I think its pretty obvious to anyone who's been in philosophy for even a short time that the next question becomes, "Well what caused God then? — Philosophim

Or any child.

If a person avoids causality because they think a conclusion leads to God, that's not square thinking. — Philosophim

That wasn't anything that I was advocating. I was saying it is yet further evidence that the metaphysics of causality are far more complex and interesting.

What this thread demonstrates is just what a baked in conception of causality folk have. They believe that the laws of mechanics, logic and computation all point to the same small narrow device of the "cause and effect" connection of temporal chains of efficient causes.

It is even baked into the grammar of language. Every sentence is formally composed of a verb connecting a subject to an object - a tale of who did what to whom.

So no wonder folk are confounded by the idea that causality might demand a much larger "four causes" model, or that it might have a triadic "irreducible complexity".

In everyday life, they have probably never come across a challenge to the way they have been taught to think about the way everything works at its most general possible level.

Final cause which I interpret as teleological in essence and if there's a purpose, it kinda makes someone, as opposed to something, an inevitability (design argument). — Agent Smith

But if you frame your notion of final cause so that it only applies to humans, or even organisms, then you rob it of that kind of causal status as it is not a necessary part of nature as a whole. It becomes just a local accident of evolutionary history.

So if you want to argue for intelligent design - big daddy in the sky - you still have to try all the usual rhetorical tricks to make it seem you are making a solid causation-based argument.

Note that the whole "everything needs a cause" creating God is yet further evidence that a narrow "cause and effect", or efficient cause, model of causality is too limited. A larger model of causality is required.

There are some ways to debate causality, but "Scientists don't use the word" is just silly. When you have to go to absurd lengths to avoid answering a simple and obvious question, its time to question whether your argument is absurd as well. — Philosophim

:up:

The scientist can use causal language just as you and I can. But does not use it in setting out Newton's laws. — Banno

Shome mishtake shurely?

“Impressed force is the action exerted on a body to change its state either of resting or of moving uniformly straight forward.”

“You sometimes speak of gravity as essential & inherent to matter: pray do not ascribe that notion to me, for ye cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know, & therefore would take more time to consider of it.” — Isaac Newton

So Newton was both pleased to be able to give a precise reason in terms of one body striking another body, and also honest about another law that appeared to speak uncomfortably to action at a distance.

Seems that Newton was pretty engaged in the issue of causation, and its larger complexities.

The Humean issue is only about the certainty that can be ascribed to some causal belief, not that causation is somehow "metaphysical". The pragmatist then tidies that up nicely by replying that causal beliefs can be judged by their inductive evidence.

If Newton's laws predict the future with reasonable accuracy using a reasonable argument, then what is there not to believe?

Isn't that an argument for my position rather than yours? — T Clark

What, that some events seem to need a push - an impressed force - like the billiard ball, while other things, like the decay, the quantum fluctuation, have only a global probability, the certainty of a statistical half-life, that bounds them?

Some situations conform to one end of the spectrum - where cause and effect seems to rule in strict counterfactual fashion. But others are somehow locally unprompted and yet exactly constrained by some probability curve or wavefunction.

Doesn’t this show that causality must be a bigger picture?

I keep wanting to keep it simple. Simpler. — T Clark

But why when that approach can only make causality incomprehensible?

What is efficient cause all its own with no context?

And how could you explain why the radioactive atom decayed at some particular moment? If a triggering event is ruled out by physical theory, what then?

If you are serious about causality in a physical context, you are going to need to arm yourself with more resources.

I see efficient cause as being both a necessary and sufficient (given the presence of the othe necessary conditions) condition for any event. The three other kinds being necessary conditions. — Janus

Yep. There is the set-up. Then there is the pulling of the trigger. That way of thinking also leads to the dichotomy of proximate and distal causes.

Everyone is feeling the same elephant.

In physics-speak, I would also talk about constraints and degrees of freedom.

My problem is that my understanding of formal cause includes a need for intention. Formal cause doesn't make any sense unless the form is intended to achieve the final cause - purpose. Purpose requires intention. That gets too close to the noosphere for my taste. — T Clark

Yes. Final cause and formal cause combine like that in the pansemiotic view. But at the level of physics, this is no more than saying the second law of thermodynamics imposes a thermal direction on nature. The finality is the need to maximise entropy production and reach equilibrium.

So that is both sort of “mindful”. But also the least mindful notion of teleology we can imagine.

Then humans can sit at the other end of the scale in terms of being full of all sorts of cunning schemes and bright ideas.

So you can either see causality as being about two different realms - res cogitans and res extensa - each with their own non-overlapping logic. Or you can seek for a unified theory of causality, as Aristotle and a Peirce did.

The idea I'm contemplating is that the organising principle that gives rise to the unity of consciousness in the individual is an analogy for, or instance of, the same organising principle that of the cosmos; whatever it is that puts the 'uni' in 'universe'. — Wayfarer

That would be what I mean by pansemiosis. And all forms of organicism arrive at the same insight. The cosmos is a whole because it is a harmony of its parts.

Without the opposing forces of differentiation and integration, there would be no contrasts to produce anything. There wouldn't even be a void. There would be the less than nothing of a Vagueness, a Firstness, an Apeiron ... a Tao, Ungrund, etc, etc.

To paraphrase that SEP entry - when you experience a noise and a pain, you is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain but of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience. — Wayfarer

Right. So any neuroscientific account has to explain both the differentiation and the integration here.

The exact same noise could be painful or exhilarating depending on whether it was heard at a Motorhead concert or blasting out from your neighbours at 2am.

For the synaesthete, the painful noise could also come coloured, while for the autistic person, even turning down the volume might leave the sound feeling unbearable.

Consciousness has a functional unity to the degree that it is neither over-integrating, nor over-differentiating, but doing differentiation~integration just right.

