterial entities" in this context? Would these include things like numbers, natural laws, and teloi (e.g., intentions)? Or do you by the term intend things like angels, deities, and forest fairies? As to the latter, they would again not be consistent with what I take naturalism to be - this due to not being explicable in terms of the physical and what the physical essentially entails. However, as to the former, tmk they are not amenable to scientific investigation - by which I understand the empirical sciences' use of the scientific method - but are nevertheless aspects of reality writ large upon which all at least modern scientific investigation depends. And, personally, I do take the former set to consist of natural, though immaterial, givens - hence to quality as natural aspects of the nature which naturalism demarcates.

(Hence tychism?) — Srap Tasmaner

Or better yet – if Peirce had completed his logic of vagueness – he was defining tychism more clearly as that to which the PNC doesn't apply (and generality or synechism as that to which the LEM doesn't apply, so framing the metaphysics more clearly in terms of the familiar laws of thought).

But yes, free generation. Just like a quantum vacuum.

But much of what you write is about how constraints themselves are generated, rather than simply being given, and this is where symmetry breaking comes in, yes? — Srap Tasmaner

Constraints develop or evolve. They are the habits that survive – in that they are not disturbed by mere passing fluctuations any longer.

So at the level of pure tychism, fluctuations are symmetry breaking in equilibrium with symmetry-restoration. Virtual particles are defined by their creation~annihilation operators that don't give them long enough to get established as real particles.

But once there is a spacetime context that is larger in than the Planck scale, brief time, then now there is a filter on this hot and cancelling action. Some kinds of symmetry breaking start to stick. In particular, you get the electroweak phase transition where local fermion gauge breaking gets entangle with global goldstone boson symmetry breaking – the Higgs field that gives particles an effective mass and traps them in longer-lived states.

Whole species of anti-particles get wiped out leaving the particles nothing to annihilate with any longer. The CP-symmetry breaking story.

So all this is just routine particle physics. You can get global constraints kicking in as fast as the spacetime metric grows and so allows interactions on that larger collective scale. A Darwinian filter sorts everything out down to protons, electrons and neutrinos.

Can you better explain what you mean by "immaterial entities" in this context? — javra

Just a placeholder for "not reducible to matter", since that's the other thing. I think I've got it now with the distinction between numbers and angels, although I do wonder why the problem with angels is that they're not physical and the problem with numbers is nothing at all.

how can materialism and physicalism uphold their own rational validity when their rational validity is (for reasons so far discussed) undermined by the very metaphysical stance they maintain? — javra

And naturalism gets around this, on your view, by countenancing laws of thought as "natural, though immaterial, givens"; that is, you get to rely on logical inference and the materialist does not. Is that your position? I mean, that seems like cheating, like the Russell line about "the advantages of the method of positing."

Whatever I end up thinking naturalism amounts to, I don't think that'll be it.

although I do wonder why the problem with angels is that they're not physical and the problem with numbers is nothing at all. — Srap Tasmaner

Yea, one way to tersely address this is that the cogency of scientific knowledge is in many ways contingent on the occurrence of numbers but couldn't care less about the occurrence or non-occurrence of angels. Numbers - more accurately, quantity - is something the occurrence of a physical reality essentially entails (otherwise one would have a quantity-devoid, partless, etc. reality - which is not what the physical presents itself to be). Angels, on the other hand, are not essentially entailed by the physical reality we all share.

And naturalism gets around this, on your view, by countenancing laws of thought as "natural, though immaterial, givens," that is, you get to rely on logical inference and the materialist does not. Is that your position? — Srap Tasmaner

No, it is not. My position - which I think I've repeated one too many times already in this thread - is that the logical inferences of materialists when it comes to their metaphysics result in the conclusion that all logical inferences are relative - such that one might as well declare that "to each their own equally valid logic and reasoning". In contrast, maybe there is some impartial, nonfabricated set of rules, laws, or principles that we all must adhere to when it comes to logic and reasoning if we are to pragmatically survive - immaterial thought these might be - such that 2 + 2 does not equal 5 no matter how much one tries to make it happen.

