My point was that this is completely different from dfpolis' position that laws are inherent within matter, so no such "accidental change" is possible. Yet both of you claim to have a metaphysics which represents modern physics. Is modern physics that confused that it supports contradictory metaphysics? — Metaphysician Undercover

Dfpolis was taking a position on Hyle. I disagreed with that, making the argument that he was treating the material principle as already having formal organisation in having an inherent and active intentionality. So in terms of "prime matter", his starting point had already crossed the line and ceased to be prime.

However, that is also a reasonable view if we are talking about the actual world where it is only in our conceptions that we are wanting to insist on some absolutely dualistic separation. So it is also the case that any notion of prime matter is simply a state of being that is the least tellic, the least organised, the least shaped and directed.

And as we have discussed multiple times, I would then go beyond that qualification to say that both matter and form would have to co-arise from something even more extreme - a state of "actual" vagueness. It is at this point any conversation we have completely breaks down. You were already lost at step one - the idea that prime matter reduces to a notion of undirected flux, making matter already an active thing, just a chaotically unformed kind of active thing.

So I am quite sympathetic to Dfpolis on the characterisation of Hyle as already intentional and active - given my qualification that that is then the least intentional form of activity we could possibly imagine. It would be simply a blind and formless striving to be.

And I am completely opposed to your characterisation of prime matter as some kind of passive substratrum that awaits a shaping intentional hand to magic it into a world of objects. This is just the materialism of atomism. And Aristotle was a good deal beyond that.

Unlike my story which avoids those contradictory facts of modern science altogether. — Metaphysician Undercover

Talk about wishful thinking.

How would you quantify one degree of freedom, to ensure that it is maintained, in continuity from one moment to the next? — Metaphysician Undercover

Physics does that by counting the microstates of a bounded system. So what is conserved is all the possible configurations of some collection of parts. A block of spacetime can contain some maximum number of different arrangements.

So that is how the model achieves conservation. And now the ontology works the other way round. It is the closure by being bounded - constrained - that underwrites the energy conservation. In general relativity, for example, energy is no longer conserved as a necessity. This is because the spatiotemporal boundaries are no longer globally fixed. They have a plastic geometry.

So energy conservation becomes an output of the model. The modelled world starts open. You add constraints to close it in suitable fashion. It is no longer a universal fact to be taken for granted - even if our actual Universe does look pretty closed in terms of its energy content.

And remember I asked you a direct question:

A constraints-based view of substance says limits on instability create stability. So in every moment, something could accidentally change. And very often in life, things do. But to the degree there is a global order or law in place, such accidental changes are suitably restricted. Things can't change enough to matter.

This is a perfectly intelligible ontology. Tell me one thing wrong with it.

...I'm sure you were just about to give an answer.

I think that you are not quite grasping the concept of "matter". — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm simply not agreeing to your half-baked thoughts on the issue.

When change occurs, there is always an underlying substratum which remains the same, and this is called matter. This allows us to say that a changing object maintains its identity as the same object despite undergoing change. It is essential to the concept of "change". — Metaphysician Undercover

Your view is familiar. Along with its defects.

Without this concept, change becomes unintelligible because at each moment of change there is something new. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'll repeat. A constraints-based view of substance says limits on instability create stability. So in every moment, something could accidentally change. And very often in life, things do. But to the degree there is a global order or law in place, such accidental changes are suitably restricted. Things can't change enough to matter.

This is a perfectly intelligible ontology. Tell me one thing wrong with it. And it fits the facts as science knows them. Unlike your story.

What I was saying is that the concept most often used today, to account for temporal continuity, is energy rather than matter. This is expressed as the law of conservation of energy. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are still a century out of date. Energy is now countable as quantum information. Degrees of freedom are the conserved quantity. Cosmology measures the entropy of event horizons. Things have moved on.

Matter is completely conceptual, it is the concept which human beings have developed to account for the temporal continuity of existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are confused. The point I was pushing was how physics is no longer based on that kind of material atomism. It agrees that it is form that gives persistent shape or individuation to raw potential.

So substantial being is again understood in hylomorphic terms. Of course, this ain’t much trumpeted. But it looks undeniable.

In modern physics the concept of matter has been replaced by the concept of energy as the means of accounting for temporal continuity. — Metaphysician Undercover

And energy in turn has become entropy and even information. There is a trajectory here. Persistent being is now dominantly described in terms of form or ontic structure.

And to complement that, we need an equally updated notion of the material potential that is getting shaped into something. That is where Aristotle is not much help. But Anaximander’s Apeiron or Peirce’s logic of vagueness is.

I am not talking about an information realm, but about physical and intentional theaters of operation and their relation. — Dfpolis

And so the crucial question becomes how do you measure intentionality in your scheme?

Information and entropy complement each other nicely as measurements in the two theatres of operation as physics and biology are coming to understand them. If you have some personal idea here, then you will need to say something about what would count as a measurement of your explanatory construct.

