I think you were distracted away from a quite valid point. — Banno

:lol: :lol: :lol:

From what I've observed, most people don't recognize the irreducibly complex reality you describe. — T Clark

Yes. This is a point very specific to Peircean semiotics and hierarchy theory. But a relational view of reality is already more irreducibly complex than an atomistic one.

One thing can stand alone, however you have to have two things to relate. And then three things to have a hierarchical relation. The story that is a dichotomisation towards limits plus the spectrum of all the mixed states to be found inbetween.

If you have black and white as two complementary extremes, you must also have all the shades of grey which a black and white mixes. And that makes for a triadic story of complexity. This is a simplistic example. But you can see how it makes threeness the irreducible basis of a world with complex relations. You’ve got to break possibility apart in a way it then can relate over all its scales of being.

Apply that logic then to all the dichotomies that Greek metaphysics left as it legacy. Chance-necessity, part-whole, discrete-continuous, integrate-differentiate, matter-form, one-many, and the rest. The Universe formed as a unity of opposites. The irreducible thing of two opposites and their relational unity.

Your complex and nuanced understanding of causality is not how most people understand it. We civil engineers don't work with machinery, we go out into nature and treat it as machinery. — T Clark

Well the crowd I mixed with were mainly ecologists and biologists.

When you're dealing with such a complex system, why do you need the idea of causality? Of course reality can be described using the language of cause, but why do it? — T Clark

How could you - as an ecologist - even argue with someone who only thinks as a mechanist. If it is their actual causal model of reality where the issue lies, you have to be able to argue at the level of a different brand of causality.

A scientist is giving causal explanations just as the basis of what they do. What is an explanation if not an account of a structure of reasons?

Triple dare? But you haven’t moved on from tautology. Love is love. Good is good. Unity of being is … well, unity I guess. And the being thereof.

A pretty thin metaphysics.

To you apathy, for one example, mild liking as another, are equivalent to hate? — javra

Now you are just making babbling noises.

Though it was quite apparent that your problem was with love. It is to the latter that your replied to me, — javra

But never a topic I raised. And now you don’t want to have to provide an answer. Curious.

But I think this is beginning to touch on the nerve that might have been struck in you to elicit all those emotively hurt feelings, or so it seems — javra

Wishful thinking. I don’t see atheism as a term of abuse. Rather the opposite. But for you, metaphysics seems to be the sound of one hand clapping. Broken at base.

Now, just so it said, I won't apologize for implying that love is good. — javra

And I am saying that if this is going to be a useful distinction – one that has dichotomistic rigour – you need to be able to tell me "as opposed to what?". How can I know what you think love is if you won't tell me what it isn't.

Is not-love = hate? Well hate seems make the world spin pretty fast too. If I am to agree with "love is not a wrong", you do seem to understand that a rational argument requires this dialectical framing. But you should also see that you are again jumping your categories.

If what is not a wrong is a right, then what is the actual wrong that makes love a right? If your answer is hate, then why would it even exist in a world where love is supposedly universal and all there is? I mean the math just doesn't add, does it?

Whereas my kind of dichotomies – which are complementary and not antagonistic – say fine. If love is the unity, what are the opposites it usefully combines.

And in social science, that would be competition and cooperation. Two forms of the good that go together splendidly. The basis of rational and civilised human social and economic order.

Or if an ethologist was invited to join the discussion, we might add in dominance and submission – the way social animals achieve fruitful order in their pride, troop, herd and flock structures.

Is it that the good can only be obtained via a balance between the good and the bad (to not bring in evil)? — javra

I thought you were talking about love. Why the sudden change of topic?

Does good and bad seem to make more sense if we are speaking generally about Nature as a whole? Does speaking of Nature as "universal love" make one loses grip on that straight face? Do we want to want to put our most extreme claims of transcendental being back in its bottle a while? Safer to move what's most fragile out of the way.

And to repeat what I have now had to say way to often, any dichotomy that I supported would be that thing which is a pair of complementary limits, not a pair of antagonistic ones. It is worth balancing two varieties of what is "good". And your metaphysical task is to be able to make that make sense.

One doesn't want to be evenly balance between good and evil, or even love and hate for that matter.

If we are talking the natural structure of pragmatic social order, this is why competition and cooperation work so well together. Each supplies something good and healthy that the other lacks. That is why they combine make the world feel complete. Give it a rounded shape if you like.

But keep spluttering away in suppressed fury. Love! LOVE!!! I tell you.

Or what you can only assert ever more vigourously in lieu of any credible argument.

I simply point out the lack of any argument in your post. Not even any poetry as some kind of evidence. Just some mutterings about sex as rape and praise for Peirce's worst idea.

you apparently caused some pique — Banno

And here is Banjo to join the mean girls with his usual constipated approach to insult. Ohh sir, sir! Well apparently. And to some degree. But surely, surely. Oooh sir!

what i so far find to be facts — javra

Yep. The kind of facts one finds in Hallmark cards. And PF apparently.

All this talk of love spoken through gritted teeth. Something's up. :up:

Love makes the world go round, which nobody can deny who is born of two parents. — unenlightened

So why just two parents? Why this complementary thing of a penis and a vagina, a sperm and an egg, the birth of a girl or a boy?

And if love makes the world go round, does hate bring it to a stop? Or doesn’t another song says love brought their world to a sudden stop.

All this talk of love from you. And yet I’m not feeling love from you. Curious. Poetry employed in an act of social aggression.

I have to be charitable and conclude that you only mean to prove my thesis with this little display of uptight contrariety. So thank you. :up:

In the OP and subsequent posts, I think I’ve made it reasonably clear what I’m talking about when I say “causality.” — T Clark

Yep. It finally seems clear. You feel the notion of causality is too simple to deal with the complexities of reality. Applying its simple rules quickly becomes defeated by the fact that reality is just too much to be boiled down into chains of cause and effect. Everything is too networked, too interdependent, too full of feedback and strange loops. Stuff emerges. Things are transformed. Growth and development leave linear tales of cause and effect fast behind.