It would certainly be more satisfying to have a story in which a single process gives rise to the constraints on its continued operation. Without such a story, you in effect imagine the universe to exist within a bigger universe in which there are already certain rules in place -- the rules of universe creation, these laws of thought -- and you simply decline to explain that one. You would face a similar problem if anything simpler and more general than your story were conceivable -- but you knew that going in and have aimed at maximal simplicity and generality. — Srap Tasmaner

Oh, on this, we start with the need to explain at least one world - ours.

And to the degree that a tale of immanence and self-creation is achieved, that does serve to rule out a more pluralistic metaphysics.

For example, some use the quantum collapse issue to argue for an infinite multiverse. But a Darwinian self filtering mechanism - like quantum decoherence - can then close the story in effective fashion. You can prune away the modal argument that all possibilities exist. Only the possible universe exists as it is the one making all the other universes impossible.

There are still problems of course. To include vagueness in a concrete fashion is a delicate operation if vagueness is suppose to be an ultimate lack of the concrete.

So I might talk about the Apeiron, quantum vacuum, Ungrund, vagueness, or other concrete attempts to frame this notion of unlimited and formless potential. A sea of pure fluctuation … that pre-exists … any existence.

But again, we start knowing that there is indeed a something with intelligible structure. There is a world. We can start in the middle of things, as Peirce urged, and work out to the edges.

We can start in the middle of things — apokrisis

Hey that part I understand and, for what it's worth, agree.

the logical inferences of materialists when it comes to their metaphysics result in the conclusion that all logical inferences are relative - such that one might as well declare that "to each their own equally valid logic and reasoning". — javra

Wait, really? I thought the relativism at stake was to the ordering of nature, but you meant relative to the individual reasoner as a bit of ordered matter? Is materialism really committed to that sort of simplistic perspectivism? Why cannot materialism call on the laws known to hold in this material universe, logical and natural, and leave it at that? This universe is logical, and so logical inference is appropriate here -- no eternity needed. --- Or is the materialist unable, in your view, to recognize that, say, the law of non-contradiction holds in our world?

I'm missing something. Apologize if I'm just misreading you.

I’m currently tired, so my bad if I’m reading you wrong. You reply as though I’m pushing you into buying something and you’re not yet prepared to buy it – but I have nothing to sell. I’ve simply presented my fallible perspective. I’ve by now expressed my views repeatedly, and at this point find the prospect of doing so once more to likely not be beneficial for anyone. So I’ll now ask you in turn for your own perspective:

Do you find that the basic laws of thought are fixed for everyone today, yesterday, and tomorrow?

If so, on what coherent materialism-based grounds do you so conclude?

If not, on what coherent grounds do you find that reasoning and logic can serve as means for discerning what is real?

You reply as though I’m pushing you into buying something and you’re not yet prepared to buy it — javra

Sorry if it came across that way. I just don't understand, that's all.

So I’ll now ask you in turn for your own perspective — javra

Yikes. My views are in flux, even more than usual at the moment.

Do you find that the basic laws of thought are fixed for everyone today, yesterday, and tomorrow? — javra

As far as I can tell, this means the world has a logical structure, so any belief that violates the usual canons of logic cannot be true.

I'm going to lean "no". I think the picture presented here is of a static world modeled after the medium-sized dry goods we are used to interacting with. But the universe wasn't always like this, which means insofar as we see order around us it is not eternal but temporary -- it had to emerge and it will go away.

What's more, our intuitions about things at our scale don't translate well to the much larger or the much smaller. Space itself bends -- what the hell? And I don't have a clue what's going on at quantum scales, but the stuff @Andrew M has tried to explain to me does not match how my keys and my breakfast cereal and my books behave.

So I'm inclined to think these laws of thought -- phrase I really detest -- are an approximation, in almost exactly the way that Newtonian mechanics is an approximation. It's only an approximation and even that only applies because of where and when we live.

That's not to deny its utility at all, but its utility is the point, hence my leaning harder all the time toward pragmatism.

The twisty journey that all must take from lumpen realism, to the body shock of idealism, to the eventual resolution of enactivism and pragmatism. — apokrisis

That's how I read Hume, and it would be true of me except I've never found idealism appealing so there are things about the predictive modeling view that wouldn't bother an idealist but freak me out a bit, as I'm getting it all at once.