So pain is an attention getter that forces focus on sensations of damage. It helps if that pain is bound to the location of that damage - which might be the speakers at the Motorhead concert. But physiotherapists often find that the pain shooting down your leg is caused by the pinched nerve in the small of your back.

This fact - that neural "information processing" issues are always to be found whenever consciousness appears dysfunctional - ought to be a clue. The kind of seamless flow or unity of a functionally adapted brain is something that we might take for granted as a "substantial simple", but when that unity breaks down, we can see what a dynamical balancing act it truly was.

but that has been shown not to account for the subjective unity of perception — Wayfarer

Sure. The brain has its topographic organisation that makes it look like a bunch of computational modules. Then something like a central CPU clock - the thalamus beating out its magic binding rhythm - would synchronise all the activity. And then obviously.... well here the computational analogy stalls. In fact it gives no reason why the central synchronisation of a set of distributed components should result in "feeling like something".

But that is why one would only use computer analogies in the most superficial way. Biosemiosis sees organisms as being based on an embodied modelling relation. The nervous system forward-models the organism's world. It is not representations-based - the Cartesian story - but intentions-based, the Peircean and Bayesian Brain story.

So the unity of awareness - as the product of a process of differentiation grounded in integration - is not something input/output computers can give you. You can't just stick together a bunch of data points by making them all fire in different places at the same time.

But a semiotic organism learns to live in an intentional and predictive temporal space. It already has the motor and sensory habits that generally adapt it to its environment. It can form both short-range predictions and long-range intentions.

And it can suppress or erase data just as much as stick it together. It can learn to ignore the world - as the world as it is now was fully predicted just a few moments ago.

So there are a bunch of obvious differences from the Turing Universal Machine notion of how an organism might work. All the issues - like the fact that consciousness is both a unity and a particularity at the same time - are just problems for the computational analogy and its Cartesian representationalism.

Have you had the last word yet? Have you seen off every challenge to your confusions?

No? OK, go for it one more time then.

I did wonder if you have PDA. — bert1

No. You have just proven yourself to be someone who can't follow arguments and gets very frustrated by that particular shortcoming.

Whilst nevertheless possessing the paradoxical attribute of subjective unity. — Wayfarer

The clue would be that it is indeed a "paradoxical" claim unless the unity is the holistic one based on the classical unity of opposites.

In other words, consciousness can't be a simple. It is already complex.

We then need to cash this out as a systems-style causal account, and not a simple-minded monist account which doesn't even work for physics and its models of the "material realm", let alone the semiotic sciences of life and mind.

So from the cognitive neuroscience point of view, we would conventionally start by noting that "consciousness" is a unity in terms of being a balance of integration and differentiation. We need to see the world generally so as to be able to see it as being contrastingly particular. And this indeed is the phenomenological structure we discover on closer inspection - a division of "mindful awareness" into differentiating attention and integrating habit.

Something has to explain how I can both drive a car down busy streets, and yet do so completely automatically to the point I can't even remember the experience if I am too happy in my own day-dreaming.

So yep. Start with the unity, the holism, the global symmetry state. But that only sets the stage for the "other" of its breaking.

The breaking then become the various dichotomies which organise the brain so that it has the right kind of rational structure for making pragmatic sense of the world.

You have motor cortex vs sensory cortex, object-recognition paths vs spatial-relations paths, sub-cortical habits vs cortical attentional process, working memory vs long-term memory, focal left brain attentional style vs vigilant right brain attentional style, etc.

To analyse, the brain must dichotomise. This principle goes right down to the sensory receptors that are switches with two states - on or off.

Then that which is dichotomised must be unified by its synthesis. So the brain is organised by the fact that it divides just as much as it unites, differentiates just as hard as it integrates. The result is a coherence of incoherences, a generality of limitless contrasts.

It is easy to make is sound paradoxical ... until you see this is just what the unity of an anti-reductionist holism is. The irreducible complexity of a reciprocal relation where you go in two different directions at the same time in a way that then produces the third thing of their optimising balancing act.

I answered all your questions Apo! — bert1

You gave a bunch of different contradictory answers to the one question. That's slightly different.

But consciousness is neither an object, a substance or a property, but a relational activity. — Joshs

Yep. A biosemiotic modelling relation. :up:

Also, there has to be a reason why animal brains are the densest concentrations of structural and developmental complexity in the entire known universe. And why they can afford this in material and energetic terms.

It is not as if - even for the materialist - consciousness could be regarded as some kind of ultimate simple, when it is plainly the ultimate in terms of its material complexity.

Apo, you are behaving very oddly. — bert1

No. You just continue to badger me without addressing the inconsistencies of your own position.

It seems according to you, panpsychists don't mean to reduce consciousness to being another ultimately simple property of matter, like presumably mass and charge.

And you say that panpsychists also can't see how consciousness could reduce to processes, functions, or information.

Yet at the same time, you say panpsychists generally believe consciousness can be reduced to a quality present in every system.

Then your confusion about what you might want to concretely assert in this discussion now reaches its crescendo where you state that your personal reduction would be to "a property of reality-as-continuum, perhaps space, or the quantum field."

And somehow "a snail, a molecule, an atom, a field" are all just essentially the same metaphysical category in your eyes - presumably a system (but a system that has no process or function) ... or a "reality-as-continuum" (with some wild hand-waving towards scientific concepts you don't understand)?

And you say you want clarification from me.... :lol: :rofl: :lol:

You introduced the term and said panpsychism was reductionist. I'm just trying to understand what you mean! — bert1

I gave you the dictionary definitions. They fit what I was saying. If you think different, show me how.