Which is all true. But that is only to say that Nature is not a machine. A machine is designed to have a mechanical logic, a cause and effect linearity. It can be described in terms of a blueprint and a system of differential equations. But Nature is irreducibly complex. Or at least that is the conclusion of the systems science tradition that has sought a better model of natural causality - the causality of a cosmos - since philosophy first started cranking up.

Greek holism came before Greek atomism. Although not by that much as holism and reductionism are themselves a neat dichotomistic pairing of the metaphysical options. Aristotle entered the chat a few centuries after it got going and brought some coherent sense to both sides of this causal debate.

Anyway, the issue is clearly understood. Nature has its causal structure. That is bleeding obvious. And it is not a mechanical one. Or at least only in part. So a complex world gets to have a complex model of its causality. Aristotle sketched out the four “becauses” which would helpfully cover all the bases that needed to be covered.

All four causes would in some sense have “effects”. But already the effects could be broadly divided into constraining or limiting effects - effects like global laws - and constructing effects - effects like physical degrees of freedom. Effects like material and efficient causes that construct the linear tales of how one thing leads to another thing in little chains, that might then aspire to the complexity of networks with feedback loops.

And even networks of such networks that were arranged in levels of scale, or hierarchies of networks connected in feedback loops. And beyond that, even the hierarchical order that comes as networks of feedback show emergent behaviour and become organised by symmetry breaking and phase transitions. Networks that change state in the way gas condenses to liquid, and liquid crystallises into solid.

So we can say causes have effects. But then comes the complexity - the complexity that Nature demands from its would-be modellers.

The world divides neatly into its tale of global constraints in interaction with its local constructive freedoms. Its system of natural laws and the individuates action they regulate. And the maths and the logic have to follow that divide. As a field of research, this was making strong progress even 150 years ago. We had non-linear maths. We had statistical mechanics. But it was the invention of the computer that put a rocket under the maths of complexity and chaos theory.

Massively large calculations could hope to do a reasonable approximation of the intricate patterns of connection that make up any natural system. One could simulate the weather, the internals of a proton, the boom and bust of fishing stocks or stock markets. Networks of feedback arranged into hierarchies of such networks over logarithmic scale. Throw in phase transition behaviour too. It’s all become standard causal modelling.

Go to any lecture on theories of cosmic inflation and the modellers have to present their computer simulations of the physics that their particular model predicts. Go to any climate change conference and researchers will offer the latest update on how then Gulf Stream is faring and how close it seems to a radical phase change that will flip its course,

So metaphysics offers us a unified story of the natural logic of natural systems. And we also get a sub-model of atomistic reduction out of that exercise for free. We get the other thing of a mechanical notion of reality - nature imagined now as a reductionist machinery.

Then maths and science come along. It begins to model nature in reductionist and mechanical terms as that is the simplest place to start. You walk before you run. And also, society got immediate payback on building up a new mechanised form of itself. Reductionism was a partial model of causality that really worked down here on the face of a planet where we had already transformed its ecology by the technology of farming and were tantalised by the prospects of a collective social mechanisation.

Then this in itself became a networked feedback process. To control Nature better, we had to improve our causal models. We had to learn how to deal with complexity and chaos at the level of our maths and science. We had to be able to make useful predictions that could incorporate all the nonlinearity and uncertainty that Nature actually contains.

So these days, using computers to crunch numbers into hugely intricate patterns of hierarchical recursion, we can predict the weather, get the right numbers for the interior of a proton, manage fisheries, even start to model the kinds of things that humans would say to each other in natural language responses if they were trying to be both socially pleasant and objectively reasonable. The large language model that simulates our “collective intelligence”.

So does the fact that cause and effect models seem too limited to encompass the real world mean they are effectively useless as you wanted to argue?

Well the history of humanity seems to suggest no. The problem is more the lag between the partial reductionst models and the later arrival of the more holistic models. We are already running at one level of inquiry before having learnt to walk at the next.

I'm not saying this is the natural order. I'd say it applies to the West (and certainly in my patch) and it's the contingent product of capitalism and culture. My Aboriginal friends here tell me that this process isn’t a part of First Nations culture. — Tom Storm

Competition-cooperation is the balancing act necessary to live as a society. Although humans are then also still shaped by the dominance-submission hierarchies that are the natural order in social creatures who lack the language to organise at a cultural level.

So it is the balance that is the necessary part of the equation. And the lifestyle that is contingent in the sense that different lifestyles tend towards different balances in what a culture demands.

A traditional foraging culture will be different from a settled farming community, which will be different from a nomad pastoralist lifestyle, which will be different from a modern neoliberal economy or authoritarian police state.

But each such lifestyle still has to find a collective balance of these forces - both the cultural habits of competition and cooperation, and the neurobiological habits of dominance and submission - that “works”. That promotes the long term stability of a collective social identity in a world that always changes, especially in terms of how that collective social identity is doing things to transform its landscape, attempt to transform “its” world.

Still, I’m always aware that my cause is just one of many competing values in a world where most things are ultimately for sale. And in the end, what we are really talking about is human behaviour a product of culture and language not some “true” order of nature. — Tom Storm

But right there you point to the core dynamic that organises society - a balance between competition and cooperation - and then shrug your shoulders and say there seems to be no natural order in the way humans collectively organise.

You can see it but you can’t see it.

it is at least intuitive and empirical to say that one object hitting another caused the other to move. — NOS4A2

But if every action is matched by an equal and opposite reaction, then who actually pushed whom Newton? What happens when you are an astronaut and throw your wrench? How can it be that you are now sailing backwards? Intuitively and empirically?

I hear you. You coulda been a contender. But yah couldna be bothered. :up:

It's clear from this thread I'm working on pulling my thoughts on this subject together. I don't think that's the same thing as glimpsing fragments from different puzzles. — T Clark

Don't be insulted. Even a rag bag of fragments is not only as far as most folk get in knitting together their lives into some sort of semblance of a coherent whole, it is even a respectable achievement in the eyes of PoMo types like @Joshs and @Banno. They call it bricolage. A nice French term for do it yourself. Grab whatever is at hand and whack up some kind of art work.