If not, on what coherent grounds do you find that reasoning and logic can serve as means for discerning what is real? — javra

As above, because that's all they're for, at least as predictive approximations.

You seem to accept the thrust of the argument from reason, that if materialism is true then there really isn't anything you'd call logic. I think there's no real argument presented at all, but there is something like a conflict of definitions. This discussion has at least forced me to consider which side of the fence I want to be on, and if I have to give up the eternal truths of logic to stick with natural science, then so be it.

I've taken the opportunity to choose, but I don't think it's actually forced by the argument. Denying that the universe comes with a built-in logical structure we discover does not require us to deny that systems we have ourselves constructed can have the logical structure we give them. To say otherwise looks like a simple genetic fallacy to me. The logic I "find" in the world is an approximation I make; the logic in a mathematical proof or a computer program or a game of chess is fact, because we made it so. Is there some other sense in which the logic we imbue these artifacts with is eternal and unchanging? If so, it's something different from what we've been talking about.

Is there some other sense in which the logic we imbue these artifacts with is eternal and unchanging? If so, it's something different from what we've been talking about. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes to the first; no to the second.

That said, thanks for the informative reply. What you say of logic makes sense, but then, it also unintentionally equivocates what is at issue – this at least in terms of the dilemma I’ve repeatedly presented.

It hence equivocats between logic proper and that which it necessarily depends upon: the basic laws of thought, of which I exemplified the most fundamental of these: the law of identity.

Logic – here presuming we’re addressing formal logic and not informal logic – is largely axiomatically founded. With most of these axioms being creations which we for whatever reason (a best inference, a shot in the dark, and so forth) thereby fabricate and then build logical systems upon. It is because of this that different systems of (formal) logic can be obtained (consistent, paraconsistent, etc.). In comparison, informal logic is simply the process of solving problems in linear, step-by-step manners of thought – irrespective of how this might come about – and so is for the most part equivalent to rationality and reasoning.

Either type, however, would not be able to be engaged in in any manner whatsoever if not for our utterly fundamental manner of being aware – this in respect to anything, including of empirical givens (e.g., the sky’s color), of introspective givens (e.g., a felt emotion), of proprioceptive givens (a felt pain), and so forth. Fully innate to all aspects of our awareness is something that is so utterly basic, so utterly necessary, that quite a few might be at a loss for why it should be presented as a law that we follow to begin with. Namely: Anything (e.g., an entity, a process, a quality, a property, etc.; else, a set of any of the aforementioned or mixture of these; and so forth) one is aware of at time t can only be at time t the very same given one is aware of – this in comparison to being both itself and something other at the same time and in the same respect. E.g., when one (consciously) strictly focuses on X at time t one does not – cannot - then strictly focus (consciously) on Y at time t (needless to add, this in the same respect).

This is (of if one prefers, appears to be) a property of all awareness – hence, derivatively, of all possible conscious thought (one cannot think without being aware of one’s thought(s)). It is not something that some person decided one day to concoct as an axiom thinking that, upon its being so axiomatized, it might then be put to use as foundation for further reasoning by him/herself and others. It is not something that can be invented by some awareness that, at some initial time of its creation, lacked the very ability addressed.

It is then termed a law – not because some individual or cohort decided to make it a law for others to follow – but because it is deemed to be an immutable governing factor of all possible awareness (and, hence, of all possible thought).

Becoming, if you’d like, meta-aware of this innate aspect of all awareness is a discovery of what is and has always been – but an awareness does not need to be endowed with this meta-awareness in order to be aware and, thus, to be governed by this, so traditionally termed, law of identity.

I know of those who doubt the reality of the LNC. I have yet to learn of any philosopher or non-philosopher who in any way doubts the law of identity as just specified.

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Hopefully I’ve addressed the law of identity more clearly this time around than I did when I was replying to the issue of infants’ lack of recognition of object identity (which, again, is a complex concept which we likely learned as infants via trial and error and which we adults entertain habitually in mostly unthinking manners – but which could not be obtained in the absence of that property of awareness just specified, i.e. in the absence of the law of identity).