...it's odd to think of panpsychism as a reductionist theory, because it is precisely difficulties reducing consciousness to processes, functions, information, whatever, which motivates some panpsychists. — bert1

Yeah. So they reduce it to a property of matter ... which may be a fundamentally incoherent metaphysics, but there you go.

Panpsychism covers a number of views. What most of them have in common is perhaps that consciousness is present in every system. — bert1

Really? They all claim consciousness is a universal property of systems, not a universal property of matter?

Was this the version of panpsychism that I was responding to in the OP? Or the more usual dictionary definition?

Are you asking what my particular panpsychist view is? — bert1

Are you answering any time soon?

So how are you defining reductionism and panpsychism in this conversation?

The simple answer is that you don't seem to understand the terms in the usual way.

Again, let the dictionary be your friend: "[Panpsychism is] the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness." :roll:

But the sharp and personal sense of the immediate is also involved in the modeling of the subpersonal, the pre-reflective, the unconscious and the automatic; in other words, the general that is placed as outside of the situated awareness of the personal is itself a product of that situated awareness. — Joshs

Good job that the particular and the general are a dichotomy and thus a system of mutual constraint then. So first and third person is the division we produce by remarking on the huge difference between being “ourself” as the invariant imposed on the flow of experience vs being “any such self”.

Reduction normally involves explaining one thing completely in terms of things other than it. — bert1

Let the dictionary be your friend: "[Reductionism is] the practice of analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundamental constituents, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation."

Stability of form and structure is an illusion. — Harry Hindu

So like I said. Stability is relative to instability. The dichotomy is the mutually constraining one, the mutually "othering" one, of stasis~flux, or being~becoming, or how ever else you might want to capture the essential idea.

If reductionism is faulty then how is it that we understand the things we have invented as products of smaller parts? — Harry Hindu

Reductionism to the holism of structuralism is different from reductionism to the reductionism of materialism - the fetishisation of Being. And the mechanical works as a combo of material and efficient cause because we humans supply the formal and final cause.

So the holism is there, if you look.

Energy and matter would be different substances and forms. — Harry Hindu

But what does modern physics now reduce these things to? I think you will find it is the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking. The global Poincare group and the local gauge group.

Nature is reduced to mathematical structure by our physical laws. And the rest is all that is measurable within that scheme.

If something works, we ought to understand why that has become the outcome. Hence ontic structural realism as the recent metaphysical bandwagon,

At first, I was thinking you were agreeing with me that causality is not normally a useful metaphysical idea. Now I'm not sure. — T Clark

Let me be clear then. I couldn’t disagree more. Being able to give reasons for why things are and why things change is the entirety of metaphysics in my opinion.

But you say you understand causality to only mean efficient cause. And that to apply only in classical physics.

That is bonkers as far as I am concerned.

I think you mean 'matter'. — Wayfarer

Nope. But we do tend to define matter as that which can take the imprint of our rather particular human wishes.

That doesn't do justice to the deeper definition of substance that goes beyond it being already present as a material cause, and instead defines it in terms of a privation of form, and so unformed potential.

We should consider what the ancient philosophers understood as the philosophical significance of the forms, which is that they are changeless or incorruptible. So they signify immortality, that which is beyond the vicissitudes of becoming and passing away. The quest was for the correspondence between that element of the soul which could be identified with that immortal aspect of being — Wayfarer

So I give the Aristotelean view and you reply with the popular theistic version of Platonism - the one without the chora as its version of the material potential or formless receptacle.

I agree Aristotle said the soul was the form of the body. But then a neuroscientist would also say the same these days. With the emphasis on the lack of immortality, perfection, changelessness, etc, that in fact essential to substantial being as something developmental and temporal, not timeless or transcendent, but thoroughly immanent and actual in its substantial particularity.

...but I want to be able to convincingly argue that the idea of causation is a metaphysical principle that is not of great value in any but the simplest situations. — T Clark

I mean good luck trying. That would be a counterfactual approach. Deny the obvious, and when that fails, you have no choice but to accept the obvious. :up:

The Aristotelean scheme is meant to show that even the simplest simplicity must have the irreducibly triadic complexity of hylomorphism. And therefore all later notions of causality - like the reduction of all causes to just efficient/material cause - could at best be regarded as modelling conveniences.

Simpler models of causality do work if you can take the stability and indifference of a holistic context for granted.

So that is why atomism was the stimulus that got science started. Newton could start things off with an a-causal void. And that little ruse allowed him to treat all the busy contents as a collection of atoms.

This was a stroke of genius in that other famous minds like Descartes couldn't let go of the idea that space had to be full of something causal at every point.

Einstein did the same stunt at a more abstract level in getting rid of Maxwell's ether.

So to imagine that the context is a "nothingness of perfect stability" is the way to model reality as just some local play of material/efficient causal atoms. But physics has only had to keep returning to the void to re-fill it with the missing holism.

Quantum field theory filled the vacuum with a sea of virtual particles. Even general relativity made spacetime floppy unless filled with some energy density at every point.

So you have this dialogue by which physics keeps moving itself forward. First make things too simple by getting rid of Aristotle's formal/final causes. That moves you a step forward. Then take another step by re-filling the void just created, except now define it at as an "emptiness" at an even more abstract level.

Many, most of the responses so far have seemed to be in that vein, and it surprises me. I thought that the idea of cause was fairly universal. — T Clark

Pfftt. Who has studied metaphysics, physics or philosophy of science?

Causality must be the hardest subject there is. And that is because it is the most abstract and fundamental level of metaphysical analysis.

What value is there in loosey-goosey causality. — T Clark

But how could you define your deterministic efficient cause except counter-factually in relation to that which it is not.

This is Metaphysics 101. Precision is the double negative. A is defined by being not not-A.

So to have efficient cause, you must counterfactually define it in terms of its Hegelian "other".