[[Whisper it softly: there is then a bit of a feud going on in the bricolage camp.

Some talk as if this creative reassembly is a crafty rearrangement of stable elements. Others angrily protest that life must instead involve an ongoing emergence and transformation of the found elements.

Dichotomies. Always there lurking to bite you on the philosophical bum!]]

I have taken a look at it and I do not see the connection with what I have said. — JuanZu

I am also looking for a better law or principle that accounts for the production of the singular, which is neither particular nor universal, neither general nor specific. — JuanZu

Peirce had a theory of tychism or objective chance. And that justified his "propensity" approach to probability. The claim is that chance or indeterminism is a real fact of reality. And that then makes synechism or the forming of long-term habits – evolving into patterns of regularity – a real fact of reality too.

So you want the thing of the irreducible novelty. But the best you are going to get is the dichotomy of irreducible chance and inescapable pattern forming. The development of a world organised by its propensities or dispositions. Neither chaotic nor rigid, but the balance that is being a system constrained towards desired ends while employing uncertain means.

Peirce built a whole logic around this concept. Quantum physics now produces a whole world. :grin:

Quantum tunneling is an example of being able to make that jump into the future which proves to be the way you could have just escaped from that past. A fluctuation that could hurdle a barrier. An action, but also one meeting the constraints of being a "least" kind of one. The briefest time for which the right amount of energy could be borrowed for.

So matter which way you turn in causality, there is always going to be a dichotomy. And an irreducible novelty can be classed in semiotic terms as a difference that makes a difference. A fluctuation that also has a distinct meaning.

So tychism asserts that reality is basically a spontaneity of fluctuation. A vacuum state. A sea of difference that is generally a state of indifference, yet also capable of generating events that make a difference. A random action can start something, as in the example of sandpiles and their critical state.

A trickle of sand for a while just piles up. But then its slopes reach a critical angle. Some next falling sand grain is the one to break the camel's back or buckle the beam. It strikes just right to trigger a sand avalanche. And do the system resets, having to build its slope back up, then wait for some random grain to make history by again becoming the difference that made a difference.

I presume you want more from what you mean by "novelty". But in physics and Peircean metaphysics, this kind of complex systems approach is your best starting point. The idea that everything starts from a state of poised criticality. For a long time nothing seems to be happening, and suddenly it does. Thom's catastrophe theory. Linear change becomes non-linear change as a sudden phase transition.

Switching models again – there are so many – think of the ball resting on the dome or the pencil on its tip. Spontaneous symmetry breaking. So many directions to go, only one will get picked. So many things could be accused of rocking the ball or the pencil off its perfect balance, but even the smallest imaginable fluctuation is already – in causal terms – enough. Sufficient. We don't even have any good reason to try to single it out. Some air molecule could have done it. Somebody coughing in another room and faintly vibrating the building.

So the irreducible novelty, the difference that makes the difference, is the smallest nudge within the most critically poised context. No bigger nudge was needed. And no less poised context would have worked. There had to be these two things in some exact reciprocal relation that one could measure even down to the Planck scale of the quantum.

Again, every way you turn, there will be a dichotomous structure to causality. Novelty is just then the badge of honour pinned on the lapel of the difference that turned out to make the difference. It could make a difference because it was indeed a difference. But it made a different kind of difference to all the other difference. It actually changed its own world in some obvious fashion. The pencil toppled, the ball rolled, the slope slide, the particle tunnelled, the beam buckled.

The thing – the propensity – that was always the inevitability indeed eventually happened. And it was also as "accidental" as such a thing could be. It was hard to have picked it out in a crowd of exactly-similar looking events in a context that was also "all the same" in being loaded to the gills in a state of critical tension poised for some global topological transition. A world that would never be quite the same again.

What does it add to the discussion to talk about causality instead of just describing the "blooming, buzzing confusion?" My answer--not much — T Clark

And there will be those who just love such an answer.

But there is a reason why pragmatism describes it as the natural state of the newborn helpless babe when thrust kicking and screaming into the strange new world.

We start with the simple things so as to move on to the complicated things. Or in your case, its a shrug of the shoulders? Once you seem to be getting by, why should other folk still be working hard to get ahead?

I think you and I speak a different language. — T Clark

Not sure if we even live on the same planet. :up:

Is what we are calling mechanistic cause the same as efficient cause. That was what I intended. It's Newtonian cause. f = ma; F = G(m₁m₂)/r²; and then updated by general relativity and quantum mechanics. Me pushing a shopping cart, throwing a ball. Also included are all the things that happen with no people around--a billion light years from here. — T Clark

So you have differential equations. And you have a notion of a world populated by objects. A world of medium-sized dry goods as the metaphysician would scoff. You believe in both causal agents and causal agency as there are laws that apply everywhere in spacetime but also all the things a person might choose or want to do at some point in a vast Cosmos.

There is indeed a reason for confusion. You have glimpses of fragments and they all seem to come from different puzzles. This could take a while.... :grin:

I always thought it was contingencies all the way down. — Tom Storm

And yet maths tells us that even chaos is a structured pattern.

One never arrives at the sound of the one hand clapping. The clapping just get weaker and weaker until it finally seems to fade completely away. :wink:

This is enticing. Can you expand on the latter part of this para? — Tom Storm

Does one need to wonder about why the ant turned left rather than right? Well we could drill down to those causes. And indeed we did in my biology classes where we ran cockroaches on one-sided treadmills to see how that confused them into thinking they had made an unwanted turn.

But I mean, in our models of the world, we only have to be right for all practical purposes. We don't need to know everything to know enough.

