However complicated the strucures are, they still need stuff out of which the patterns and structures are formed. — Cartuna

Well the structure is what shapes the material stuff that it needs. Thus it is a closed and self organising view of nature.

The Standard Model of particle physics is an exercise in ontic structural realism. The constraints of invariant group symmetry is what conjures all the elementary particles into formed being.

Do you want to argue with the physicists as well as the neuroscientists now? :confused:

Here you presuppose that it produces consciousness. — Cartuna

No. I trust the amount of evidence gathered in favour of this particular hypothesis. The scope for doubt has been carefully minimised.

If you want to imagine something different - like all of the neuroscience, none of the consciousness - then of course I will call you out on your sloppy argumentation.

If one elementary particle is just matter, why shouldn't a highly structured bunch of them not just be that? — Cartuna

I refer you back to the modern physical understanding of “matter” that has long replaced your folk metaphysics understanding of matter.

Yes I am unable to explain consciousness. Because it isn't explainable. — Cartuna

You are not doing anything except regurgitating half baked folk wisdom about the nature of reality and the nature of mind.

As I've noted, I've been perplexed by your discussions of semiotics from the first time I read your posts. Certainly nothing wrong with your explanations. It's just an alien way of thinking for me. It sometimes seems to verge on the mystical, which I understand is not your intent. — T Clark

Most people never get it. :grin:

When you say "neural firing must somehow produce an experienced representation," is that different from saying that the experienced representation emerges from neuronal firing. In your view, is that wrong too? — T Clark

Yep. Emergence is generally employed as a hand-waving patch for the failure of materialism/reductionism. You get a claim about higher level properties “popping” out due simply to “enough complexity”.

Water having the property of liquidity, for example. Confine a bunch of H2O molecules at the right temperature and pressure, and they collectively interact to form one phase of matter and not one of the three others. Thus liquidity becomes merely a label for a state that is still constructed, bottom up, from the fundamental properties of material parts. Good old fashion reductionism still gets to win as the higher level property is not fundamental, merely an accident of an arrangement.

But structuralism is about taking top-cause - the shaping hand of form or constraint - seriously. And so causality then has the irreducible triadic complexity of a causal world where bottom up and top down causes work in combination. The global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees of freedom in turn (re)build the larger context, the global reality, that is making them. The causality is synergistic - as Hermann Haken describes.

So I would talk of emergence too. But it is the proper holistic view of emergence and not the arse-covering notion of emergence peddled by eliminative reductionists.

Thus even the term “consciousness” is not a lot of use to me, or neuroscientists like Friston, because it is language already loaded with all the presumptions of reductionism and its bottom-up, magic popping out, way of thinking.

For me, I prefer to talk of brain function in terms of it known bottom up and top down processes - like the distinction between habit and attention. Habits are routines that the brain simply “emits” in a bottom up fashion. Attention is then the brain coming at things from the other direction - starting with a global effort to suppress to halt and suppress the habitual so as to make room for a novel and voluntary state of intention and planning to rule.

The two streams of processing - which can be described neuroanatomically - generally work so seamlessly together that we don’t even notice there is this dance going on.

But what happens when I drive my car in busy traffic while fully absorbed in my own thoughts? Am I conscious of one and unconscious of the other?

These are the kinds of questions we can answer scientifically once we drop the folk metaphysics that thinks it already knows what it is talking about.

To talk of experienced representation already bakes in the information processing dualism that a semiotic understanding of mind and life would want to avoid.

The tricky bit is that instead of a broken dualism, the way forward is not back to any kind of monism, but instead a step up to the hierarchical causality of holism. You have to move to an irreducibly triadic understanding of “consciousness” as a “semiotic modelling relation”.

In Friston’s Markov Blanket formalism, the neural firing “represents” the difference between the organisms actions on its physical environment and the physical environments actions on its sensory receptors. So as a system, the brain is trying to minimise that difference - reduce the prediction error as the brain pursues the holistic goal of being in perfect synch with “its” world. The neural firing “represents” the running interaction of an organism’s goals and with the challenges of its environment.

And being in a well synched state of flow - as when driving without having to pay attention - becomes something as unconscious as we can get. The aim is the very opposite of what the Cartesian reorientations presume.