The irony of the Aristotelean systems view is that this defines efficient cause to sit at the pole that is locally contingent rather than globally necessary. It is the free variable that you want to plug into your equation expressing a constraining symmetry.

The determinism in any causal situation owes everything to the downward acting constraints. And that rather precisely defines the accidents, the randomness, the freedoms, the causal particularity, as the upward acts of individual and constructive action.

The force applied could have been anything. And yet the number measured was x. So that is what I plugged into the differential equation that could compute the outcome to any number of decimal places.

We thus arrive at counterfactual theories of causation, — Banno

Yep. The holism of the context.

A second try might be to soften "A causes B" from B always following A to B mostly following A; to treat causation as probable rather than certain. — Banno

Yep. The next step in understanding the causality of the context as the holism of global constraints.

So efficient/material cause are taken to speak to localised acts of construction. And the reciprocal to that - in the good old Aristotelean analysis everyone wants to ignore - is globalised states of constraint.

Constraints place limits on what is possible. But then what isn't prevented from being the case, is free to be the case. Indeed must be the case. Anything that isn't expressly forbidden is going to inevitably happen ... sooner or later, in unpredictable fashion.

The alternative, for which I have great sympathy, is that the notion of cause cannot be cashed out in any great depth, to follow Hume in concluding that cause is more habit than physics. — Banno

Yes and no. Even physics sees its laws as habits or emergent regularities. And being global constraints, they reciprocally define their own degrees of freedom. Global invariance is what grounds the kind of local variation that can freely exist - as by definition it isn't constrained.

And of course Peirce spelt that out explicitly as a metaphysics, a theory of probability, and a logic.

So yes, causality reduces to merely some notion of a habit. But no, this in fact cashes out our notions of causality in their greatest depth.

The good old Aristotelean analysis is yet again affirmed.

Try looking up "cause" in the index of a text in any science. If it were central to the scientific enterprise. one would expect more than one or two entries. — Banno

Perhaps you just don't recognise the rapid evolution of its definition in terms of measurables.

Once it was Newtonian forces that were shoving stuff about. Then it was Leibnizian vis viva or energy - where inertia resistance and forceful acceleration were unified as a measurable. Lagrangian mechanics was born. Eventually thermodynamics forced itself into the conversation and the cause of action become the production of entropy - a framing even more transparently Aristotelean.

So not sure where you get the idea that science doesn't talk about causality. That is what laws and differential equations are about - the global symmetries that define the holistic context and the local symmetry breakings that are the local causal actions you want to be able quantify.

Force, energy, entropy. These are concepts that make reality measurable with the context of their relevant levels of theory. And science has kept moving up the scales of abstraction to recover the general causal scheme of Aristotelean system science.

So, when the two balls hit each other, by which we mean the electrons in the atoms near the surface of the balls repel each other, the collision is elastic. That means the force of the collision causes both balls to deform like springs. When they move back into their original positions, a force is exerted and energy is transferred from one ball to the other and the second ball starts to move. — T Clark

You are hoping to project an intuitive notion of efficient cause onto the physical account - one where, as you say, you can ignore the rest of Aristotle's holistic account. Yet the physics will always let you down.

Even Newton's laws of motion say an elastic collision is the result of the ability of an inertial body to resist its acceleration as much as some impressed force might embody the capacity to accelerate it.

Every action is matched by the reciprocality of an equal and opposite reaction. So the causality is divided equally between the mover and the moved, it would seem.

And for free floating objects in space, this Galilean relativity becomes rather in your face. Who moves when the spaceman throws his space-wrench? Does the wrench move away from the throwing spaceman, or does the spaceman get propelled away by trying to budge his wrench?

Which inertial reference do you prefer? And how is that choice justified in fundamental law?

Efficient cause then really starts to get lost in the thickets when you shift up to actual relativity and its issues with simultaneity, or quantum mechanics and it nonlocalism and virtual particles.

Efficient cause can't explain anything all on its lonely ownsome. A holism which can provide the context is always going to be the other half of the story that completes the causal picture.

For him, ousia means Being, not substance, that is, not some thing or some being that "stood" (-stance) "under" (sub-).' — Wayfarer

This makes sense in that Being grounds Becoming in the Aristotelean scheme. So that which stably exists becomes the stuff which also can stand under the change.

Of course, this new variety of reductionism is disputable. Hylomorphism reads better when understood as Being being the stability of the material potential once it has become structured or in-formed in a fashion that supports its persisting existence.

In that light, the Becoming grounds the Being. You have to have the dynamics - the flux - before you could negate that in some way that results in the stasis of a continuous identity.

So the general Greek scheme is the same whether it is the Pythagorean apeiras and peras, the Heraclitan flux and logos, or the Aristotelean hyle and morph, or material impulse and Platonic constraint.

Substance is the stability that results from a structure of constraints acting on a field of free possibilities. It is the stabilisation of the unstable.

Reductonism needs one or other to come first - either the dynamically stable results or the dynamically uncertain start. But holism says the dynamism - the process view - is the thing. And so existence is all relative to that.

Either the dynamism is maximised in one of its directions, or minimised in the other. It is the wholeness of this relation that counts - which is the ground - and not which way around you try to arrange the two complementary poles.

So you can read it as Being begets Becoming. Substance describes an informed state of materiality such that there is something that is both stable enough to have a persisting identity, yet also fluid enough to partake in further evolutionary change. The clay can be made into bricks.

But then Becoming also grounds this Being. The wish to build a house drives the need for solid little cubioids as the Platonically ideal construction material. And so that wish - imposed on the innocent undirected dynamics of clay - bring about the result of restricting its claggy material freedoms. An end is put to its less substantial state of being.

it reifies it by installing the dualism within each bit of objective reality. — Joshs

Are we talking reality's atoms, or reality's degrees of freedom? ... and thus its invariances ... and thus its structural dichotomisation into its global spacetime invariances (the structure of its Lorentz, Poincare and even de Sitter symmetry groups) and its local gauge invariances (starting with the Standard Model's SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1))?