I wonder if this is unfair. Certainly there are examples of this. But there are also plenty of folk who don’t care about philosophy and just see mountains and trees and want to preserve and nurture such things. The impulse to destroy or "redevelop" is not a necessary byproduct of our ontology. — Tom Storm

But what happens when the greenie and the developer meet to discuss their mutual prejudices? Doesn't the frustration soon rise to the point where each must assert their dominance in terms of some moral absolutism?

Or don't you talk to developers much. What do you make of a spectacle like Trump telling the UN that climate change is the world's biggest hoax?

You might enjoy this video on the guy who tried to bottle the patterns of architectural form that humans find the most convivial. You will note that it is not completely fractal nor completely mechanical in its design. It indeed answers best to what we, as social creatures with biological requirements, find the most liveable in those terms.



So it is not black and white. Maths and feelings may be opposing limits in a discussion of beauty. But the focus can be tightened in from the Cosmos and self as the universal whole, to groups of people building the villages that sustain a community. We can develop an architecture of the everyday in terms of just that narrowed scope of pragmatic inquiry.

Wouldn't one response be, T Clark, that identifying a dichotomy also depends on were you look? — Banno

And the other response would be – it depends where you find it?

After all, isn't viewing nature in the systems science tradition one choice amongst many - a matter of convention? — Banno

So what are these many other choices that you have in mind?

Isn't it odd how when you thrash about looking for them – as with Gallow's SEP article on (token~type)x(constant~variable) – you arrive at a little four valued table. The cross product of a dichotomy of dichotomies. One not at all unlike Aristotle's own four causes. Just renamed as token causation, type causation, token influence and type Influence. :grin:

So when it comes to models of causality, we find that they tend towards either the triadicity of a hierarchical holism or the monism of a substance reductionism. And that these both arise out of the dualism of an initial dichotomisation. A very simple idea like a world that has causes and so effects. This first thought can then be developed into its complementary triadic and monistic extremes.

The whole deal ends up unified as a unity of opposites of course as, at the end of the day, the triadic view is the irreducible one. Holism has the generality that can incorporate reductionism into it as its particularised case. The Peircean argument.

So your "matter of convention" is more a nod here to woke diversity as the socially appropriate thing to be saying in a public forum these days. It is the necessary presupposition that conditions all the philosophy that feels axiomatically correct in terms of modern cultural convention. It puts one already on the correct side of any debate that could be had in a forum such as PF.

One simply must be a pluralist, an anti-totaliser, a believer in multitudes, an absolutist in value judgements to be a member of the club. One couldn't dream of being anything else in the polite and refined circles of philosophical discussion. Systems thinking sounds so ... horribly and tiresomely plebeian. So non-U.

Peirce had his model of tychism or the probability of propensities. Popper recapitulated it. So the idea has been taken seriously.

Are you saying Josh’s view is mistaken, or just a partial account? — Tom Storm

The mistake would be to not expect some well justified dichotomy to emerge where one can point to a disagreement. So if I am successfully taking things to one extreme – a formal metaphysics – then there is no good reason why that would not have as its "other" the exact opposite approach, which is both equally extreme and equally valid. That way, between them, they would be both mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. They would together arrive at the limits of what could be usefully said.

So his reply is not necessarily mistaken or partial. It just could be. And the only way to find out is reply in kind and see where the dialogue goes. At the very least I should emerge with my own view on what is rightfully the other to my formal metaphysical account of causality. Which may be very much like the direction he proposes, or different in interesting and important ways.

I’m also curious, in light of the first quote above, are you any kind of theist or idealist, or is your position purely rooted in a scientific model of reality? — Tom Storm

My view of Nature is in the systems science tradition. So not theist (although it is only over the past century that the scientific and mathematical part of the deal has started to carry its weight). And only idealist in the epistemic sense, and in the deflationary ontic sense.

So I believe in the reality of structures, for example. Nature just can't help forming itself into rational patterns. It is almost as if material being as a form and end in mind. But that is now the poetic and metaphorical way of putting it. I can be comfortable with that because there are some very exact mathematical models and scientific theories which give the detailed account of why this would feel to be the case just from everyday experience of the world.

Why is a tree or mountain range beautiful? Because that is Nature expressing its scale symmetry – its most basic fractal pattern. And what then is a fractal? Well maths shows us how they are generated from recursive algorithms. They are log/log or powerlaw distributions. They are just what you have to get when you pair global constraints with local freedoms in the most cosmically general fashion.

So that would be an example of tying the two sides of this discussion together. On the one thing, I have my lived experience. Surround me with trees and mountains rather than garden sculptures and blocky buildings. Now I am seeing true natural beauty and not that other thing of a cheaply made realm of mechanical artifice.

But then ask me about why trees and mountains are beautiful and I could bore you to tears with the maths of fractals and how that reveals the true metaphysical bones of reality. One can also then like the Platonic perfection of perfect circles and triangles, straight lines and perpendicular angles. But now that is about the other side to this maths of reality.

One needs a symmetry that can be broken to get anything going at all. And fractal symmetry is about symmetry breaking achieved over all its possible scales. Symmetry breaking taken to the other thing of its limit where it must halt as itself an emergent scale symmetry. The "other" to how it began.

So science is in touch with its idealist side. But this cashes out in a belief in the inescapable truths of rational order. Nature can't escape falling into its particular patterns. Nature has to have its deep causal structure. And learning that doesn't have to make one love trees and mountains any less. Instead, it should expand one's appreciation of being alive in a Universe such as we find it.

Who needs creating gods when ontological structure just has no option but to fall into place exactly as it does – accidents and all? And why else would our soul feel so attuned to natural beauty if we couldn't somehow see the rightness of what is before our eyes. The poetic way of saying all this that @Joshs might prefer to a disquisition on formal logic and maths.

Do you see causality as foundational for how we understand the universe? I can never tell with questions like this; is it something baked into reality, or, like Kant’s time and space, is it something built into human cognition? — Tom Storm

Causality is foundational.

Of course, we are only making models of it. But the models are of something real if we believe in the pragmatic method of reasoning. If our models make mathematical predictions that our methods of observation and measurement then support with evidence.