It just is a different paradigm. But folk metaphysics is stuck in its own Cartesian rut. Reductionism prevails - because the success of computer technology appears to confirm a linear input/output model of data processing as the most useful view of the natural world.

Without matter there can be no structure. — Cartuna

A naive realist might say that. A structural realist adopts a more sophisticated ontology.

I can imagine all structured neuron activity taking place without a conscious experience. — Cartuna

You are free to imagine whatever you want. I simply ask for a clear reason why all that structured action would fail to produce what it ordinarily produces.

And again, you are showing that you are unable to supply a causal argument for why the same process might sometimes be conscious, sometimes result in a zombie.

Why would a normally developing brain in a normally developing human fail to be conscious in the normal developing way? Answer me that. Don’t simply make extravagant claims of what you could imagine.

I don't put material processes in the driving seat, though I don't deny them. — Cartuna

You are arguing against someone else. I’m a structuralist, not a materialist.

The processes corresponding to seeing color could just as well occur without an accompanying conscious experience of color. — Cartuna

This is where you get to explain just how the processes could fail to be accompanied by a conscious experience.

You don’t just get to assert it as a fact.

The structures which we call life can do nothing else but evolve towards low entropy states, being situated periodically in the heat baths of the star and the cold bath of the void of night. Nothing special about that. — Cartuna

You need to study the thermodynamics of dissipative structures that are enclosed by a Markov blanket - that have an epistemic cut or a modelling relation with their environment. Stop arguing from an ignorance of the actual argument being made by Friston and others. Thermodynamics is a larger story than what you want to believe here.

The materialist might disagree though. — Cartuna

Or more importantly, the “materialist” might in fact be a semiotician and systems thinker. And they might actually have a theory.

What have you got to offer beyond the usual doubts and assertions as your way to excuse an ignorance of where the science is at?

I'm genuinely interested in non-panpsychist theories of consciousness, but I don't have time to spend hours researching things that I suspect are totally irrelevant to the problem. — bert1

This is bullshit. I posted Friston’s presentation. If you can’t muster the energy to consider what the world’s premier thinker on the subject has to say, then that’s on you.

I like this especially for a couple of reasons. First - it's a great rhetorical response to the "science can't address qualia" argument. They say "How do you explain the experience of red?" You say "How could such modelling not feel like something?" It turns their argument back on them. Rhetorical ju jitsu. I don't know that it actually explains anything, but maybe it will knock them off their homo-centric high horse. — T Clark

I posted the Friston video to show that neuroscience can now claim to show that “modelling” is a physically generic fact of reality. It is not some arbitrary system of thought humans can chose to employ. It is like Darwinian selection or the Platonic solids - an inescapable state of physical organisation. A mathematical necessity.

Peirce got the ball rolling with his semiotic logic. He saw that “meaning creation” is just a mathematical necessity that organises human thought and also makes the Cosmos a rational place. There is a structure of relations that defines what constitutes “order” and so lifts existence out of chaos or vagueness.

Theoretical biology got to the same level of insight in defining life as a modelling relation - see Robert Rosen and his relational biology, Howard Pattee and his epistemic cut.

Now Friston is hitting neuroscience with the same story. With a lot of actual maths.

So it isn’t rhetorical to the degree there is genuine scientific advance being made. There is a new model of modelling which defines it as physically generic and mathematically necessary.

Now you can doubt or dispute this model of modelling. But first you have to show you understand the argument being made.

@bert1 simply declares he isn’t motivated enough to learn about it. I think we can dismiss “rebuttals” that take that form.

Whenever the subject comes up, I try to imagine how it would feel for sparks in neurons to turn into movies in my mind. You say "Of course it feels like something," makes me rethink the defensiveness I sometimes feel in that discussion. — T Clark

This idea that neural firing must somehow produce an experienced representation is just a hangover from Cartesian representationalism and the “naturalisation” of that ontology due to the great success of universal Turing machines as a 20th century technology.

But we wouldn’t say steam engines explain the mechanisms of life. So why would we say computer metaphors would have anything deep to say about the mechanisms of mind?

My point here is that both life and mind - as now clearly understood by the current science - have a very different (semiotic) logic about them.

What was the central problem for the Cartesian paradigm - how to connect the dualistic realms of the material and the mental - just isn’t a problem for the semiotic paradigm.