So the laws cause matter to behave the way that it does, by informing it? I assume that they exist as information then. — Metaphysician Undercover

How does form in-form matter then? You are just repeating the usual issues created by your own particular notion of hylomorphism. It is because you presume the material principle to be already substantial and passively existent that you keep encountering the same logical difficulties.

The way physics is making sense of hylomorphism is as the informational constraint on entropic degrees of freedom. So nature is taken as dualistic in a sense. It is divided into the necessary and the accidental. The substantial or actual is then the third part, the middle part, where the two combine as a fact of physical development.

This means the material aspect is best understood in terms of fundamental contingency - action that could happen in any direction without purpose or coherence. Prime matter would be active, not passive. But active in the sense of pure undirected fluctuation with no stable identity. It would be utter flux. Which then gives form and purpose a useful job to do.

The other aspect of the actualised is then whatever history gets recorded in a fashion that it becomes a material or immanent constraint on further flux.

A shower of rain falls randomly on a new bare hillside. Little rivulets form and combine. Eventually, because the hillside can erode and form patterns - information - a deeper system of brooks, streams and rivers develop. We have bodies of water that seem now fixed and permanent features of the landscape - substantial beings. The accidental gets channeled to become the necessary. It is a physical law what happens to every rain-drop now.

Although of course - taking this process view of nature and its habits - we can see that the drainage pattern can still evolve with time. Accidents continue to happen. The channels will keep readjusting so as to maintain a steady and efficient flow through their network.

So you are stuck with the intuition that the material substrate must be a rock-solid and passive - that kind of materiality. But understanding materiality as undirected flux is how you can make room for the matching thing of a constraining purpose that is encoded as information and gives steadying shape to the flow of that flux as now a material process with a direction.

If you simply refuse to accept that prime matter is essentially active - or indeed, the complete lack of any stabilising constraint - then you will keep failing to make any sense of a naturalistic metaphysics which hylomorphically invokes the "other" of that stabilising constraint.

(Of course, I realise that your theism also depends on failing to make sense of a naturalistic metaphysics. :) )

Thus, teleology and mechanism are two projections of the same reality. Instead of being contraries, they are complimentary -- related as ends and means. Mechanism fixes on means, teleology on ends. — Dfpolis

So, I'm using "logical" to refer to the information (intelligibility) specifying a state, whether that state be physical or intentional. "Logical Propagators" in nature, then, transform the intelligibility of one state into that of another. — Dfpolis

I think I agree on these points. So we may be arguing towards the same general picture. Reading your other replies, I am clearer now that you want to focus on your logical propagator story.

Broadly I take a view on causality that is Aristotelian and Peircean. Which then cashes out in the kind of current physicalism which sees information and entropy as bridging the old mind-matter divide.

So we do have an information theoretic turn in fundamental physics that takes a constraints-based view of natural laws. The laws exist emergently and immanently as contextualising states of information - the holographic principle. And then material events are the observable concrete happenings that emerge locally as actualised states of being.

Being the informational side of the equation, the constraints on a system embody the downward acting formal and final causes. So we can speak of logical propagators as representations of intentions.

Talk of an "informational realm" is pretty general. Having established it as a legitimate part of modern physicalism, the issue becomes how to describe the structure of the realm. And it is pretty standard to apply logic rather directly to our ontological modelling. You have quantum information approaches where the issue becomes how can one ask two opposing questions of reality at the same time. You can inquire about the location of an event, or the momentum of an event, but not get a complete answer on both in just a single act of measurement.

So yes. Seeing reality as being shaped top-down by an intelligible or logical structure is the new metaphysical perspective I would say. Plenty would believe the Universe is a computer, even.

But then your proposal strikes me as having a particular problem. It seems to have to presume a classical Newtonian backdrop notion of time - a spatialised dimension. And modern physics would be working towards an emergent and thermal notion of time as a better model. So any logical propagator would have to unfold in that kind of time, not a Newtonian one.

On the other hand, the classical is what does emerge in a coarse grained fashion. So, with care, a Newtonian notion of time, and hence of logical intentions unfolding in time, does make sense.

And that is again where I would insist on a clear distinction in terms of history vs anticipation.

Brains are the kind of devices that can record personal memories. So they can form a prediction, expectation or goal and remember that in such a fashion that the information does act to constrain future eventualities. You get the clear intentionality of Mary planning to speak in the room tomorrow and all that logically follows from her having that intention today - and being likely to still be in a similar state of mind tomorrow.

But the bare physical world - the world that does not have this kind of anticipatory intentional modelling of its tomorrow - has only its tendencies, not its plans. So it is "intentional" in an importantly different way.

Yes, the full physical description needs to recognise final and formal cause. And an information theoretic perspective now gives physics a suitable mathematical, or logical, framework for describing the world as being constrained by its history - its "memory" in terms of holistic informational states. We can see how "law" gets baked into the fabric of the Cosmos as a fact of its dissipative development. It evolves a structure that stands as a context to all further material events. All this is a great advance on the old notion of transcendent laws floating somewhere above everything they regulate in some kind of eternal and perfect fashion.