If so, then the question should be addressed not in terms of logic but, again, in terms of the basic laws of thought upon which all forms of logic are contingent. To further simplify things, I'll here strictly address the law of identity (as it was just described):

Can – or, better asked, does – this utterly innate law of identity change over time?

If so, on what grounds can we consider any aspect of our current thought process to arrive at any existential truth – such as that of materialism (for example)?

If not, how can materialism account for this utterly immutable governing principle of all awareness?

The logic I "find" in the world is an approximation I make; — Srap Tasmaner

I think it helps to see we are pursuing a model of causality when we talk about the logic, structure, rationality or intelligibility of nature. Otherwise you are getting too hung up on the human mathematical practice and it’s semiotic peculiarities. You get caught out by the fact that semiosis is itself a symbolic and mechanical way of regulating the material world, and the material world then has its own organic logic - that of a self-organising dissipative structure.

So we have to be able to step back and see the whole of a modelling relation in which the model and the world have their own causalities, their own logics. And what would then universalise them as aspects of the one “logical” cosmos is the further step of understanding how the mechanical and the organic are the two poles of a meta-dichotomy. They can mutually exist as “other” to each other.

So the usual monistic and foundationalist instinct is to reduce our models of cosmic logic or cosmic cause to a single central truth. But semiosis and systems science explain why this quest proves so hard. It is because causality/logic is irreducibly complex in the triadic way that systems thinking describes.

The approach to the goal of a unity of opposites has to begin with the grant that anything might be the case. The “ground” of being is a pure material potential/pure logical vagueness. An everythingness of unstructured fluctuation.

We can know this is the most reasonable starting point or initial conditions as we can wind back from the developed state of the Universe today. We can see that the Universe is the most fundamental expression of an organic causality in that it is the grand self-organising dissipative structure that constrains all else due to the laws of thermodynamics and symmetry breaking.

And we can also see that one of the possibilities that exists in this general dissipative state of order is life and mind - the evolution of an informational causality, a localised symbolic and mechanical regulation that cuts across the Universe’s global dissipative project.

Modelling can control entropy flows for its own purposes as it has codes to create memories that stand outside the world of ordinary self-organising dynamics. It can manufacture networks of switches - like enzymes, neurons, utterances, logic gates - that switch material flows off and on with dichotomous certainty.

So we can say nature just self organises under the logic/causality of dissipative structure. But that itself is a statement we are then making about “the real world” from the cosy mechanistic confines of our modelling relation with that world.

And therein lies the problem. Or at least the knot of complexity which makes people’s heads explode with its self-referential Goedelian incompleteness. We can only seem to map the territory. We realise we are applying a mechanical perspective to what it itself now claimed as being the “other” of the organic. This doesn’t compute. The regress appears infinite. We are spat back out of our metaphysics into dualistic confusion.

Yet this need not be the case. If we can understand the world vs model relation in terms of an actual natural dichotomy - one that unites the organic and mechanical as complementary and reciprocal aspects of being - then we can formulate a triadic vantage point that sees both sides to the one more complex whole.

That is why I champion biosemiosis. It goes beyond pragmatism to speak to the scientific “how” of how negentropic organisms exist by mechanically ratcheting the entropic gradients of a dissipating cosmos.

In a nutshell, the material world has physical dimension. It costs time, space and energy to cause things to happen. And the way to then stand outside this world so as to model and regulate it is to thus lack the constraints of being dimensioned. To systematically reduce that dimensional involvement between model and world until it becomes the zero cost presence of an information bit or Euclidean 0D point.

The sly trick of life and mind, with their memories and informational order, is that they don’t actually have to dematerialise themselves to be literally dimensionless ghosts or whatever. As processes, they just have to be able to encode the world using a symbolic machinery that involves a small and constant entropic cost per unit of information captured and stored.

The brain burns nearly a quarter of our calories. But we can afford that because we use our brains to feed our mouths. And while feeding our mouths has been top of mind for most of history, the brain is a flexible enough bit of hardware that it could also learn to run verbal and mathematical systems of semiosis on top of its evolved genetic and neural ones. Homo sapiens could ascend the ladder of world models to ever greater dimensionless abstraction and so aspire to regulate the material dimensional world from some ever less materially constrained - and hence more purely informational - place.