The problem is that the notion of material atoms is already as reified as it gets. And modern hylomorphism makes that clear. Material reality is composed of a structure of constraints acting to shape amorphous material potential.

So whether you are seeking to explain mind or matter, both have to fit within that ontic structural realist frame.

What do you make of Bitbol’s attempt to dissolve the hard problem? — Joshs

I like Bitbol's clarity. But you know that my answer is pansemiotic. So we can't reduce out accounts of reality to phenomenology as our first person point of view - our semiotic Umwelt - is the least general "view of reality" possible. And we are seeking the maximally general view as the ground under our ontology.

Even for a phenomenologist, it is obvious that your "experience" in any passing moment - or attentional state covering about half a second - is far more particular and "first person" than your "sub-conscious" habits, which are states of mind, or psychological structures, formed over years of living and development. And your neurological level of reflexes and sensory apparatus are even more general and "unaware" than that.

So phenomenology that actually examines the structure of experience would not seek to ground itself in the sharp and personal sense of the immediate. It already has to turn towards the subconscious and automatic to find that which is more general. And it is already thus becoming more receptive to standard neuro-reductionism - as an account based on the methodological naturalism which is all about explaining the particular from the better vantage point of the general.

Thus Bitbol can be quite right about physics and its struggle to generalise the fact that we are indeed humans making models of an objective reality, yet seem forever entangled in those models.

The quantum collapse issue highlights that fact. Yet as I have argued, it also shows us exactly where the epistemic incision must be made.

In the semiotic view, reality is our Umwelt - a picture of the world as it is ... with the small addition of it being the world with "us" in it as its intentional centre.

So as a model of third person objectivity, the fact that we then also find ourselves buried in the heart of the model as its first person finality, is the feature of the model, not the bug.

As organisms, we could never afford to take a dispassionate stance on existence. Our models have to be enactive. So the self must arise out of the pragmatics of semiosis.

That means that when we inquire into the third person view of the physical world, we find it reflects our intentions and needs rather directly. We experience an Umwelt.

And the same then goes when we try to take a third person view of "consciousness" as this act of modelling the world. The "self" is a necessary part of the psychological structure that is the Umwelt.

So first and third person view are the dualised aspects of the model itself. Neither "exist" outside that.

That is the general statement about the semiotic modelling relation that grounds things. And then moment to moment states of mind are all about the great particularity of being a model that is forever dynamically evolving its overall adaptive balance.

It has been said that panpsychism solves the hard problem of consciousness. — Watchmaker

How do you "solve" a problem by combining two problems in an unresolved fashion? It is like shoving the shit that makes you uncomfortable into a locker and saying, see, I can still shut the door on it. Case closed. No metaphysics necessary.

positing consciousness as fundamental, you at least don't have so great a leap to explain things. — Watchmaker

That is the miracle that appeals. You don't have to explain anything about anything. Folk who promote panpsychism don't want to have to explain either mind or matter. They just want to take these familiar cultural categories at face value. So both get shoved in the locker of simple-minded reductionism. And job done.

It doesn't seem as absurd as saying that that the immaterial mind arose from physical matter. — Watchmaker

Depends on how absurd your notion of "physical matter" is. Most folk are naive realists rather than Aristotelean hylomorphists, or modern day particle physicists who talk about stuff like gauge invariance, Yang-Mills couplings, stacks of QFT fields, conformal de Sitter spaces, and the like.

Physicists have looked at "physical matter" rather closely and the naive folk view of things is long dead.

Neuroscientists have looked at "mental matter" and ditto.

Panpsychism is the pathological metaphysics that arises when you try to reduce all existence to materialism, and wind up including "consciousness" as "another face of matter".

Aristotle showed that substantial being is in-formed. It is the combination of material and formal cause. So everything that exists - such as an organism with life and awareness - is a product of a process of material potential becoming suitably structured to achieve the "goal" of having some stable material identity.

But material dualism arises where form isn't deemed to be fundamental and so "consciousness" cannot be explained in these structuralist terms.

The appeal of panpsychism is thus that of a reductionism which is so extreme it even wipes away the vast biological and sociological complexity of the human organism. All that structure counts for nothing and "consciousness" can be made another fundamental property of nature, like mass or charge ... even if that ruse involves claiming that it is a fundamental property which is "first person" and thus will never be measurable.

If panpsychism seems to not to add up, that is because it doesn't. It is material reductionism taken to its self-parodying extreme.

Sounds like you’re done with the easy globally continuous stuff and are raring to go with the local discrete stuff. Bring on gauge symmetry and how it generates particle physics. :grin:

...to complete the thought, classical realism is the place we want to get back to as the balance of what gets broken.

So QM is "weird" as it breaks realism. And folk then take one or either path and extrapolate the weirdness to infinity.

That gives rise to the different interpretational extremes. You have the Copenhagenism that offers no stopping point until it arrives at the consciousness and freewill of the human observer.

Or you head in the other no-collapse direction and have the endlessly bifurcating many worlds multiverse.

Each seems the correct interpretation - compatible with the maths. But that is because the maths doesn't contain a cut-off. Only a quantum gravity theory that absorbs all three Planck constants - the irreducible triad of c, G and h - could introduce such a cut-off to physics. And so nothing formally seems to resist the galloping off towards the infinite horizons of metaphysical irreality in one or other of its available directions.

The way to avoid the pathological metaphysics is to realise what is going on. Classical reality is emergent from the reciprocality of a pair of local~global limits. The weirdness of one is going to cancel out the weirdness of the other, at the end of the day.