If there is still a problem, it is the general epistemic one that applies to the scientific method in general - the need to base causal accounts on counterfactuals. But that is, as I say a completely general epistemic issue, and not a specific ontological issue. It is not central to scientific inquiry. It just demarcates the ultimate limits of inquiry as a semiotic process itself. It defines truth as an asymptotic approach to a collective rational agreement - pragmatism, in a word.

You're presuming that experiencing necessitates feeling — Enrique

Huh?

Explanation only becomes exhaustive when the substances it describes are observed to completion, and mechanistic concepts alone never get us to that point. — Enrique

Did you not understand the part of my post where I argued from the position of a structuralist, as opposed to a substantialist, ontology?

It is the belief that mind is some kind of fundamental reified substance which is where folk go wrong. I start from the opposing belief that mind is a process - a structure of relations. So if mindfulness is substantial, it is in the proper Aristotelean sense, not the Cartesian dualist sense.

You've asserted it and said the burden of proof is on the doubter, which is rhetorical nonsense. — bert1

You are doubting something before you have even understood what you claim to doubt. So until you can supply some grounds to substantiate your doubt….

This is the crux of it. Why should it feel like something? Why can't the modelling happen in the dark? — bert1

Do you understand the Bayesian/semiotic approach to modelling well enough to justify such a doubt?

If not, your proclaimed doubt is “happening in the dark”.

It seems that there are two options from here. We either regard consciousness as a fundamental property (a property like charge for example in which we accept that there are no more fundamental descriptions of it; some things just exist the way they are without the need for further explanation) or we can try to come up with a more fundamental theory, that goes beyond surface-level descriptions of consciousness. — tom111

There are better options. Maybe it is structure that is fundamental and not properties. Properties may be better thought of as emergent features of systems of relations.

Physical reality is best described as mathematical patterns or structures of relations. Quantum theory, relativity, the standard model. The maths describes the causal structure of reality.

When it comes to consciousness, neuroscience is also seeking to find its mathematical model of its essential causal structure.

Both life and mind are themselves code-based modelling relations with reality. That is the kind of structure they are. Semiotic structures. Genes and neurons anchor the business of modelling the environment in terms of an organism's interests and purposes.

So consciousness just is - in a general metaphysical way - the brain modelling the world from an enactive or "selfish" point of view. Consciousness is what it is like to be in a modelling relationship with the world - a model of the world that has "me" in it as its centre.

That general semiotic modelling relationship is now being put on a solid mathematical foundation by Karl Friston and his Bayesian Brain approach. He now claims it to be a fourth branch of mechanics - Bayesian mechanics to add to classical, statistical and quantum mechanics.

See his talk here for details.



That still does not "explain" the redness of red, of course. But that is a different story. Scientific accounts generally don't explain reality in terms of qualities ... being that they deal in the mathematically quantifiable.

It is like being given a useful - measurable and calculable - explanation of magnetism and complaining that an account of its essential causal structure does not give you an understanding of the magneticness of magneticity.

Once you verbally reduce the world to singular qualities, you cut it away from all that is its counterfactual context. You abstract it from its structure of relations. And no wonder not much more can be said.

But even without going into the maths of Bayesian mechanics, or the metaphysics of code-based semiosis, it should be easy enough to see that the brain - in modelling its environment in terms of its embodied self-interest - ought to feel like something. Indeed, something just like being a model of the world as it is with "ourselves" living and acting in it.

How could such modelling not feel like something? (The question that brings the conversation back to the realm of questions which are framed counterfactually and thus allow you to say why zombies can't be actually zombies if they indeed are in a Bayesian modelling relation with the world, exactly like we are.)

I'm advocating a distinction between metaphysical as a synonym for metaempirical., and metaphysical as a synonym for supernatural, that's all. — Janus

But who supports a definition of metaphysics as the study of the supernatural?

And when metaempirical is used as a term, it is about the wider epistemic reasons for believing in a theoretical framework rather than about the ontological presumptions that might motivate ideas about suitable experimental metrics.

So metaempirical justification for some line of physical inquiry might be Occam’s razor, or this way of thinking has worked for us before, or this way of thinking seems to produce more results than just the ones we were directly aiming for.