Yet still, Mary can today form a plan of what she will do tomorrow. But an iceberg or hurricane can only form a propensity. A small hairline fracture in the melting berg today is possibly highly likely to be the vast chunk that calves off tomorrow.

We could even model that in terms of deterministic Poisson statistics. Likewise we can predict which way the hurricane is likely to swerve as it knocks about the Carribbean islands. There is a statistical band to which it must be constrained - given a set of measurements we might obtain to day to encode an informational picture of it in terms of a set of dynamical parameters obeying some intelligible framework of state-dependent laws.

So physics is certainly made intelligible by its propensities. The today does actually constrain the tomorrow. And that is the best we can mean by formal/final cause as even human intentionality is only ever an intention. Things can go awry for Mary in ways she didn't expect. Worst of all is that she might not even remember.

So everything can be brought back to the notion of constraints. And how that is then neatly matched by the capacity of reality to surprise. Spontaneity can be limited and yet not eliminated. A physicalism based on information and entropy is then in a great position to model that. Entropy treats the material now as uncertainty, surprise, fluctuation, or other action in want of a shaping, constraining, hand.

The ship of science is thus better balanced. The old materialism did make the mistake of reification - seeing matter in fallaciously concrete terms. An entropic view of materiality reduces it to random fluctuation - something that would be nothing if it weren't taken in hand. And then bringing in an informational view of the physics allows for the explicit modelling of the formal/final causes that do the hylomorphic shaping of the active material potential into something that is reliably substantial.

Again, if the back story is understood in that light, then I think I can see where you are going with logical propagators. However the sharp distinction between ordinary physical systems, and living/mindful organisms, must still be maintained when talking about "intentionality".

Still, since the analysis does not address the issue of an intending mind, we need to be agnostic as to their origin and its character. — Dfpolis

Why would we need to be agnostic when intentionality is something neurocognition studies? We have reason to make a definite distinction between brains and universes, purposes and laws.

This is a common misunderstanding. Quantum theory restricts probability to observations and asserts that states evolve deterministically between observations. — Dfpolis

Given that it is probability states that evolve deterministically, then I would say that makes it literally part of the equation.

The model physics finds adequate today is that all of the past is summed up in the present physical state (with no detailed "memory" of how that state arose). Future states are completely determined by the laws of nature acting on the present state. There are no "probabilities" involved unless one wishes to predict a measurement (observation). — Dfpolis

And yet the principle of least action is basic to physics. And classical determinism is an emergent feature of reality at best. Events are certainly constrained by contexts. And the constraint can be so universal - no detailed memory of its origins, as you say - that it is pretty absolute and deterministic looking. But then underneath this classical emergent description lies the deeper quantum one.

So you are taking an approach to the laws of nature that seems really dated.

The idea that transcendent laws could some how reach down, God-like, to regulate the motions of particles was always pretty hokey. An immanent view of nature's laws is going to be more useful if we want to make sense of what is really going on.

I am not seeking to conflate anything. Broadly, I'm saying that physicalism (as opposed to physics) is an instance of Whiteheads Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness -- that it confuses an abstraction (resulting from the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science) with the complex concrete reality from which it is abstracted. We have two disjoint abstractions -- the objective world of physics, and the subjective world of Cartesian mind. What we need is to understand is how the concrete world bridges these abstractions. In other words, the mind-body problem is not a problem of the lived world, but of confusing our abstractions with reality. — Dfpolis

Sounds good. But I'm not getting much sense of how you mean to proceed from here.

Talk of "laws" is definitely nonsense if we are to understand that as meaning anything like the kind of law-bound behaviour of reasoning social creatures like us. But the irony, as I say, is that our human concept of law is all about reification. We create these abstract constructs like truth, justice and good, then try to live by them. A lot of hot air is spent on debating their "reality".

And yes, the realms of the material and the mental are rather disjoint abstractions. But the problem is not that they are modelling abstractions. That is just how modelling works. The problem is that they don't work very well - at least to explain "everything". Materialism does a pretty good job of modelling the physical world - as a finite state automata. But that then sets up this dualism where everything materialism leaves out - mainly formal and final cause - gets left unexplained as part of the "mental".

However physicalism has moved on. You now have a better dichotomy in play - information and entropy. And these are not disjoint realms. They are formally reciprocal. So - while still being just models, just abstractions - we can understand how these two aspects of being are bridged in concrete fashion.

So first up, science just is modelling and hence abstractions are how it goes about its business. That won't change.

Second, physicalism can now be better understood in terms of information and entropy rather than mind and matter. And that semiotic view even explains why science - as an informational process - should be a business of abstractions ... so as to be able to regulate the world insofar as it is a concrete and entropic realm of being.

A pivotal thesis is that the laws of nature are essentially intentional. — Dfpolis

Well, yes and no. The laws don't cause material events in the sense of a willing, planning, intending mind. So they can't be essentially intentional in the usual psychological definition of intentional. It can only be some kind of analogy.