The question then becomes what is this most general model of reality. Is it exactly the same size as the Cosmos it describes? Or does it need to be larger as we need to be able to imagine a cause so general that it could produce any kind of "Universe". Or can it only instead always be smaller – simply because the true causes are somehow transcendent and ineffable. We are fools as humans to think we can encompass existence with our little bag of mathematical tricks.

I of course want a model of causality that accounts for both cosmology and mind. A pansemiotic model to give it a brand name.

So a model that predicts all that we can observe and doesn't overstep the mark by predicting stuff that just starts to sound idiotic.

Such as you get with multiverse talk for example. The idea of a reality so unconstrained by unity that it fractures into an infinity of universes of any type, and so where there is now not just this one semiotically-structured conscious "you" here in this one pansemiotically structured world, but an infinity of these "yous" living every version of your life. And indeed, an infinity of these "yous" also repeating exactly the same life in every detail. As given this kind of causality that lacks the extra property of finitude, infinity without limits is what you get. What you logically believe to be the true truth. The most truthy truth of them all.

So causality is foundational. It is always just our idea of reality. And yet also, one has a reality to check things with. Once you understand this is the game, the rest is just working out the details to the point you find a good reason to care.

Do humans need to do this for everyday living? Almost universally they prove that they can get by without any measurable degree of logical or mathematical or experimental rigour.

They can just see trees and mountains and imagine instead how much better things would look with as a flattened plaza with some public artwork and this year's version of fashionably blocky buildings. Even beauty can have its necessary other. Be determined by the eye of a beholder. Be considered as a celebration of all things civilised and well-machined.

Reality is dichotomies all the way down. Not turtles.

The irony is that you're treating the science of quantum mechanics as factual, while simultaneously criticizing the scientific framework as "speculative". — Relativist

Bingo. :lol:

Causality can’t be formalized into a clean dichotomy of constraints vs. degrees of freedom or top-down vs. bottom-up. It isn’t a fixed logical schema but a dynamic interplay that unfolds over time. — Joshs

But that is the metaphysical architecture that sets up the dynamic interplay over time. It is boiling causality down into the logical account rather than describing it in terms of the blooming, buzzing confusion one might appear to experience.

The salt marsh doesn’t just exist within constraints and freedoms, it enacts its world through sensorimotor coupling, structural coupling, and ecological embeddedness. Context isnt external constraint; it’s part of the organism–environment system. — Joshs

Again you are saying the same thing. Just in a more touchy feely way.

Rather than positing a timeless schema of causes, we need to see how causality arises within living, embodied processes. — Joshs

But not everything is living and embodied in Nature. You need a model of causality that is large enough to even hopefully account for the reason why a Cosmos would exist. And one that goes beyond flowery words to have mathematical and quantifiable consequences.

Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy. — Joshs

But the argument is that freedoms and constraints co-emerge. In logic, that is what being a dichotomy means. That which is formed by being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

What’s with the twee NPC soliloquies?

I claim my contribution to be definitive. Subject to somebody finding a fatal flaw in my reasoning. — Pieter R van Wyk

So you self-publish on Amazon and try to drum up attention on some random philosophy forum with aggressive demands for definitions of “what is a system” that you can then dismiss. Never getting around to explaining what is so definitive about your own new contribution.

Doesn’t seem crackpot at all.

I knew what it meant from the systems science perspective. And also just in having grown up in Asia and seeing it as part of the daily social habit, woven in with British imperialism, Chinese communism and other interesting social creeds.

My take is that we are better off without the idea of overarching values, because that leaves us with the freedom to create our own values. — Janus

I will state the obvious in that we have this freedom as a right and then the responsibility to exercise it as a fact. Modern society reformed itself to become an open market of value making.

That was working not too bad before social media came along and pushed the consensus beyond a hierarchical balance and into dysfunctional polarisation. Two sides now only wanting to cancel each other out.

I think it's more likely that you can't see what anything in religions mean, except for in the social sense, of how they help society hang together. — Wayfarer

If that is a thought that comforts you, OK.

It's not a debate when you equivocate and waffle. If you want to believe that it is antagonism you face rather than rigour, then OK.

Thinking of it mechanistically, I'm talking about causality that includes the transfer of energy from one system, the cause, to another, the effect. — T Clark

Mechanical forces are quite a particular subset of physics. They depend on the simplistic ontology of atoms in a void. Particles that have mass, shape and motion. They can stick together or recoil at the instant they happen to come into physical contact. They can compound or scatter as a second order topological fact.

So yes. This is a very restricted, if very useful, model of causality. It is exactly what you want if you are in the business of turning nature into a system of machinery. Even society can be imagined in terms of atoms in a void. The neoliberal market model of how life should work.

Machines are a system of switches, levers, ratchets, cranks, cogs, pulleys, pistons, etc. Hard constraints on volatile explosions. Everything becomes predictable as accidents are ruled out. They are made impossible and so can no longer be a cause you need to worry about. You just fill a tank, let the explosive potential go bang at precisely timed moments. Then all the mechanical parts twist and turn in a concert of strict "cause and effect", while the spent products of the explosion get shoved out the exhaust or radiated away by another level of machinery that is a heat exchange mechanism.

Mechanical causality is also what is natural when turning logical relations into computer circuits. You design a machinery of switches and transducers, plug in the electric flow and cool the resulting entropy production. Data become the virtual atoms banging about in their virtual void, clumping or scattering according to how the algorithms are driving their patterns.

So the natural world has a rich causality. The engineered world has its impoverished version. But simplicity is the easiest thing to get built. We learn to come at life's problems as if being asked: now how would a mechanism best handled this little chore.

I answer your challenges to the best of my ability, but not always to your liking. I’ve been here for a decade and I know where the boundary lines are in terms of philosophical commitments, that anything that could be considered religious is outside that boundary. — Wayfarer

There is a boundary between philosophy as making rational sense of the world and philosophy as making shit up. Philosophy is critical thinking. And it should be applied with full rigour to all our social narratives. Then let the cards fall where they may.