Metaphysics is indeed a broad brush label. But context would make it clear I was talking about ontic presuppositions that lay the ground for the actual business of making measurements. So for instance, whether you believe reality is made of particles or waves, whether you believe actions are local or nonlocal, etc.

The fact that New Age crackpots conflate two kinds of “mystery” - quantum collapse and the neuroscience of consciousness - is just one of those things. It has nothing to do with metaphysics and science as two fruitfully related academic disciplines … if you must treat them as clearly demarcated in the first place.

My vote: just spare us from the crackpots and their theories that can’t even past the first hurdle of “even being wrong”.

Discussion would be much better if you bothered to read what I wrote, rather than jumping to stupid conclusions about what I'm saying. — Janus

Be huffy. But as Callender notes, it is not about what is or isn’t observed. The metaphysics grounds what even counts as the right kind of measurement.

If you feel your preferred jargon covers that, go for it. But it would be nice if you could supply a source to substantiate your implication that metaphysics and “metaempiricism” ain’t just synonyms here.

I don't see how "transcendence vs immanence" is relevant to debates about interpretations of QM. — Janus

All I was saying is that however we might interpret QM the interpretation is a physical, not a metaphysical one, at least in the sense of not positing something transcendent at work. — Janus

This is ridiculous. Here is what a competent philosopher says as something just taken for granted….

Quantum mechanics, like any physical theory, comes equipped with many metaphysical assumptions and implications. The line between metaphysics and physics is often blurry, but as a rough guide, one can think of a theory's metaphysics as those foundational assumptions made in its interpretation that are not usually directly tested in experiment.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-70626-7_119

Damn. :razz:

Although I agree with your point about how bivalence works, I think there is a place for it as long as you recognize that it is just a point of view, a choice, and not the fundamental basis of reality. — T Clark

These are always “just models” that need to prove themselves pragmatically.

And I’ve said that reductionism and holism themselves are reciprocal points of view - a dichotomy - if understood correctly. I don’t reject one in favour of the other, but do then use each to sharpen the sense of the other.

You could consider that a disputable meta-metaphysical claim. I would be quite happy to defend it.

…and are trying to present their position. — T Clark

That would be true if they make a positive and open minded argument for it. No problem there.

All I was saying is that however we might interpret QM the interpretation is a physical, not a metaphysical one, at least in the sense of not positing something transcendent at work. — Janus

If this is to be argument by definition, then I’m happy with the usual position that metaphysics is an inquiry into the nature and causes of being, Then as a debate, transcendence vs immanence is one of its familiar organising dichotomies,

do you think the Bohr-Einstein debates were about physics or metaphysics? — Wayfarer

It isn’t me that wants to make a sharp distinction here. I take the opposite view. Science is how we put metaphysical reasoning to the test.

it’s not about different interpretations of the same facts. It is about the axiomatic basis by which some observation could constitute “a fact”.

So the metaphysical work gets done to set up the theory. It doesn’t follow the measurements as they already build in some metaphysical basis.

Well if you don’t understand the point there’s not a lot of use trying to explain it again. — Wayfarer

Physics is not metaphysics, otherwise what would be the point of having a separate subject area? — Wayfarer

Did you understand your own point. Seems not.

Interpretations. That is the point. An observation of a physical phenomenon is just that - you register a measurement on an instrument, there's no room for disagreement about the reading. But what it means is wide open to interpretation. — Wayfarer

It is one thing when the needle moves. It is another thing when a guy in a white coat told you it was going to move exactly like that for exactly this reason.

The situation is no longer “wide open” for interpretation. You have a job to do to say why some other interpretation would both predict the same thing and much more besides.

They say nothing about what may or may not underlie, or be beyond, the physical, as far as I can tell. — Janus

They certainly ought to constrain what would be considered credible.

Like after Darwin, you might quarrel about how humans arose from apes. But no longer do you need to worry about the mechanics of turning ribs into first wombs.

They're all quite different philosophically, but they're all working from the same set of observations. — Wayfarer

Sigh. How is your case furthered by citing all these physicists taking different metaphysical positions?

Interpretations of physics can be wildly different philosophically, yet both consistent with the observations. — Wayfarer

Did you have an example in mind?