It is also true that physics needs to recognise final cause in some proper fashion. The one thing we have learnt about the Big Bang universe is that it was born with an inherent general direction. It has a thermodynamical arrow of time.

Also, pure determinism can't be correct. Quantum theory shows that probabilistic spontaneity is part of the equation. And so at best, the "laws" speak to generalised constraints on action. Events can be directed towards propensities, but they can't be absolutely controlled.

So physics knows that the classical Newtonian/mechanical model of "cause and effect" is the coarse grain view, not the fundamental view. But the job then is to expand the classical metaphysics just as far as needed to make more sense - not jump all the way over to a mentalistic or idealistic metaphysics.

So the metaphysical project - from a physicalist point of view - would be minimalist. Let's recognise that classicality is the coarse-grain picture. Now how do we incorporate the "intentionality" without claiming that the universe is like a brain making intelligent, personal, particular choices?

A broad difference between physical intentionality (propensities or teleomaty) and mindful intentionality (biological functionality, or psychological purpose) is that physical intentionality is a matter of historic constraint. A system develops a record of its past as some kind of memory. And that history constrains all further free possibility. The physical future is still free - a matter of unconstrained accident - but also a freedom that is shaped into some definite set of likelihoods.

Then psychological intentionality is quite different in that it involves a model of the physical world which allows the anticipation of its future states. And so, by being able to predict the propensities of the world, an observing self becomes included in the future outcomes of that world. The self becomes a player who can act to constrain outcomes, even at a future date, so as to serve locally particular goals.

So physics is just history. A state of constraint limiting freedoms. And psychology is anticipation. A self with purposes is being inserted into this more basic equation so that self-serving actions can be added to the evolving mix.

I think you are aiming to conflate the two stories. Physicalism - seeking to make a minimal expansion to its causal metaphysics - would agree that finality has to be part of its fundamental story now. But it can already see how psychological finality is its own semiotic story. It is discontinuous with the physicalist picture in the important regard of introducing a modelling relation with the world.

Groovy.

speculative realism, speculative idealism, or speculative metaphysics. — schopenhauer1

Speculate away.

Yeah. Let's talk about the thing-in-itself ... without actually talking. I will enjoy your silence.

Pfft.

No answer. — schopenhauer1

Where was the question that was cogently expressed and relevant to the discussion?

Where's that world's smallest violin emoticon when you need it.....

So, modelling doesn't have a "feels like". — schopenhauer1

Again, now that you have actually read the thread, you will appreciate that your old hobbyhorses are irrelevant.

Yes. Sorry to drop such arcane concepts into the conversation. For all those without access to google, here's a link that might just help - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_modelling

That is one kind of experience and the experience of a rock or electron might be another kind of experience — Janus

OK. So define this other kind. What would be its difference that makes it a difference, while also not being different?

You keep waving a hand vaguely. I am asking for a reason to take this seriously as some form of counterfactual-based claim.

but, as I said earlier the difference in kind between life and non-life is a relative one, on Whitehead's view, not an absolutely radical one. — Janus

Handwaving.

I made a clear distinction between biosemiosis and pansemiosis. To the degree that the physical world is constrained by an informational model, all the information is on the "outside" of any supposed entities. Whereas with life and mind, it is actually encoded inside the organism as information stored in a memory.

So I provide the story that underwrites the continuity - semiosis as a generalised causal mechanism based on the information~entropy distinction. And also the story that accounts for the discontinuity - the epistemic cut which distinguishes the actually living and mindful from the non-living and non-mindful.

And it is not as if biosemiosis is not already being incorporated into science - https://link.springer.com/journal/12304/11/1/page/1

If you want Whitehead to be granted a similar respect, you would need to start being specific about how it is actually suppose to work.

Everyone knows that life and mind arise from the physical realm that is nature. So there is a continuity somehow. But also a discontinuity somehow. To say that it is a relative divide - that it is a mix of the continuous and the discontinuous - is thus utterly vacuous. We already know this is the case. I am asking you how all this waffle about "non-conscious experience" takes things any further.

Semiosis clearly does take current physicalism further. That is why it is catching on in science.

Anything that is affected has some kind of "interiority"; rocks will be affected according to their internal constitution, and so will electrons. This is not animism, though, since it acknowledges the almost negligible sense in which things like rocks and electrons could be said to have an "interiority". — Janus

Waffle.

Because their experience, though of course non-conscious, and however minimal, and which is determined by their own constitution, is not epiphenomenal precisely because it is what determines how they will respond to any affect. — Janus

So what is experience when it is also non-conscious? C'mon. Seriously now. Address my actual question.

Of course rocks have some kind of internal structure. But in what sense does that structure model anything?

And are you saying electrons have internal structure? This might be news to particle physics. You best explain.

We know what we mean when we says things like "The cliff experienced the erosive force of the wind and rain" , or "the electron experiences the attraction of the nucleus". — Janus

Yeah. We don't mean the cliff or the electron are alive, model their worlds in terms of some interior system of sign, and hence felt something one way or the other.