Which is where we get to with thermal decoherence as a general framework uniting QM vagueness and classical crispness, or counterfactual definiteness.

And biosemiosis becomes the icing on the cake. It draws the further natural line across reality that is the epistemic cut between organisms and their environments. It shows how the Cosmos already decoheres itself, and how what human observers do is add a new level of machinery to the situation where this decoherence can be experimentally manipulated and even exploited for new technological purposes.

So at the Copenhagen end of the interpretive spectrum, you get rid of the conscious observer issue entirely. It can be left at the door of the biosemiotic epistemic cut.

And at the multiverse end of the interpretive spectrum, you can likewise rule out MWI. Decoherence says collapse is real enough due to thermal scale.

Copenhagenism is a claim about limits being taken - contextualised events becoming collapsed to a-contextual numbers. But then that Copenhagenism is just a human story. The physical reality it is based on is the nanoscale of warm water - the quasi-classical transition zone in which quantum coherence is becoming classical decoherence. Strong entanglement is giving way to strong contextuality.

Nope, didn't mean non-locality for contextuality, although some people do claim that non-locality demonstrates contextuality because ones observers' observations effect another's in such a baffling way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I admit my views are provisional here. But for me, non-locality and contextuality seem two sides of the same coin - a dichotomy, and thus reciprocally related.

When you break the symmetry of a realist metaphysics, it breaks in these two directions, depending on whether you think you are talking about the localism of the particular interaction, or the globalism of the world that constrains the probabilities.

So like all QM's complementary variables, you can't violate both inequalities at the same time. If you are moving towards the one limit, you are moving away from the other, so to speak. And yet you also know the two are related in a deeper way.

This makes a neat fit as it promotes the two things of entanglement and contextuality to be being a more abstract commutative pair. We can see the holism of the quantum state from both its local and global angles in the one view that is united by entanglement~contextuality as its "central axis of weirdness".

I was thinking of more recent Bell-Wigner experiments, instead of just testing Bell inequalities. Because the difference is that assuming non-locality might not be enough to get rid of the lack of an objective world where all observers can reconcile their recorded facts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. But to me, this risks doing the usual thing of stumbling across the fact of a dichotomy that stands for an irreducibly triadic relation and then blindly believing it must be reducible to one or other of it two poles in a monistic fashion.

If find we have a binary choice like entanglement vs contextuality, then pick one as foundational. Do we save realism by throwing locality overboard, or by throwing out - in some arguments - the freewill of observers?

My metaphysics would say that such a dichotomy instead indicates a local~global pairs of limits. So locality almost goes overboard, but not quite. Observers go overboard, but not quite. Each would be the extreme case that could never quite be reached.

And this seems the way it works out - nonlocality as the most local view, and contextuality as the most global view, of the weirdness that makes QM non-classical.

Noether symmetries are continuous transformations,the transformations being temporal translations. — Agent Smith

Think of it as the global Newtonian 3D spatial container and its local energetic actions. Spinning on the spot, or moving with constant motion in a straight line are both defined as inertias. Momentum is conserved by the moving mass, never being gained or lost (in the frictionless perfection of the gravitationless Newtonian frame).

So that fact reflects the continuous symmetry built into the Newtonian description of the container. Move some local rotation or translation to some other arbitrary point inside the container, and nothing is physically different as far as the amount of rotation or translation that would be observed.

Then likewise, move the action - some translation or rotation - to another moment in time, and it will still reflect the same amount of energetic effort. A one joule shove a billion years ago will look like a one joule shove a billion years from now ... if you grant the fixed symmetry of the Newtonian conception of space and time.

So it is the unchanging invariance of the whole - the spacetime stage in which the local action takes place - that ensures the conserved quantities of those local actions. The same actions would carry the same weight no matter where they happened in time and space.

We call that space-conserved property an object's inertia. And the time-conserved property its energy.

It is an accountancy trick. We know that Newton idealised the situation for the sake of simplicity. But it works at our general scale of being as observers of a now very large, very flat, very cold, and very empty universe.

What's the relationship, if any, between the geometric symmetries mentioned above and Noether symmetry? — Agent Smith

Reflections - and even rotations of triangles - are discrete symmetries. You can see something has changed even if it maps back on to itself. But the rotation of sphere would be an example of a continuous symmetry.

Noether's theorem says there is a conservation law for every continuous symmetry in nature. So you have the two forms of momentum conservation - rotations and translations. Each looks the same amount of action anywhere in a Newtonian conception of space. And then you get energy conservation from actions in the time dimension.

One moment in time is considered no more special or different than any other. It is another continuous symmetry. Shift an event from last year into next year and it does nothing observable to the energy content. So time translation can't change the energy content of the Cosmos.

This is all correct in the Newtonian world, which is suitably closed and thus properly symmetric as both a spatial and temporal coordinate system.

But general relativity is not so rigid. It is an open story of spacetime dimensionality. So energy isn't conserved - although a closure can then be constructed, and symmetry restored, by talking a higher level view that balances the total inertial mass of the system against its total gravitational potential.

So the relationship is simple. Continuous symmetry means you can't see a difference just by shuffling the localised content of a system about in spacetime. Thus some general quantity of a local "stuff" is being preserved in a substantial way - such as momentum or energy.

But all this holds good only if the global container is closed and rigid enough to sustain the continuous symmetry. If spacetime evolves in some fashion, then energy conservation doesn't strictly apply.

Any recommendations on Pierce in terms of a starting point for a deeper read? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm always being asked that and the truth is ... no.

Peirce never wrote a book to sum it all up. So he isn't easy to study like others who put it into a single text that an undergrad course could prescribe. He left behind a vast library of unpublished manuscripts. The works cover a lot of steadily evolving thought. The scholarship that then sprung up around that was at first mainly theological, only later did scientists catch on.