So again, our big metaphysical question here is what is the fundamental model of the causality/logic of the Universe? And this quest is already irreducibly complex because we are mechanical systems modelling an organic world in the mechanical way that looks to contradict everything about that world.

This seems an irresolvable problem. But it is also the larger semiotic inevitability. Organic order - the evolution of a Universe structure by the logic of dissipation - had to create the possibility of its own mechanical regulation to the degree it became crisply dimensional and thus gave causal reality to whatever could then conceal its dimensionality - ie: the further realm of 0D symbols. Or at least semiotic systems which could afford information storage as a very small and constant cost.

A word is a puff of air. But we can make it stand for anything in terms of some unit of socially meaningful information. An enzyme is a chain of amino acids, but the body can toss one into the biochemical fray and regulate the direction of any metabolic reaction. A neuron is an abrupt act of depolarisation, but it can stack up levels and levels of Bayesian predictive routines. A number can be encoded in the 1s and 0s of a logic gate, but the resulting mathematical structure encoded in a pattern of electrically-powered switching can function as a useful model in any way a human cares to imagine.

The brute materiality of the Cosmos is the ground of its own antithesis in terms of bringing to life - being the cause - of the mechanical symbol processing that transcends the Comos’s strictly dimensional existence.

Yet look closely enough - understand semiosis as physical process with a small but constant cost per unit - and you can reunite the model with its world. We see that life and mind are part of the Cosmic fabric as all they really do is aid its dissipation by applying Bayesian modelling to the creation of paths that locally accelerate the global diktat of the Second Law.

We speak of causality when we talk of material structure. We speak of logic when we talk about informational structure. And both those things are different, yet also fundamentally connected. In formal terms, we would get closest to the metaphysical truth by being able frame them as two halves of the one larger dichotomy. And to do that, we have to dig away at the third thing of the way the two halves indeed connect. The story of the switches and ratchets which are the Janus interface bridging the epistemic machines with their ontologised environments.

Or if we switch from this synchronic perspective to the “other” of the developmental/evolutionary diachronic perspective, then we have to dig away at the third thing of the way the two halves could co-arise from some shared initial state or a vagueness … which is neither dimensional, nor dimensionless, but now “other” to dimensionality in general. In other words, the Apeiron - the everythingness that is neither yet a something, nor yet distinguishable from a nothing, but “exists” as a logical ground for any resulting structured material being.

This is certainly a twisty saga. But it is the systems metaphysics Anaximander first articulated, Peirce formalised, and which science is cashing out in twin pronged fashion as it comes to model the Universe as a self-organising dissipative structure and life/mind as itself the machinery of models that can further ratchet this generalised cosmic flow.

In effect, small infants live in a different world from us, with different or perhaps only fewer laws of thought. They transition to ours, mostly. — Srap Tasmaner

And generally learn to speak as a part of that. Something which is also unique to h. sapiens.

Object identity is not an identical property to that of what the law of identity stipulates. — javra

The law of identity itself originates with Greek philosophy with Parmenides assertion that "what is, is," and "what is not, is not", suggesting that something is what it is and cannot be what it is not. Later, in the Phaedo, there is the 'argument from equals' where Socrates argues that, in order to ascertain that two objects have the same length, we must already have the 'idea of equals' in order to make the judgement as to sameness and difference.

My belief is that our every rational act is suffused with such judgements of sameness and difference, is/is not, equals/unequal. And because it structures our cognition, these are also inherent in reality as experienced by us.

So again, our big metaphysical question is what is the fundamental model of the causality/logic of the Universe? — apokrisis

The lesson of philosophy since Kant is that we can't see the Universe from some point outside our own cognitive apparatus - that the world and the subject are inextricably intertwined. The world and the self have distinctive existences within that matrix but the world remains an experience-of-the-world. Within that matrix logic and mathematics are formal structures which are replicable and inter-subjectively verifiable, but I say it's a mistake to think of them as being 'in the mind'. They're neither 'in here' nor 'out there' but structures within the experience-of-the-world. Reason provides the means to abstract, predict, and generalise, which is why Greek philosophy held reason in such esteem as it provided insight into the causal formal domain, whereas sensory consciousness only reveals the phenomenal domain.