So we can all cope with anthropomorphic analogy in everyday language. Just because we talk like the animists of old, doesn't mean we are metaphysical animists.

Human experience is a difference of degree not an absolute difference of kind. — Janus

That would be news to a lot of folk. If they experience erosion, they tend to go "ow". We would understand their behaviour as telling us something that is a lot more than just the physics of friction and fragmentation.

What is experience if not information; and conversely what is information if not some kind of experience? — Janus

Great. First step taken. Now how are you going to continue on to show they are two ways of talking about the same thing?

Information in-forms entities, that is changes them, and so all change is relational. — Janus

You mean like the standard Batesonian definition - the difference that makes a difference?

Change is experienced in different ways by different entities, and talk of interiority even in the case of biological entities, even humans, is a relative matter, not an absolute one. — Janus

So change is experienced in different fashions. But let's not suddenly abandon the position you were starting to develop. What does all such experience have in common? You seem to think it might be ... life ... and interiority.

I would say semiotics agrees. But pan-experientialism wants to say something else.

Apparently electrons are also alive and have minds according to Whiteheadians. A baffling leap indeed.

Well, @prothero's angle is that the kind of experience enjoyed by electrons is the non-conscious kind. And so we should indeed expect it to make no difference to their physical behaviour.

And yet the great advantage of Whiteheadian experiential physics is that it does away with the usual dualistic charge of epiphenomenalism. Somehow. Even though the non-conscious experience of electron now makes their experience as epiphenomenal as it could get.

Gee. This Whiteheadian metaphysics really seems something. If you contradict a contradiction, do you arrive at the truth? ;)

Maybe you can answer the question he is not answering then. :lol:

A description of the experience using informational constructs, is not the experience. — schopenhauer1

We are talking about bleeding electrons here. And therefore, why a description of electromagnetic interactions using experiential constructs is crackpot.

Do you really want to add your name to the list of card-carrying Whiteheadians?

That's like saying "When one human experiences another, what is the maths involved? — Janus

But we have good reason to credit humans with "experience", even if it is just a folk psychology term. We know what we mean by the word, and we know what to expect of organisms with the kind of complex nervous systems to have it.

If I kick a dog, I expect it to feel something. Now its behaviour might be somewhat unpredictable or indeterminate. It might attack me back, or cower in submission, or run off as fast as it can. But those are the sort of responses I would expect from a creature with enough of a brain to be modelling the world in terms of rational choices.

We could certainly aim to model that complex psychology with complex maths. And science does. But just at a level of commonsense, we think experience is a thing for all animals with enough of a brain to be modelling a world.

An electron? Not so much. There is zero reason to suspect that it has experience or that experience can still mean anything in terms of its action.

But if any of you Whitehead fans can make a case for why an electron must operate by experience, now is the time to lay that story out. Where is the intelligent complexity in their behaviour? Where is the complexity in their structure that could sustain a complexity of behaviour?

On the other hand we can say, and it is said, that electrons experience and respond to the kinds of subatomic forces that have become codified in particle physics and chemistry.

I think this is probably all that Whitehead intended; to suggest that human "interiority" is primordially prefigured in the the quasi-interiority of the electron, the atom, the molecule, the cell, and so on. It's a way of thinking that parallels semiotic thinking and information theory, which also rely on the idea of surfaces and interiority. — Janus

If it is just a vague analogy, then who cares. Old Whitehead just had a colourful psychological way of speaking, but he meant nothing by it.

However you guys have been defending him as saying something significant - something which completes the incomplete science ... even though it changes none of the science and adds nothing in terms of measurement or prediction.

The difference with semiosis is that it is already scientific hypothesis. Fifty years after Peirce, biology cracks the genetic code. Semiosis is shown to be true at a fundamental level for the sciences of life and mind. That is how complexity works.

Now extending the notions of semiosis to the physical realm is still a stretch. But very clearly, one big difference would be that no interiority is being claimed for the physico-chemical world. All the information or interpretance is on the outside - contextual. The interoricity ain't even quasi. Pan-semiosis would be the metaphysical extension saying that we are now talking about an obviously different kind of semiosis - different in ways that are well-defined and make sense.

The notion of “photons” is however an abstraction. — prothero

Of course. And ones that can be measured. That is the (scientific) point. As a construct, it is one with observable consequences.

But you are claiming electrons and photons would have non-conscious experience. I asked how that would change anything worth a damn about our best current physical descriptions of particle interactions. You then went off to talk about physics being incomplete, and not how a Whiteheadian physics offers any concrete step forward in terms of measurable consequences.

Admit it. Nothing is added. Nothing is explained. Talk of experience is an empty word - a good example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness indeed.

But in the case of Schroedinger's cat we cannot. This is why it's said it was neither dead or alive. If the cat knew it or not is not taken into account. — Heiko

What do we hear from the box when we shake it? A dull thud or sudden feline screeching noises ... or something spookily both at the same time?