Ain't metaphysical, by definition. Physics is not metaphysics, otherwise what would be the point of having a separate subject area? — Wayfarer

This is just you boundary policing. Next you will be saying that Atomism played no part in the Scientific Revolution.

What is the difference between "dialectical" and "bivalently-framed?" Is it that with the dialectic, the goal is to reach consensus, while with bivalently-framed, we have to make a choice? — T Clark

Bivalence is a reduction to two options. That sets up the further reduction to just the one monistic choice - as the other becomes the not-true.

This is @Banno's pattern of thought. You can always tell a reductionist by the way they build their conclusion into their terminology. Determinism is opposed to in-determinism. Sense is opposed to non-sense. By this kind of rhetorical trick, they hope to reinforce the notion that truth is something monistic. You either see things their way or you are simply opting for the option that their jargon already negates.

The sign of dialectical or triadic systems thinking is that the poles of any metaphysical dichotomy each have their own name. A dichotomy is where both choices are "true" in standing as the positive limit of the other. One doesn't negate the other. Each negates the other. And what do you get from a double negative? :grin:

So instead of determinate vs indeterminate, it becomes determinate vs vague. You don't signal that one choice is wrong by pointing out that it is merely an absence of some particular metaphysical quality. You give both their own proper name.

A small point of jargon. But important where folk are mostly arguing rhetorically.

Anyway, the difference can be summed up that by saying the principle of bivalence is the logical claim that propositions are to be judged either true or false - true or not true. And a dialectical or dichotomous logic says that any "bivalent" division of metaphysical possibility has to obey the rule of being "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive". So to be "true", each has to stand as the logical negatation the other. Or to be more accurate, each has to be the formal inverse of reciprocal of the other.

So for example, vagueness is defined as that which is lacking all definiteness. And definiteness is that which is lacking all vagueness. But for each to have a measurable lack of the other, there must be that other to stand as a counterfactual possibility.

We are thus making statements about qualities being defined mutually "in the limit". A reciprocal relation.

Vagueness = 1/determinate. Determinate = 1/vagueness.

This is why a metaphysical dichotomy leads on to a triadic or holistic resolution - a Hegelian synthesis or Peircean semiotic. You have two things that exist as the third thing of their mutually co-dependent relation.

So when it comes to metaphysics as a historical practice, you can see how a division of thought might arise.

There are the reductionists who want to arrive at some monism and so they either proclaim the monisms of Idealism or Realism as "the one true path of all right thinking folk", or they get upset by paradoxes that arise and simply reject metaphysics as a discipline in its entirety.

The other path is the one that successful metaphysics has always taken since the ancient Greeks first developed the two general approaches to logical thought. And it is no surprise if logical holism might win the game. Nature is of course a cosmic whole. (Well, that is the general hypothesis that has worked out so far.)

That's why I'm so attracted to pragmatism as a way of approaching the world. I am self-aware enough to see that has as much, or more, to do with temperament as it does with reason. — T Clark

Pragmatism is logical holism. So you can pick it for that reason.

Reductionism is fine too. It works really well if you want to build machinery or even mechanise human society and the human mind. Simple cause and effect thinking is neat little everyday tool of thought.

But if you want to do metaphysics, you have to study metaphysics for the actual logic it employs.

I am skeptical of bringing physics into metaphysical arguments. It's often a symptom of wrong-headed thinking. Is that there one of them "category errors.?" Quantum mechanics seems to be a prime candidate for this mistake. — T Clark

I don't see "metaphysics" as something beyond science. It clearly grounds science. And science then delivers a pragmatic judgement on the abductive speculations.

What do you think metaphysics ought to deliver as its social good? Does it have a purpose? I can't see any other reason to "do metaphysics" except to attempt to deduce the truth of reality from first principles ... and so set yourself up with clear hypotheses worth the effort of empirical test.

So pragmatism rules. Otherwise it is just spinning tales that make no difference.

The reason why quantum physics keeps coming up is that it simply destroys "reductionist privilege" at root.

You can cobble together a decoherent "maths of reality" out of a combo of wave mechanics and statistical mechanics. You can arrive at an effective collapse of the wavefunction - with only a last tiny grain of uncertainty or vagueness. But in the end, there is no closure, no actual wavefunction collapse. Monism loses. The irreducible triadicity of a holistic systems logic has to be accepted.