My belief is that our every rational act is suffused with such judgements of sameness and difference, is/is not, equals/unequal. And because it structures our cognition, these are also inherent in reality as experienced by us. — Wayfarer

I'm in agreement. Could try to splurge on the idea a little, but am thinking this would only muddle matters.

However, in relation to what has been so far discussed by me, on one hand there is the issue of whether the law of identity is immutable for all awareness and, thus, for all consequent thought. Then, on the other hand, there is the issue of whether physical reality in fact does conform to this same principle: that what is X at time t cannot in the same respect be non-X at time t - not just epistemically but also onticaly.

Since we're all quite familiar with introductory notions of quantum mechanics, this issue, for instance, can then apply to the wave-particle duality of quantum particles: Is a particle a particle at time t when its so measured to be? Is this so called "measurement" only a best inference - rather than an immediate percept of what is - that can thereby be mistaken (due to mistaken reasoning) in the identity of what is being measured - such that what's measured is neither strictly particle nor wave, but something different? Or is it, in physical reality, both a strict particle and a strict wave simultaneously and in the same respect - contradictory though this is? But the latter can then signify that a chair can ontically be a swimming pool at the same time and in the same way - and so so much for reasoning.

For those of us who don't know how to "shut up and just do the math", how one address the law of identity as an existential given - one that might be applicable to physical reality at large as well as all our awareness - will directly impact one's possible choices in perspective regarding this issue of particle-wave duality just mentioned.

I don't have a ready answer for this issue up my sleeve - just my convictions. And this subject is probably a distraction for the thread's primary theme. All the same, it's interesting stuff to me - ontologically speaking.

------

Edit: BTW, thanks for the head's up as to the historic background to the law of identity. I misspoke in that previous post you quoted from: the principle was known of prior to Aristotle.

Numbers - more accurately, quantity - is something the occurrence of a physical reality essentially entails (otherwise one would have a quantity-devoid, partless, etc. reality - which is not what the physical presents itself to be). — javra

" NUMBER IS DIFFERENT FROM QUANTITY
This difference is basic for any sort of theorizing behavioral science, for any sort of imagining of what
goes on between organisms or inside organisms as part of their processes of thought.
Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that
numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.
Between two and three, there is a jump. In the case of quantity, there is no such jump; and because jump is missing in the world of quantity, it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.
Even when number and quantity are clearly discriminated, there is another concept that must be
recognized and distinguished from both number and quantity. For this other concept, there is, I think, no
English word, so we have to be content with remembering that there is a subset of patterns whose
members are commonly called "numbers." Not all numbers are the products of counting. Indeed, it is the
smaller, and therefore commoner, numbers that are often not counted but recognized as patterns at a
single glance. Card-players do not stop to count the pips in the eight of spades and can even recognize the characteristic patterning of pips up to "ten."
In other words, number is of the world of pattern, gestalt, and digital computation; quantity is of the
world of analogic and probabilistic computation."

Gregory Bateson Mind and Nature- A necessary Unity

Between two and three, there is a jump. In the case of quantity, there is no such jump; and because jump is missing in the world of quantity, it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. — Janus

Alright, so you're saying (via your quote) that tomatoes are not quantifiable?

As to the "exactness" of what a gallon consists of, this applies to all measurements in general, doesn't it? As in "exactly 1 yard or meter" doesn't quite exist in every day physical reality - other than good enough approximations - but only occurs as an abstracted concept ... much the same as a (perfect) circle doesn't occur in physical reality. Take the standard meter by which all measuring devices (say, a tape measure) are measured and built, place this very standard on any flat surface: which molecules pertain to the meter and which don't? And then there's smaller constituents of the physical. Its exactness doesn't occur in physicality.

Till shown otherwise, I'm calling BS on the quote's contents. One can't have numbers (such that they mean anything) in the absence of quantity, I still say.