Religion is generally fine as the useful myths that a society organises itself by. To the degree that society is just its own thing, it can be as fictional as it pleases. But if a society has to exist in the world, then it needs to pay attention to this global fact. Even if it just shifts to faction, the narrative has to work in the sense of promoting functional behaviour at the collective social scale.

So religion is fine to the degree it works in this pragmatic sense. We are social animals. We do need to be bound by a collective world model to all become the productive inhabitants of this world. A transcending narrative is a basic requirement of social-semiosis.

But are religions good at adapting to changing circumstance? The Anglican Church certainly seems so. Belief in anything is optional. Social cohesion and public service is at the centre of what it does. Buddhism and Confusicanism likewise might be equally progressive within their own social contexts. I'm not sure anyone wants to be run under the rule of mullahs or evangelicals any time soon.

Or maybe that is my mistake as I have enjoyed all the benefits of a progressive and pragmatic social order. I feel no urge to go back to the certainties of life as lived in previous centuries.

But yeah. It is not that I rule out even children recalling past lives. As a pragmatist, I just weigh the evidence for or against. I spent a few years deliberately looking into all the fringe science looking at telepathy, hypnosis, spiritualism and whatever. Especially where it was being done under laboratory conditions. I even took part in experiments to get a taste of how thing were operated.

So I have no problem at all with science investigating the various species of idealist belief. But I've followed closely the results from when that was done. This is all familiar terrain. Been there and done that. Heard any amount of equivocation in the process while also agreeing that science can't pretend to prove the negative. It can only claim to have constrained the scope for doubt. Or in terms of the fringe, the scope for belief in its claims.

How can you seriously propose that time is generated from something which requires time. — Metaphysician Undercover

But my argument is that time is generated from rotation. The first time that something could go around in a circle and so be different from the first time something was also going off in straight line of the same scale.

This is of course the quick and dirty account. But it’s based on the maths of the symmetries underpinning quantum field theory. How SO(3) breaks down into its double cover of SU(2). You can get the fluctuation that is a vector gauge boson. A particle that exists as it has the dimensional structure that is an action in a direction. A translational degree of freedom which carries with it a transverse plane of rotation - a spin that cashes out an intrinsic energy. The constant field strength of a quantum oscillator.

And even this is still the quick and dirty account. Much more maths is involved. And I agree that physics hasn’t been able to fully resolve the issue of what time is at the Planck scale.

Indeed, most simply run classical time straight through the Planckscale and through its final singularity point to come out the other side. Quantum magic is used to paper over the brief disappearance from view and a mirror version of our universe is then discovered emerging in this other classical time dimension.

But I prefer approaches that deal with what happens at the Planckscale and its unit 1 description of the Universe where the classical and the quantum bend into each other so to speak. A singularity is avoided. We instead have a symmetry breaking in terms of the Planck triad of constants, c, G and h. Spacetime extent emerges in conjunction with quantum mechanical content. And c sets the fundamental beat of doubling and halving - doubling of radius and halving of energy density.

Time is emergent as the exponential curve of expanding and cooling this creates. A first moment that is immediately followed by a second moment twice the global scale and half the local energy density. Another period doubling gives you a x4 and x1/4. And so on in powerlaw fashion.

As a fundamental way of looking at the ticking cosmic clock, it’s taken about 7 billion years to achieve the latest period doubling - a doubling of the cosmic horizon coupled to a fall in the Universe’s temperature from about 5 degrees K to 2.7 degrees today.

So time emerged as part of the Planckscale package. What is remarkable is that a clock was set ticking that marked out its moments as geometric growth - the period doubling of a thermal process, or a doubling of spacetime extent and quantum mechanical content. And that this metronomic beat was not disrupted too much by the fact that its contents was evolving its state.

A hot relativistic plasma broke to become a cold comoving and gravitating dust. Matter could suddenly go slower than light and that did indeed change the cosmic expansion rate/dilution rate by a whole order of magnitude. Radiation dilutes at the fourth power as it also redshifts in the time direction while matter dilutes at only the third power. If it wasn’t for the appearance of dark energy, the cosmic clock of time would have gone right off its track. There wouldn’t have been enough gravity exerted by the material contents to continue a smooth doubling-halving through the current matter dominated period of cosmic history.

But then dark energy kicks us in the opposite direction. It now both accelerates us back up to the original geometric or logarithmic beat of time and then overshoots. Time again will break down and effectively come to an end as the cosmic horizon becomes frozen in place and no more temperature fall becomes possible.

So even if you can’t follow these details, you can see how time is an emergent description of what the universe is doing as a material system. The basic period doubling clock relies on matter being in a critical balance as described under inflation and the Lambda-CDM concordance model.

And the reality is that even with dark matter, the Universe was 70% light in this regard. The spring driving the cosmic clock was only a third wound up. The fact that mass condensed out of the radiation flow was a boon as that did something to reorganise the passing of time within a now comoving reference frame. Then dark energy adds its new upward flick where time is halted by a horizon. Unless you want to think of its as continuing in some still more transformed way as the superluminal expanse that flows on over the cosmic horizon.

Biology is not an existential discipline. It isn’t concerned with existence as lived. I could know all there is to know about you, biologically, and yet still not understand you as a person. — Wayfarer

But you were talking about biology as the general cycle of life, not about the neurobiology or sociology that might particularise me as a human individual in the modern world and not a frog or amoeba or human as part of the great mystic cycle of life …. and figuratively, spirit.

So more deflection.

We’ve discussed Stevenson’s interviews with children with past life recall many times on this forum, it is universally scorned, but I think it is meaningful data. — Wayfarer

Jesus wept. I’m out if we are now stooping to this. Anything goes as evidence as - of course - science can always be doubted. It can’t prove spirits don’t exist. Therefore … they do exist. Or how else otherwise could volumes have been written about them?

You can’t give a straight answer so only give me crooked ones.