Analytic philosophy was both deeply influenced by Peirce and sociologically committed to making others its heroes - principally Wittgenstein (as Cheryl Misak documents in her excellent Cambridge Pragmatism - video version). Continental philosophy was likewise past structuralism and already wedded to Sassurean semiotics, and so had no interest on discovering how Peirce would sort all its problems.

I studied hierarchy theory and systems science first. So I could immediately see what Peirce was driving at as soon as a decent surge of academic retellings began to appear in the early 1990s.

This internet source became the place to find good modern papers. There was also a lively Peirce discussion board back when I first got interested.

The lens of symmetry is something I should look in to more. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Symmetry is to physics as dialectics is to metaphysics.

Sure, but the point is that the standards as to what constitutes "support" for a formal system cannot itself be a formal system. — Metaphysician Undercover

That point is made by Robert Rosen’s modelling relations theory, Measurements are the informal part of the formal process. The system, as a whole, is thus a complementary pairing of models and measurements. We have to figure out what counts as sufficient support as something that is pragmatic and contingent on circumstance.

So it's wrong to characterize something which is not understood as a formal system as "frantic hand waving", or else formal systems would just be totally useless fictions or fantasies. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hand-waving refers to the waving of empty hands - hands which ought to be full of supporting specifics. So it is indeed pointing to what is lacking and thus leaving a “theory as a useless fiction or fantasy.

Quite literally something that is impossible to totally pin down because you will never make a purely physical observation, you will only make ones occurring in subjective experience, which is why consciousness causes collapse can live on. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’d take a different tack. The problem for quantum mechanics is that it has no epistemic cut - a place that marks the collapse of the quantum probabilities into the classical actuality. And so the collapse becomes something indefinitely deferred. Either deferred in the kind of decoherence that ends up in multiverses, or deferred in the way that ends up in Copenhagenism.

Yet biosemiosis models epistemic cuts. And a biosemiotic model of subjective experience let’s you place the observables at the intersection not of the quantum and the classical, but of the informational and entropic.

So it is not about “awareness”. It is about how humans form models and make measurements that convert some physical state into some symbolic state.

A needle moves on a dial and it is seen to point to a number. Right there is the epistemic cut - the collapse - that turns a material event into known fact.

So the physics itself is collapseless. Thermal decoherence only constrains the quantum probabilities to some narrower range of uncertainties (in my non-multiverse view). Material uncertainly always thus exists - even if constrained to the Planckscale.

But the human mind - as is true of biosemiosis in general - then applies a mechanical, and hence classical, grid over the continuity of the wavefunction physics. Questions are posed by our instruments so as to have digital yes/no answers. We ask what number should be put on some event - the numbers being artefacts of the laws of logic, the events being quantum uncertainty being constrained to some point where we can afford to be indifferent about the inherent ontic uncertainty or “measurement error”.

So the collapse is “all in the mind” in the sense that it is a human modelling choice to identify some event with some number, and then continue on talking as if the numbers are the events.

What is then “real” about such reading of dials is that biosemiosis itself - as the mechanical basis of life and mind - can only physically kick in at a particular material scale.

Machines are switches - the physical embodiment of informational states. And nature only supports such switches (or ratchets) at the quasi-classical nanoscale of being (in room temperature water). This is the first point at which mechanical structure - in the form of biological molecules that can do mechanical work - can stably persist in the thermal chaos of a nanoscale liquid environment.

So the epistemic cut is itself a fundamental fact of nature, it is where biological information can first impose itself on quantum indeterminism to the degree that “making readings” becomes a physically possible thing.

This applies to neuroscience as much as biology. Sensory receptors form at the smallest scale at which they can be instruments taking readings without also being blown apart in the process by the physical energies involved.

To bring it back to the quantum physicist in the lab, their eyes can only read numbers on dials. Well, their eyes in a completely dark room could just about detect individual photons emitted by a scintillation counter - biology has great signal processing. But scientists like to work in well-lit rooms where everything is “classical” - ie: as converted to a system of sign - as possible. That is, the numbers must be so easy to read that any question of uncertainty about he reading of dials is made completely moot.

So on the one hand, the quantum physicist constructs instruments - mechanical switches - that are as purely informational as can be. And then those instruments can go beyond the nanoscale limitations of biological switches. We can built switches from metals and other materials that don’t get blown apart in the act of trying to constrain the physics to scales smaller than the nanoscale. We can thus move the effective epistemic cut down to a level where we start to probe the Planckscale limits of physical being itself.

We still only come back with numbers to talk about in Copenhagen fashion. But the physics we are reporting on are that of the thermal decoherent structure that is reality collapsing its inherent uncertainty or indeterminism towards it own Planckscale limit - ie: the point where QFT blows GR apart in our information modelled view of the material actuality.

That's why I think, Boehme, while extremely mystical and esoteric, hits on an essential feature of reality. Definition requires difference. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I need to get back to Boehme and Schelling. :up:

I'm not sure what the fundemental dichotomies would be. ... Order - chaos seems like it may be essential one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They all seem fundamental. What about Aristotle's hylomorphism of form and matter?

But I personally settled on an ur-dichotomy of dichotomies. :grin:

That is everything can be encompassed by the vague~crisp developmental contrast offered by Peirce, and the local~global dichotomy of hierarchy theory, that also speaks to triadic structure, but as that which is the fully developed.

So one dichotomy represents the process that is dynamical becoming - the vague start in a Firstness that culminates in a completely definite finality of Thirdness.

The other dichotomy represents the completed structure that is a Thirdness - the being that emerges as the dynamically stable limit of all that developmental becoming.

So you have two axes that are arranged orthogonally, and thus themselves compose a holistic dichotomy of being and becoming. The possibility of becoming divided into the local and global of a Thirdness - a stabilising hierarchical structure - is matched with the fact of arriving at that state of fundamental division.