Alright, so you're saying (via your quote) that tomatoes are not quantifiable? — javra

Sure, language is ambiguous, and we can say that there is a certain quantity of tomatoes or a certain number of tomatoes. But the quantity of tomatoes, although it can be given as a number, could also be given as a weight or a volume. Of course, these weights or volumes are also expressed in numbers, but Bateson's point is that number is discrete, whereas quantity, insofar as a distinction can be made between it and number, is not.

So, we can have exactly three tomatoes, but we cannot have exactly three kilograms or cubic centimeters of tomatoes.

The lesson of philosophy since Kant is that we can't see the Universe from some point outside our own cognitive apparatus - that the world and the subject are inextricably intertwined. — Wayfarer

So where are you standing when you see that embodied modelling relation?

Pragmatism/semiosis is about going the next step of discovering the extremes of a disembodied view by starting with the extremes of the embodied view.

This is why Peirce began with phenomenology. He tried to excavate the Firstness of qualia of “mere flashes of feeling and sensation” as they are before being complexified by language and logic.

Then he flipped that to show how that then looks from the other perspective of maximally disembodied material reality. Hence his “objective idealism”. Which might as well be called his “subjective realism”. The two are just reciprocal in being organised by dialectical inquiry.

So one thing can always be described or measured in terms of its dichotomous other. Instead of the equals sign - which would describe their dynamical balance, you just need to have an inversion sign (a reciprocal equation) that defines the same dynamical balance in terms of its complementary limits.

Gray = gray. But black = 1/white. And vice versa.

The same game allows us start where we first find ourselves - usually in a grey fog of vagueness or uncertainty - and figure out that there are these psychological limits in terms of self and world, first and third person views, embodied and disembodied cognition.

Kant started a ball rolling. But he was not the last word.

They're neither 'in here' nor 'out there' but structures within the experience-of-the-world. — Wayfarer

So everything is “just models”. Except then there is the further thing of not all models being equally rigorous.

You suggest a dichotomy of formal-phenomenal. That is the right start in terms of logical rigour as it posits qualities that mutually quantify.

But I think you can see how it bakes in category errors. It looks to mix up epistemological and ontological qualities. Or if you are really wanting to talk about Platonic ideas, then you are straying into the pitfalls of Cartesian substance dualism.

I see some sense to the cut you want to make. But I don’t think it is a sufficiently clean cut.

If you hit the dichotomy between its eyes, you would then also have a metric by which formal thought and bare consciousness could be measured. The qualities would be quantified by their status as the polar extremes or a reciprocally causal relation.

In my view, you are talking about mindfulness at the level of neurobiology vs sociocultural construction. But I argued that these are all hierarchical levels of semiosis done with increasingly formal abstraction and material range.

Types of “consciousness” - or the Bayesian modelling relation - are being stacked up with broadening scope and greater organismic being.

Semiotics sorts out the foundational basics of what is going on causally. Now we are talking about the specifics of grades of semiosis and how they are indeed developing along a natural arc towards the limits of symbolic abstraction.

Forget naked feels and atomistic qualia. They aren’t evidence of anything definite or rigorous, despite what phenomenologist would like to claim. Or at least, rigorous phenomenology discovers holistic states of sensory, motor and affective integration when it zeroes in on “what it is like to experience redness”. Qualia are reductionist constructs. Holism discovers gestalts when it indulges in drilling down to psychological Firstness.

So yep, there is always the dichotomy, the dialectic, to make our ideas clear enough to be measured. And neurobiology has its system of measurement in the way we respond bodily to a “stimulus”. Social construction had its own measurements ranging from the rather informal constraints of “does this conform to traditional convention” to fully formalised acts like reading the numbers off a dial.

There are levels of semiosis that express a sort of dichotomy in developing along the path from concretely embodied to abstractly disembodied. But genes are not “other” to numbers. Biosemiosis is about how information breaks entropic symmetries.

Organisms exist by giving nature a direction. And broadly this is always metabolic. Even philosophers have to eat. But then we have gone on to create metabolisms at the level of agrarian societies and industrialised economies.