So I do argue that the common concept of ‘mind independence’ i.e. that the bedrock of reality comprises mind-independent objects, is oxymoronic, as objects can only be known cognitively (in line with Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution in philosophy, that things conform to thoughts, not vice versa. ) That is why there are references to all those sources in that OP, and I dispute that it is either equivocal or vague. But that is really all I have time for now. — Wayfarer

And now the flop the other way. From past life recall back to the safe ground of epistemic idealism.

Nothing vague or equivocal about that at all. :roll:

:up:

Yes, I do believe that death is not the end of life. It certainly is for the individual that I am. But the causes that gave rise to this life will give rise to another (something which gives me no joy). — Wayfarer

So in what sense is that now any different from what the biologist would say? Except biology has the detail and removes the equivocation.

It is true that in traditional Buddhist lore, the animal realm was one of the six domains in which beings take birth, but there is nothing like that kind of belief. — Wayfarer

So again, what would reincarnation and nirvana mean in your modernist Buddhism? What are your ontic commitments that might allow me to distinguish it from everyday biological science?

Hence Nishijma saying that there is no such thing! — Wayfarer

The argument here is that you are always being accused of being vague, equivocal and confused on this key point. This is just more deflection from a question that has been clearly put. Once more, we are getting no proper answer.

Are you confessing finally to just being an epistemic idealist? And modern Buddhism is only that too? If so, great. Just be brave enough to come out and say it. And then be consistent in that position in your posting.

The Buddhist goal is nibbana (Nirvāṇa), liberation from the cycle of re-birth. — Wayfarer

And is that a credible belief when we examine what it would entail? It may indeed function as a key narrative to justify and transmit the Buddhist way of life with a community of that mind. But do you really expect to die a man and come back as a monkey, frog or amoeba? Start climbing the whole damn evolutionary tree all over again, with the level of mind and selfhood that goes with that level of materially embodied cognitive structure that goes with those lifeforms, until you get to be a Tibetan monk and make the magical last step?

If it were not for its pragmatic value as a social narrative organising a particular brand of social order, you would just have to think it a whole heap of silliness. Nothing something that could be asserted with a straight face.

This is why, in Buddhist iconography, in the graphic illustration of the 'wheel of life and death', the Buddha is depicted as outside all of the 'six realms', but in some representations, also inside each of them. — Wayfarer

So the theology evolved its social logic and continued to equivocate on the metaphysical details.

That's perfectly fine if we are talking about useful fictions – the epistemic idealism that is the organising Umwelt of a sociocultural level of organismic existence. It's just a parable. Get its message and don't fuss about the credibility of the world-building.

But if you want to challenge science and its narrative, you can see the problem. Yes you can say that science is just another society-constructing narrative too. It is just as much a useful fiction. And indeed – when it runs out of control in Scientistic fashion – it gives good reason to doubt that it is even useful anymore.

But it gets a bit apples and oranges as Buddhism was a way of social organising that made sense in an agrarian context that never looked like progressing to the next level of a fossil fuel based industrial revolution.

Indeed, as the Chinese experience showed, this was a step that the social order suppressed. The Chinese were great at technology but never minded to become a technological society. Instead Confucianism arose as a philosophy of bureaucratic control – a way to hold a volatile peasant state in a persistent state of agrarian order.

So yes, science is just another mindset for building a sociological level of organismic existence. It is epistemic idealism of another brand. But in realising that idealism is the epistemology and not the ontology – getting the relation with the world the right way around – science clearly released the next level of social development.

And while times may be turbulent, ancient times were turbulent too. All the greatest mass deaths were civil wars or invasions in China, our most ancient and prosperous of civilisations.

So we are rather stuck with the reality of the human condition, no matter what is its stage of development or enlightenment. Which is why we need the muscular rationality of pragmatism. A metaphysics large enough to understand why we do what we do even as we are doing it. Not flimsy creation myths and moral codes forged in pre-industrial times.

Also I would call attention to this phrase 'epistemic relation of self and world.' One point I noticed in Buddhist Studies, is the expression 'self-and-world' is frequently encountered in the Pali Buddhist texts as a kind of single unit of meaning ('self-and-world') This is understood as 'co-arising' or 'co-dependent', actually, one of the sources of the ideas in The Embodied Mind, as Franscisco Varela absorbed this from Buddhism. That is due, as noted above, to the phenomenological aspect of Buddhism, which never looses sight the relationship between experience and being — Wayfarer

Yes, fine. But again first the statement about an epistemic relation and then the equivocating leap to an ontological interpretation.

The embodied mind is our pragmatic model of the "world" is in fact a model of the "world with a self as its central fact". So the world is rendered epistemically. And so is the self. They co-arise as a dichotomisation that produces two exactly contrasting, so exactly complementary, points of view. There is the view the world has of you, and the view you have of the world, all bound up in the one model – the one model that is the embodied structure of some thermalising organism.

So this is all epistemic idealism thus far. Both world and self are products of a modelling relation embodied in the structure of an organism. The doubled viewpoints that speak to each other. A world made of matter and the self made of its ideas – its wishes, hopes, plans and fears. The two sides to a pragmatically-focused relation that can be run as the "internal" model that animates the organism.

But then once you start breaking out this "self" as some kind of ontological essence or substantial being – a spirit stuff – then you have crossed a line and now need to provide a new justification for what you have started claiming.

You can pretend to wind things back in by saying, well, when I said "spirit", I was merely speaking figuratively.

But you know that you then don't. You forget that qualification and launch off into everything that a metaphysics based on dualism, spirit-stuff, value absolutism, divine essences, cycles of reincarnation and the like, would appear to warrant.

Ontic idealism in all its glory. The self-contradicting thing of a figurative narrative now being treated as the literal truth. Equivocation being the means of jumping that shark.

Aristotle's cosmological argument. With the cosmological argument he denies the concept of "prime matter", as physically impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

I've told you different too many times to count. But these days AI can take the labour out of refuting your theological nonsense.