So metaphysics provides two general cultural models of reality - the reductionist and the holistic. They are both just models - good for their various applications. One is great for seeing reality as a causal machine. A mereology of parts. The other jumps to the other pole in seeing reality as an organic whole. The Cosmos becomes something quite "other".

physics is observing experimental results. Metaphysics is considering what they mean — Wayfarer

Yeah, nah. :smile:

Physics practices its own winning brand of metaphysical world-modelling. It gets on with what it believes works.

Philosophy of science might then critique that.

Alternately, we might adopt a triadic logic and assign it the value "indeterminate". — Banno

:lol:

Do you mean that as a scientific statement in relation to quantum indeterminism or a metaphysical statement about truth and falsity in general. — T Clark

Both. Metaphysics is in general the application of reason or rationality to the understanding of nature. Logic, or logics, are its tool. Then physics is metaphysically derived intuitions, shaped up into formal mathematical exactness, and then subjected to the informality of acts of measurement. At some point, we just agree that the evidence is “good enough”.

The central issue in the OP is he question of “which logic” ought to guide our metaphysical intuitions?

This could be good old fashioned reductionism. But history has shown that dialectical and trialectic reasoning - a move towards holism - actually deliver the better results when it comes to the forming of general intuitions. Reductionist predicate logic is what you use more in the next step of forming deductive statements that are then suitable for a process of inductive confirmation, or the experimental test of a bivalently-framed prediction.

So one thing that is clear to any logical holist is that yes/no thinking lacks sufficient sophistication. You need further categories - a third option as an answer, such as yes, no, or vague.

Pragmatism builds that answer in. The theory makes some kind of reductively bivalent claim about reality. It is a good thing to be clear in this way. But then the theory is only ever deemed verified or falsified provisionally. The evidence might lean heavily on way or the other. But always, the fact is that there remains something ambiguous or indeterminate about its truth status.

Then when it comes to quantum theory, we find ourselves bumping up against the fact that nature itself must have this same kind of logical holism. The vagueness that we need to include in our epistemic methodology becomes also a useful third category when we speak of nature “in itself”.

The alternative is to form pathological metaphysical intuitions like claiming QM proves there is a multiverse, or forever protesting that there must be “hidden variables” still to uncover.

No. — Banno

So … not yes? :smile:

Metaphysical statements are taken as true, but unjustified. — Banno

So God exists. There is no God.

We must take these statements as both true, and both requiring their own justification, rather than being a single counterfactual in which the degree to which one can be shown false, the other becomes accepted as true?

Sounds legit.

Then Janus came up with this, which set me thinking: — T Clark

To be true or false as a particular claim requires meeting the test of being a statement to which both the principle of noncontradiction and the law of the excluded middle apply.

If the the PNC fails to apply, the statement is logically vague. It is neither true nor false.

If the LEM fails to apply, the statement is logically general. I would say this covers the recursive or self-referential case where the statement is seemingly both true and false at the same time.

The subject where this issue most often comes to mind for me is interpretations of quantum mechanics and, in particular, the multiverse interpretation. In my mind, unless there is an experiment or theoretical development that can determine which interpretation is correct, then anything beyond the Shut Up and Calculate Interpretation is meaningless. — T Clark

In practice, decidability is a pragmatic exercise. I would say that while we can model the world as if it has counterfactual definiteness all the way down - and so is seems that bivalent logic ought to apply - in fact Nature I only admits to being relatively divided. This makes it vague or indeterminate at base.

This is a view quantum theory looks to confirm. The Planck constant defines a fundamental grain of uncertainty.

So there are three ways to go on quantum decoherence. You can get hung up on the bivalent question of whether there is a definite collapse to classicality or instead no collapse and hence MWI. The third answer would be to say that decoherence is a reduction towards classicality, but never a complete one. Some degree of indeterminacy or vagueness remains. The PNC never completely applies.

So both MWI and classicality get ruled out as being logically imposed fictions on our metaphysics. If we expand our metaphysics to include the concepts of vagueness and generality, some of the major historical blocks on metaphysical thought start to fall away.