Homo sapiens invented articulate speech and kicked the collective metabolism up a gear. The Ancient Greeks took the Pythagorean turn of seeing maths could be closed by proofs and so opened the door to the giddiness of Platonic idealism. But what then actually made maths and logic matter in human lives? It wasn’t the discovery of a new realm of being. It was just the practicalities of turning a shit-load of fossil fuel into population growth that wasn’t just exponential but hyperbolic. The rate of increase was increasing up until about 1990.

Pragmatism says sure, maths and logic seem to speak to maximal disembodiment. Silicon Valley believes it to be the future reality. The Metaverse and the Singularity. But those wet dreams of computer science forget that humans are still just doing metabolism. The only thing really changing is the scale.

This is the anthropocene. The population is topping out at 10 billion hungry mouths and ecology says we way overshot the actual carrying capacity. Our economic models that got us here were all wrong as they did not factor in the other side of the equation - the environmental capital that is being converted into social capital. Etc.

So again, a clear view of the reality is critical. Maths may be unreasonably effective in describing nature - from the much simplified reductionist point of view. But the holistic use of maths in modelling is a whole lot tougher. We need robust systems modelling to rejig our metabolic systems to continue any further as civilised beings who can also live within ecological limits.

All this is to say that slicing across the complexity with the right dichotomies has become mission critical. Ways of thought appropriate to agrarian societies are in the past. Ways of thought constructing the world as it is today are about to hit the wall.

That is why I promote the combo of dissipative structure and semiotic regulation. Or what some call ecological economics. A practical philosophy of how to be an organism with all these stacked up levels of semiosis and cranked up future expectations.

Platonism is fun with ideas. My point is that in some sense the formal does transcend the materiality of being. But human systems of thought are then closely tied in practice to achieving basic needs. And for the majority, a bucket of KFC is the ultimate Platonic good. (Well, it has pragmatically become the quickest way to get protesting inmates down off the roofs around these parts.)

So judging by what society does rather than what philosophers might call “the truth”, the realm of civilised concern remains the metabolic reality of giving the entropy of chemical reactions a usefully constructive direction. And reductionist maths is unreasonably effective when pointed towards that end.

So, we can have exactly three tomatoes, but we cannot have exactly three kilograms or cubic centimeters of tomatoes. — Janus

I of course accept this, but so far fail to see its significance.

Rather than focusing on the absolute exactitude of things in the physical world (which I would grant does not exist, all of it being in flux and such - tomatoes very much included), I'd instead focus on the discreetness of physical givens as discerned by awareness. Something which, as an indefinite amount of something, we commonly term quantity in the English language. Which we then use numbers to more precisely quantify in definite manners.

I don't know the background of the guy you've quoted. Is the guy trying to conceive of what reality is like, or would be like, in the complete absence of all awareness in the cosmos? As one avenue of enquiry into this: under the a materialist's reductionist microscope where everything material (i.e., everything) is reducible to the quantum vacuum, in the absence of awareness discreteness would be hard to specify, if at all present. Sure. But then in a world devoid of all awareness so too would numbers not be present.

The exactitude of numbers has everything to do with awareness's aptitudes - especially here addressing that of humans - the very same awareness which discerns discreteness, and hence quantity, in the physical world (to not mention in is own thoughts, in its own emotions, in it own perceptions, etc.).

Take that meter I previously addressed: its composed of ever moving quantum parts; it, as a physical meter stick, has no absolute exactitude. And yet it is not simply an absolutely precise, abstract, free floating number; it instead is a discrete amount of something, a quantity - which we address in definite terms via use of numbers. Hence, "there is one meter stick there".

At any rate, in reference to what seems to be your disagreement with my stance that you've previously quoted:

Either via the idealism of Platonic Realism or the materialism of today's mainstream views, how can one have numbers in the complete absence of discrete amounts of givens - i.e., of quantities? (if nothing else, there would yet be a quantity of numbers by the shear presence of the number(s) addressed)

Again, in reference to what I initially said, the physical reality we know of entails the presence of quantity and, due to this, of number, (the later at least for us linguistic animals). (As an apropos, ravens and other animals are known to be able to count, obviously this without the use of language, via which numbers are specified).

I don't know the background of the guy you've quoted. — javra

Gregory Bateson