There was good reason this thought experiment was constructed to poke fun at naive QM interpretations.

Both QM and semiosis see information as part of reality. So Whiteheadian talk about particle "experience" - conscious or non-conscious - is dualistically incoherent. But the information theoretic turn in fundamental physics is founded on a measurable dualism between information storage and entropy production. It is proper theory.

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/introduction/physics/interpretation/

So are you saying there is a fact of the matter that an electron or photon is alive or dead?

With a cat, the behaviour tends to be reasonably different. We can tell. And we even have adequate physicalist explanations for why some cats are alive, other cats can be regarded as dead.

But can any Whitehead supporter explain how the posit of "non-conscious experience" makes a damn bit of different to existing physicalist understanding of the behaviour of fundamental particles. What does it change about the predictions we might make concerning what we may observe?

As a posit, the "experience" of a particle would be purely epiphenomenal on the account being given. Which is kind of ironic given the kind of anti-bifurcation rhetoric being flung about.

But Schroedinger’s cat’s electrons and photons? Not so much?

When two particles interact they "experience" each other, and the physical description of that interaction is only a partial description of what actually goes on. — prothero

Again, still no explanation of what non conscious experience is in this physicalist description of nature such that it makes a damn difference to anything consciously experienced as an observable.

information theory?

You seem to be descending into dualistic thinking here. — Janus

Or I am ascending towards the triadic sign relation view. As usual.

For Whitehead the sum of the experiences (the interpretations) just is the world — Janus

Great. So if you can sum experience, it must be measurable. Now getting back to electrons and photons, how does that cash out then? When one electron experiences another one, what is the maths involved? How does your gay talk about experiencing change a damn thing about how physics already talks about how electrons act?

So collapse is basically measurement or interaction to a specific value or location. Precisely how that happens is not something explained by either physics or metaphysics. — prothero

So are you suggesting experience completes the physics here - supplying the collapse? Or does experience resemble the incompleteness of a quantum "event" in lack that bit of the physics?

...the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon. — Segall

So here we have a clear statement of qualia realism. And yet what colour is a colourblind person truly seeing when s/he confuses red and green? Is it red? Is it green? In what sense is it real?

This kind of nonsense falls at the first hurdle.

The only valid method of explanation from Whitehead’s point of view is the reverse of the materialist’s, an explanation which traces the genesis of abstractions back to the concrete consciousness and perceptual presences from which they emerged. — Segall

So the bifurcation of nature is precisely the effort to separate the subjective from the objective or the observer from the observed or the object from its place in nature (relationships and interactions). — prothero

So Segall says Whitehead's intent is to collapse the abstract scientific account back to a subjective experiential account. And you say his intent is to separate those two accounts.

I still think Whitehead makes the mistake of trying to collapse the scientific (or semiotic) account and so talk right past the observer issue. What QM needs to complete it is an abstract model that includes the observer along with the observables - which is what it has got, in practice, with thermal decoherence being welded on to the quantum mechanics now.

Experience in various forms and degrees is as much a part of nature as are the physical or material aspects of nature and in trying to declare one “real” and the other an epiphenomena, one denies the unified character of the process of reality (nature). — prothero

And so back to a measurable definition of experience here - which is still MIA.

When two particles interact they "experience" — prothero

So are you only willing to speak analogously here or are you willing to make some actual ontic claim?

Why would we call it inter-experiencing and not inter-acting?

Action, as a materialist notion, is well-defined. It can be cashed out in observables. We can measure a difference in terms of a state of motion.

But how is experience to be defined in terms of measurements? As a theoretical construct, how does it make a predictable difference to what can be observed?

Experience is just a vague and meaningless term in this discussion so far.

Experience is defined by Whitehead as any event or process. — Janus

Yep. Completely meaningless then as it makes no specific ontic commitment. It is so undefined it can seem to cover any eventuality. As a theoretical construct, something that is always present and not changing anything, it is "not even wrong". It fails the test for even being an ontic commitment - an assertion capable of being false.

Whitehead, I believe, would say the sign is experienced by the interpretant; it prehends the sign. — Janus

But where does Whitehead leave room for the mediating thing of a sign in his scheme? He starts by rejecting that basic division into a world and its interpretation - a modelling relation. So the third thing of a mediating sign is hardly going to come into the story.

As the Whitehead expert, you can explain how it does, and why then prehension could be understood in terms of sign interpretation.

Prehend for Peirce would be the conceptual seizing or grasping of the perceptual sign as standing in a habitual pragmatic relation with the noumenal. But where is Whitehead making the same kind of claim? Can you cite anything that would clear this up and support your view?

For Whitehead only the tiniest fraction of what is experienced is consciously experienced. — Janus

Feel free to define experience then.

f you have evidence that Whitehead believed consciousness caused quantum collapse you can present it but I believe that is a misstatement or misunderstanding. — prothero

I am responding to your characterisation here. You said they resembled quantum events. But there are no events without collapse. So there remains something missing in the metaphysical tale.