No, the premise that Aristotle denies "prime matter" as physically impossible is incorrect. In fact, the doctrine of prime matter is fundamental to Aristotle's cosmology and his understanding of how change occurs in the world. The claim that Aristotle rejected it might be a misunderstanding or a conflation with later arguments.

Aristotle's cosmological argument....
Aristotle's cosmological argument, centered on the existence of a "Prime Mover," is distinct from the concept of prime matter. The argument is primarily developed in his works Physics and Metaphysics and can be summarized as follows:

Observation of motion: Aristotle observed that all things in the world are in motion or change. For Aristotle, "motion" is a broader concept than just change of place; it includes any kind of change, such as a substance's potential becoming actualized.

The need for a mover: Any object that is moved is moved by another. This means that for any change, there must be an external "mover" or cause that actualizes the potential for that change.
The impossibility of an infinite regress: Aristotle argued that an infinite chain of "moved movers" is impossible. He contended that such a series would have no ultimate source of motion, and therefore, no motion would occur at all.

Conclusion: the Unmoved Mover: To avoid an infinite regress, there must be a first, unmoved mover that initiates all motion without being moved itself. This unmoved mover is pure actuality, without any potentiality, and is the ultimate, uncaused source of all change in the universe.

Aristotle's concept of prime matter....
Prime matter is not something Aristotle's argument disproves; it is a core component of his philosophy.
The substratum of change: Aristotle developed his theory of matter and form to explain substantial change—the coming-to-be and passing-away of substances. When, for example, a living thing dies and decays, what is it that persists through this change? Prime matter is the answer. It is the underlying, featureless substratum that remains when one substance changes into another.

Pure potentiality: Prime matter is described as pure potentiality, meaning it has the capacity to take on any substantial form. It is never found alone, separate from form, because all physical objects are a composite of matter and form. An object's form is what gives it its specific nature and properties.

Physical reality: Far from being physically impossible, prime matter is the very thing that makes physical reality intelligible for Aristotle. Without it, change would involve something coming from nothing, which Aristotle rejected based on the work of his predecessor, Parmenides.

Medieval interpretation and clarification....
It is important to distinguish Aristotle's original ideas from how later philosophers, like Thomas Aquinas, adopted and adapted them for theological purposes.
Theology and creation: While Aristotle viewed the universe as eternal and the Prime Mover as simply sustaining an eternal motion, theologians like Aquinas used Aristotle's argument to support the idea of a creating God.

Prime matter and God: In this medieval framework, prime matter was also part of God's creation, unlike in Aristotle's original conception where the universe (and its matter) was eternal. However, even in this later tradition, prime matter is not dismissed as impossible. Instead, its existence as pure potentiality, requiring a form to be actual, highlights its complete dependency on a more fundamental cause—God—for its existence.

If the potential is truly absolute, then there is nothing actual, as anything actual would be a constraint to the possibility. But without something actual, to act as the cause, the emergence of something, anything, is impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly, potentiality is without constraint. But events demonstrate that constraints can emerge in conjunction with their degrees of freedom – the actualising step that creates now a sea of concrete possibilities.

Once you have the thing of a fluctuation – an action that also has some direction – then everything starts to get going.

No action, no direction. No direction, no action. But actions in a direction? A whole flood of them. Complexity can start evolving.

How could time emerge? Isn't emergence a temporal concept, something which happens over time? It seems self-contradicting to talk about time getting started as changes happen. — Metaphysician Undercover

Time would evolve as cosmology tells us. It develops complex structure through the growth of topological order. As the Big Bang expands and cools, it undergoes a rapid sequence of thermal changes.

In the beginning, all the fluctuations are stuck at the speed of light. They experience maximum time dilation and length contraction – or rather, this relativistic dichotomy can't even apply yet.

Then you get the Higgs mechanism breaking this relativistic symmetry. Now suddenly it is meaningful to talk about objects at rest. Particles that move slower than c. Mass that lags behind the radiation setting the pace. A new topological phase where time has gained a whole new complex structure.

Time changes character quite radically. And it passes through other topological stages too with inflation, or when it is a quark-gluon plasma that may have Higgs mass and yet is still effectively relativistic.

So what is time when you step right back from the physics? It is a duration. A beat that lasts the distance of a cycle. A Planck-scale rotation in its Planck-scale expanse. The fundamental unit of ħ or the quantum unit of action. The spinning on the Poincare invariant spot that defines the gauge fundamental particle. The first moment defined in terms of the symmetry breaking of rotation from translation and thus the birth of concrete dimensionality itself.

So yes, time is emergent. But physics likes to keep thing simple. Unless you are asking cosmological-level questions, you don't need to worry about all the messy topological details I've just mentioned. They were pretty much done and dusted in the first billionth of a second anyway. After the first few minutes, all the kinks were well and truly vanishing in the rear view mirror.

Your first principle, absolute potential, the symmetry which is the foundation for symmetry-breaking, is nothing but an ideal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well firstness is actually vagueness in Peirce’s logic-based approach. That to which the PNC does not apply. And therefore where the symmetry breaking of a dichotomy can start.

So unformed potential and unactualised form would “exist” together in the less than nothing that would be a logical vagueness. The absolute potential is the potential for the emergence of a hylomorphic order in a co-arising fashion. The metaphysics is more subtle than you appreciate.

This implies that time is another fundamental concept in ontology. You have provided no argument to demonstrate that "state of affairs" is more fundamental than "time". — Metaphysician Undercover

Likewise, change can start to become definite only to the degree that stability starts to become definite. So to ground that as a metalogic of existence, you need to start of in some state of radical indeterminacy such as an Apeiron or Vagueness.

An everythingness that is a nothingness and so is prior to any somethingness in that it defines what needs to start happening to get anything going. The Apeiron must begin to separate out or symmetric break in the counter directions that are the forming of stabilising constraints and dynamical degrees of freedom. Time can get going as changes can be made that are also constructing a collective history.