Personally, I don't bother reading Kant or even Hegel with any diligence. They are good thinkers, but really just historical stepping stones towards Peirce. In terms of my research purposes, they are not going to enlarge the picture because Peirce did a fine job incorporating them into his improved vision of metaphysics.

the monism I suscribe to simply says there is one fundamental kind of stuff. — Manuel

Yep. And my argument is against the notion of "stuff" itself. Stuff is just the actuality of in-formed substantial being - as Aristotle said, in his hylomorphic solution to the issue of categories.

So if there is a monism, it is the one-ness - or rather the unity - of a process, a logical relation. And the fewest number of categories to demonstrate a unity of relations is three. It is a mathematical theorem in network theory, as well as being Peirce's "reduction thesis".

What I was trying to point out is that if it requires so much effort to think this way, couldn't someone come along and say, no, 1sts 2nds and 3rds don't work? They could say "All you need is mind and reaction, mind takes care of 1sts and 2nds, reactions takes care of 3rds. 1stness is actually an unnecessary complication." — Manuel

Ah. Of course it is far simpler to think like a reductionist. And thus a dualist.

Holism is like multi-dimensional chess. Everything is in motion. Nothing is pinned down or moves forbidden. Who needs to make themselves dizzy with all that when simple tales of cause and effect can do the basic job of constructing the human world in the image of a machine - and then standing back to complain bitterly about how the mechanical model lacks any dimension of spirit and feeling.

Reductionism/dualism is a brilliant formula for an easy life. You get to have all the modern fruits of materialism and also look down on its inherent mediocracy at the same time. Win/win.

But for us sad folk doing neuroscience, ecology, climate change politics, quantum physics, or anything else that demands in engaging in actual holistic reasoning, reductionism no longer is useful. We have to bend our heads learning to think a different way.

Why is 1s needed? Well you have to be able to treat vagueness, indeterminacy, spontaneity, and all those good things, as elements of reality. You have to admit the existence of the uncertain and not just live in the world of claimed certainty.

Perhaps something like Russell's neutral monism — Wayfarer

This come back to a claim that everything is one kind of stuff, one kind of substance. Peirce is arguing everything comes back to the one kind of process, the one logical way of having a structure of relations.

So lightyears apart. Peirce is ontic structural realism. There is a Platonic strength maths at the heart of his claims. Reality is at root self-logical.

So, shift the perspective a bit. What I think idealism is saying is that perception itself, cognition itself, are the constituents of the world - the 'meaning-world' in which we live. — Wayfarer

You have shifted the perspective a bit. And in the right direction. :up:

But note that you still revert to talking about the "constituents" of the world. You are still thinking of the parts or elements that add up to construct the whole.

The way I would put it is that "cognition", or formal/final cause, act as constraints on possibility. So rather than a building up from nothing, it is about the evolution of limits on "everythingness" - a top-down suppression of variety or vagueness that leaves behind the well-formed whole.

So idealism in this sense is about the emergence of constraining structure that gives local shape to every possibility. The "mind" of the system lies in its historically-embodied collection of pragmatic habit - the laws or structural regularities that allow it to persist as the system that it is, now that it has evolved down that "material" path.

That is where understanding the idealist perspective requires something like a gestalt shift - an insight into how mind 'constructs' world. But it doesn't post 'mind' as being an objective 'thing' from which the world is made - it's that the very nature of cognition determines the world for us. Get the difference? — Wayfarer

Yes. But then that is no longer idealism as normally understood, defined, discussed. And it indeed shoots right past Peirce to become simply Kantian cognitivism. It puts you in a position where the image of reality is just an image, and never the reality.

Peirce is difficult to understand because he ties together both the ontic and the epistemic in the single process or relation of semiosis. So the way the mind knows the world is also the way the world "thinks" itself into existence.

That would be the pansemiotic thesis. All is a triadic logic of relations. What human minds do - using numbers and words - is what biology does, using genes and neurons. Then our best model of what physics and chemistry does is also going to be to view them as abiotic semiosis. A triadic relation.

And that is why the entropy/information duality has emerged as the new "objective" measure of reality. We apply a ruler that measures everything in terms of uncertainty vs certainty. Vagueness vs counterfactual definiteness. Disorder vs order. Material possibility vs formal necessity. And that is a view of reality that puts a formal basis under all of science from cosmology to neuroscience.

It is still just us modelling the world. But it becomes as near as we will likely ever get in terms of modelling the world with us in it.