The fundamental units in science are roughly quantum particles which are perhaps better termed quantum events and the nature of quantum events is open to both scientific and philosophical debate but it seems that perhaps particles only exist when they interact and that the properties of such "events or particles" are really relationships to other particles and events which is not to dissimilar to whiteheads presentation of "actual occasions". — prothero

That's fine. But that also hinges on collapse realism. Which is also fine. But now - like Whitehead - you owe an account of how collapse happens.

In my view, Whitehead goes astray from the off because he rejects the kind of bifurcation of nature that would distinguish between observers and observables.

Physicalism has the problem of solving the collapse issue. And a semiotic approach - one that agrees to a semiotic bifurcation in terms of information and entropy - would be the one I would take. But you can't talk about a process approach "resembling quantum ontology" without addressing the fact that quantum mechanics really challenges Whitehead's basic assumption of "no bifurcation" - the basic theme of pan-psychic thinking.

Observers and observables have to be separated somehow. They can't be co-located as if there were no basic separation. The issue is then how to achieve that without lapsing into Cartesian dualism.

In many respects Whiteheads actual occasions resemble quantum events. — prothero

Except that QM doesn't model the collapse to anything as concrete as an occasion. It only models the time evolution of a set of wavefunction probabilities. And this depends on an a-temporal or non-local view of reality.

So the effort here is to imagine the kind of collapse or condensation which could magic atomistic durations into existence, like droplets forming in a vague misty backdrop.

In the end both space-time consists of quanta and the argument is whether such space time quanta are purely material or do they also have experiential qualities in prehending the past and possibilities from the future? — prothero

Again, Whitehead's metaphysics grew out of that collapse issue. If you believe that consciousness is responsible for collapsing the quantum potential into a classical atomistic actuality, then you might want to go his pan-psychic route.

But who still believes that consciousness is responsible for collapsing the wavefunction?

What is the 'atom' of a process, its smallest existent? (I don't wanna say smallest particle, because this implies substance.) Does this question even make sense in pp'ical terms? — rachMiel

It makes sense to me to think of it in terms of smallest form or structure. So you could follow the condensed matter view that a particle is a quasiparticle or soliton. That is, it is like a knot or frustration in the fabric of existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton

1. If time is a process, any slice of it (duration) would have a beginning, middle, and end. Likewise, each of these would have a beginning, middle, and end. And so on, fractal-like, ad infinitum. Yes? — rachMiel

Space and time are ways in our modelling to give change a static backdrop against which it can be measured ... as change. So we have to have something that stands still as the way we make it clear that something else is moving or evolving.

Thus in process thinking, we have to realise the nature of the trick we are playing. We invent a notion of a fixed spacetime backdrop so as to dramatise the fact that there are then energetic changes taking place within that steady reference frame.

That non-process approach works really well. But ultimately, it is a physical fiction. As general relativity and quantum physics eventually show. What is fixed and unchanging is simply a point of view.

The next step after that - which gets you into a proper process story - then generalise the (semiotic) notion of a point of view so that change is basic, but a recognisable structure of reality still emerges.

At root, this is just relativity - the light-cone holographic structure of the universe. All action is scaled by c. And so two points in space share the same moment in time only if they are in communication and are integrated or coherent in the sense of being in a cause and effect relation to each other.

If the Sun went supernova now, you wouldn't know about it for another 8.5 minutes. There would be no disturbance in the light or gravity you think it is pumping out until news of that arrived at lightspeed.

So c sets a basic scale of integration when it comes to the physical definition of a temporal duration or moment. Nothing has really changed until two points in space have had enough time to be energetically connected ... in a way that could cause a difference.

Lightspeed is the very fastest rate of temporal integration. But the relaxation times of more complex physical processes could be much slower. How long does it take for a mountain range to be thrust up by the collision of tectonic plates? Geology would have its own really slow scale at which the network of forces and masses involved reached system-wide state of equilibration after any perturbation. A moment of geological time would take forever to unfold compared to the simplest level of universal equilibration - the establishing of regions of space coherently connected in terms of photons and gravity.

So a process view would see temporal duration as being about the time it takes for a spatially distributed action to unfold and arrive at some coherent balance. And with relativity, a fundamental rate for this integrative action was established by saying nothing can happen faster than c. And then we know that any process involving mass happens at sub-light integration rates. So the "cogent moment" for material systems can be way slower in terms of the rates at which a process of equilibration unfolds, and much smaller in the distances that are being integrated over.

So it is all kind of fractal. It has scale symmetry. But there is a fundamental relativistic baseline set by c.

In terms of your question, there would be a thinnest kind of slice - the c-scaled slice, or the lightcone story. Then in terms of other material processes, they would all have much fatter "moments". They take longer, and span less distance, to achieve the cogency that defines a duration - the time it takes to achieve a stable change, a change stable enough to be fixed as a fact of history, a constraint on future freedoms.