If this Peircean logical story works, then it should be easy enough to map all other metaphysical-strength dichotomies to its ontic structure.

So chaos~order would fit to the local~global axis of being as the systems story of global constraints shaping local degrees of freedom in hierarchy theory.

And it would fit the vague~crisp axis of becoming as being also the view that it takes time for the global constraints (or the sameness of a global coherence) to evolve, and thus time for the local freedoms (or local differences) to be given some final restrictive shape.

A problem though is that "chaos" tends to be an ill-defined word itself. In probability theory, it speaks not just to a certain randomness - or lack of order - but to a more specific class of disorderliness.

Unsurprisingly, there is a further dichotomy at work - which is why chaos~disorder would be considered a non-fundamental dichotomy. A chaotic regime is randomness that is fractal, scalefree, open, and without a mean. It is ruled by powerlaw statistics. The other kind of disorder is the more familiar realm of Gaussian or Bell Curve randomness, that has a single scale, which is thus closed by a boundary, and does have a definite mean or equilibrium average state.

This is a technical point. And one could say that the new maths of deterministic chaos still isn't describing what we really mean by "true chaos" as it is still a state of disorder bounded by a pattern - the pattern that is a powerlaw or log/log differential equation. A "true chaos" indeed may seem more like a "true vagueness" in the popular conception, as it would be fluctuations completely without bounds. And powerlaw regimes are definitely bounded in a fashion that completely predicts the statistical patterns that must thus arise.

But anyway. My argument is that once you get the trick that is a metaphysical dichotomy, you can trace dialectics back to its own source. Which is what Peircean pansemiotic logic is about.

Haven't heard this. Why is this so? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Background independence is needed because a quantum version of general relativity would presume that the spacetime metric would itself fluctuate with gravitational self-interaction. So spacetime must be made part of the emergent mix in the next level of a unifying theory.

The Cosmos - as both a container and the contents - would have to arise as a developmental dichotomy. And so the very thing of "a point of view" - as a story of the invariances of fundamental symmetries - would have to emerge and become a stable feature.

So I am cashing out the notion of "points of view" as speaking to the need to ground descriptions of worlds in terms of their generalised invariances

Relativity is all about how local differences don't make global differences - and in fact instead reveal the global sameness.

QFT is all about how the same can apply through gauge symmetry to locales. What global invariance cannot "see", is then what makes the local degrees of freedom, or variance. And this is why particles are shaped by their own local permutation symmetries - the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) deal of the Standard Model.

Again, dichotomies rule. The Big Bang starts at the Planck scale where GR and QFT don't yet experience any local~global distinction in scale. The energetic fluctuation is just as "curved" as the curved container that is meant to make it distinctive as "a fluctuation". So in fact there is no point of view to be had when there is no distinction between the local QFT differences and the global GR metric sameness.

But as the Big Bang starts to expand~cool from that point, then you have the emergence of invariance on two opposed scales - the QFT local scale symmetries that frame the fluctuations, and the GR global scale symmetries that track the shape of their container.

How does it deal with the apparent experimental confirmation of contextuality (i.e. the same thing observed can occur at different times for different observers). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you mean non-locality? Well time - understood as the measure of rest mass locality - has to be emergent as well.

A world composed just of radiation is timeless in the sense that there is action at less than c. It is only when particles gain mass that going less than c, and thus experiencing locality as the possibility of being different, becomes a thing.

A photon experiences no time on its journey. So it already lives in the non-local world. But mass breaks that symmetry to introduce a new variety of physical difference. Another point of view arises where there is the radiation bath of the CMB that "sees" time only as a generalised drop in temperature, and then all the bits of material crud that has gained local mass, along with a fractured collection of different gauge interactions, to become fermions living in a local "proper time" view of reality.

So local~nonlocal would be a further dichotomy or symmetry breaking that follows on to give greater emergent richness and complexity to time as a "dimension".

A photon only sees time as a structure of thermal decoherence. For some reason, it winds up red-shifted when its wavefunction collapses.

An electron lives in a more exciting world where it could be deflected by another particle at any moment. It gets to exchange momentum through a whole history of localised events.

Because if being is just being, pure, undifferentiated oneness, undefinable relative to anything except for its not being non-being (which has no trait), then it's not clear it is anything different from nothing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. So does this lead one logically to identifying fundamental being with vagueness? To get to less than nothing, we would find ourselves in a realm that would seem to lack both sameness and difference in equal measure.

So we know that sameness and difference exist in the world has it has become. They are a concrete metaphysical strength contrast or dichotomy that describe reality in terms of opposing limitations on being.

Thus logically - working backwards from the principle of noncontradiction, which clearly applies in the world as it has become - we would have to assert that the ground state of this being is one that lacks any distinction between sameness and difference. Which makes it a vagueness.

The ground of being would be discoverable by applying this reasoning to every metaphysical-strength dichotomy that seems to apply to the world's state of being. So it would dissolve away the distinctions between chance and necessity, the discrete and the continuous, form and matter, atom and void, change and stability, differentiation and integration, incoherence and cohesion, the local and the global, signal and noise, etc, etc.

Hard to imagine. But the logic of this seems clear enough.

This is why I say uncritical metaphysics has become a problem for physicalism, because in very many versions the God's eye view is posited, even as God may be denied. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is certainly true up to a point. But a quantum gravity theory of everything would have to be background independent, and so a model of an immanent point of view rather than a transcendent one.

This would put it in the class of pantheistic metaphysics where the view is unplaced in being the view from everywhere. Although I would prefer to call it a pansemiotic metaphysics as that gets rid of the last vestige of dualistic thinking and embraces the bootstrapping triadic logic of the systems point of view.