The logic of his categories has to be convincing, otherwise someone else can ask "why don't you follow Whitehead or Heidegger?" or anyone else. — Manuel

I was puzzled by the angle you are taking here. But a check of your bio and a quick skim of your P&M monism thesis hopefully explains.

Some like to see Peirce as some kind of panpsychist, or idealist, or neutral monist, but I look at that as a grave misunderstanding and something that will cloud any possibility of understanding his position.

However I am also of course partial. I come at Peirce via biology, neuroscience, complexity theory and systems science, so I had already rejected any variety of reduction to a monistic metaphysics, along with a rejection of any form of dualism.

The systems position boils down to seeing reality as triadic, and hence irreducibly complex. Some call that Peirce's Reduction Thesis.

So Peirce might achieve a "monistic" unity in saying everything is semiosis. But it is a unity that is like the classical unity of opposites - the unity of the dialectic. Except Peirce realises you have to add yet a third dimension to allow for an axis of development. So his is a unity of the triadic. It is the dichotomy plus the vagueness it divides.

As a view, this would make the considerable work you invested in your thesis quite redundant. P&M monism is already ruled out. You would have much to lose from seeing Peirce as I see him.

That might be an interesting situation for you, or it might not. I'm just indicating the degree of paradigm shifting that would be involved.

Coming from a systems science perspective myself, Peirce simply cements its triadic paradigm. I was working with a gang of theoretical biologists in early 2000s when they realised that Peircean semiotics crystallised their general worldview. Overnight, they renamed themselves biosemioticians. But they were already thinking in non-reductionist terms. They had that habit of mind developed to a mathematical degree. So the move came easy.

Alright but, which of his writings do you consider to be helpful when looking into the categories. — Manuel

He never set it out in a book or even completely finished figuring it out. The Peircean triad simply informs all his thought as the structure that guides his every effort to explore any possible philosophical question.

I'm not kidding. It is a mental habit to be learnt by practice, not just a formula of words you can parrot. You have to restructure the very patterns of your habits of reason in a way that escapes the usual narrow conventions of reductionism and "cause and effect" thinking.

So understanding is something that can only grow from repeat exposures to every possible angle. Eventually it becomes second nature. It is the lens and not merely just another passing image.

With pure freedom and spontaneity Peirce tended to associate mind, and with firmly entrenched habits he tended to associate matter — SEP, Charles Sanders Pierce

So was he speaking metaphorically or literally? Does "tended to associate" mean logically derived from first principles, or useful for introducing a broader canvas of thought that serves to undermine the cherished categories of Cartesian dualism?

Science was narrowing philosophical thought in two cultures fashion. I read Peirce as striving to undermine certainties about both matter and mind, and that way clear space for a uniting semiotic view of these divided categories.

As for semiosis, I still can't see how it applies outside the organic realm. — Wayfarer

Strictly speaking, it can't. That is what modern systems thinking realises in rooting semiosis in talk about codes, modelling relations and epistemic cuts.

Peirce didn't have biology and neurology figured out.

Can't all of the relations between inorganic substances be fully described in terms of physics and chemistry alone? — Wayfarer

Broadly speaking, you can still have a code-less pansemiotics. So you can relax that constraint and arrive at a more generalised metaphysics - and thus recover Peirce in that limit-taking move.

Physical description still requires global laws to regulate the local accidents. It all gets very mysterious when it comes to the holism of quantum theory and the need for wavefunction decoherence. So physics tries to describe reality by excluding any sense of an observer or interpretant. But it is still there in that the laws of nature "know" what is going on. Or that the Universe is made of information and so semiosis is happening "everywhere".

Life and mind are localised semiosis. Cosmology is generalised semiosis. One needs to have its own encoding machinery. The other just is an encoding machine - a dissipative structure collapsing its own wavefunction, expanding and cooling into its own heat sink .... whatever "physical" way you want to put it.

And idealism doesn't mean 'believing that all is mind' or anything of the sort. — Wayfarer

Erm....

IDEALISM - This is the view that the only reality is the ideal world. This would be the world of ideas. It is the view that there is no external reality composed of matter and energy. There are only ideas existing within minds.

https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/intro_text/Chapter%204%20Metaphysics/Idealism.htm