2. If time is a process, does it imply that space is also a process? — rachMiel

Space, time and energy together make up the process. So space is an aspect of the process. We want to get away from the simple Newtonian separation of the three, even if the three are quite separated seeming in our current state of the Universe - where it is so cold and expanded that it is pretty close to its static Heat Death condition.

One way to think about space then would be as the opposite of time. And if time is how we think of integration, then space is how we think of differentiation. If two points are distinct and at a distance from each other, then that is why it is going to take time for them to become connected and in touch with each other in an energetic or communicative sense.

For there to be an issue with integration, then there has to be differentiation. And vice versa. So really the two are the two sides of the same coin. That is why relativity can speak of spacetime.

Time then gains a direction once we stir thermodynamics into the pot. Entropy breaks the symmetry of relativistic spacetime and so gives us a direction that points to the past and a direction that points to the future. The past is all the spatial extent that is now temporally integrated. The future is all that extent yet to be integrated.

So a process view would understand reality as a web of relations not a collection of bits. And then we would see structure arise as the result of fundamental contrasts in those relations. You would have action going in two directions at the same time - integration and differentiation. And that in turn would map to what the "collection of bits" ontology has been calling temporal duration and spatial separation.

A process view would have to change its very jargon to escape the familiar clutches of the mechanical view of nature. So asking what "space" or "time" are, is still to be thinking that the holism of the process view ought to reduce to the mechanicalism of classical physics.

Now mechanics is great. It is a really efficient for calculating the state of the world - in the near Heat Death state that defines our particular moment in Cosmic history.

But a process view is about a metaphysics of relations. It is about seeing nature in terms of its coherent structuring forms rather than as an atomistic collection of parts ... floating in a supposedly a-causal void.

how can something that emerges also 'impose itself'? — Wayfarer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh–Bénard_convection

And neo-Aristotelianism? The supposed subject of your OP. What does that conclude?

What? You need to be scandalised all over again by the notion of a cosmic Heat Death?

You've been reminded as you asked. Now squeal in horror.

Thanks, really what I was asking after was what is the core difference (if any) between "material" and "efficient" cause. The classical difference would be the material is bronze and the efficient is how the artisan uses his tools to fashions it into a statue. — JupiterJess

The difference in my view boils down to the distinction between the general and the particular. So talk of material is talk of a general stuff with some suitable generic property. And then efficient cause focuses on a particular local triggering action. The properties of that stuff are being employed at a particular place and moment in time to achieve some substantial change.

So for construction to happen, you need some stable stuff with stable properties. And then you need whatever it is that starts the atomistic building up in a particulate, localised, step-by-step fashion.

You can see the presumption is the parts have inherent stability in terms of possessing some set of properties. And so that is what makes construction even a coherent possibility. You can add bricks and eventually you have a wall.

Downward constraint, by contrast, presumes a chaos or foment that needs to be contained to create any localised stability. There are no parts to build a wall unless there is a context to ensure the parts retain their shape. It would be like trying to construct with rectangles of sloppy mud. The construction would flow and loose its shape unless something is constantly holding the mud solid.

Also, and this fits more with the discussion with this thread and is not really addressed to you, but if the top-down constraints , formal causes do not exist when they are not in use how is it they can be repeated at future points? I've read some Aristotleian realism and it doesn't seem to come up with an adequate solution. For example if "redness" can be manifested multiple times, then when there are no red things can it occur again at a future point? — JupiterJess

Yeah, this is a real problem. But it is solved by understanding constraint to take hierarchical form. And this is what we see with biology - where there is the information contained in the genes to specify the symmetry-breakings which channel growth down regulated pathways, so that the form of a particular species is repeatedly produced.

So this is the genus~species approach - a subsumptive hierarchy. You start with the most general constraints, then add further constraints as needed to increase the specificity of the final outcome. You keep narrowing the definition of what is acceptable. And eventually you are producing the near identical.

Redness makes for a bad example as redness is just an interpretation the primate brain makes of the world to help it distinguish the boundaries of objects. It is a processing shortcut for brains which need to do rapid object identification. A red apple is going to pop-out against a backdrop of green foliage.

But consider convergent evolution - the way wolf-life, cat-like, tree-like, etc, animals appear to fill the niches in ecosystem. The same kind of body shapes appear despite disconnected evolutionary stories. This is an example of how environmental constraints are imposing a structural demand on material plasticity. The world just grows to fill the slots that are defined for it.

So reality as a whole has this weight of hierarchically organised constraints. And then material possibility flows so as to fill the structure created.

Even at a quantum physics level, if you set up a particular kind of experimental apparatus, then events will fill that context you have created. You have made it possible for them to happen due to the imposition of an intelligible structure . But quantum physics exposes the fact that the material principle also has to do its part of flowing to fill that framework. If an experimenter does not completely determine the path of an event, then the event will fill that larger, more relaxed, space of what is possible. It will live in that looser, less specified, world.

QM is really very hylomorphic. One of the themes of the book mentioned in the OP.