But not all causation is physical, that's the point with free will, intention, it's non-physical causation. And, the need for a cause of physical existence is what drives the assumption of God. The cause of physical existence cannot be something physical, therefore it is necessary to assume a non-physical cause. It is different to say that all effects are physical than to say that all causes are physical. And this is one of the important aspects of Aristotle's philosophy, that he provides real grounding for non-physical causes. — Metaphysician Undercover

But your Aristotelian holism falters as you are deliberately arguing towards some version consistent with a transcendent theism.

It is true that material/efficient cause can't be itself the cause of what it is. But it doesn't help for you to assert that the cause of material/efficient cause is now something unphysical ... like a divine first cause ... which is really just another version of material/efficient cause, just removed to some place off stage and given a mind that just wants things, and whatever it wants, it gets.

So your transcendent theism claims the existence of a non-physical material/efficient cause, and heads off into complete incoherence as a result.

A properly physicalist understanding of Aristotle's four causes naturalism would see formal/final cause itself as the cause of material/efficient cause. So the cause of the material principle would be immanent - a self-determination that suppresses any uncertainty or indeterminacy when it comes to material action happening with definite constructive direction.

Formal/final cause explains the nature of material/efficient cause in direct fashion. If you give action a definite shape, then it acts with definite direction.

And then, in reciprocal or complementary fashion, formal/final cause gets explained by the fact that there is material/efficient cause constructing "its" kind of world.

So each aspect of causality is broadly responsible for the origination of its "other". And that is how actuality can arise from potentiality in a self-determining fashion. A strongly causal world is what emerges as a process of development, a process of establishing regular habits.

if you have to be more analytic about it how would you frame the four causes? — JupiterJess

I'm not sure what particular clarification you seek here. But I suppose one concern is to reduce the four to the two in some proper fashion. So my systems view of causality would see things in terms of the dichotomy of downward acting constraints in interaction with bottom-up acting construction. You have two contrasting species of action - holistic constraint and atomistic construction. The downward constraints then embody Aristotle's formal and final causes. And the upward construction embodies his material and efficient causes.

So top-down, an intelligible structure is being imposed on nature in emergent fashion. There is a necessity for global regularity to appear during development simply because for everything to be part of the same world, it has to cohere in some fashion. It has to harmonise and rub away all the rough edges.

Then bottom-up, there has to be the something "material" which is getting structured - shaped to fit or regularised. So that material principle also has an emergent/developmental story. It begins as merely undirected or chaotic action. Not actually constructive or stable at all. But constraint limits it, gives it the regularity of a shape that fits, one that has had all the rough edges rubbed away. And by the end, it becomes something atomistically regular.

This is like the grains of sand making a beach. A lot of rough rock gets ground to a smooth paste - spherical particles of a standard size. And then that emergent atomistic regularity can act as a source of constructive action. A beach becomes something that is simply a collection of parts. We arrive at the "atoms in a void" view of reality where everything seems just some accidental arrangement of indistinguishable particles.

So I see Aristotle's four causes as dividing causality up. The principle division is the one between causality as constraint or limit, and causality as construction or atomistic building. My systems view put them together in a developmental scheme. The whole shapes its parts and the parts (re)construct the whole that makes them. You get a neat self-sustaining story of a world rebuilding itself in a way that works for it.

Reductionist physicalism then tends to drop the constraints aspect of the deal. It just starts with the shaped parts and tries to model everything in terms of bottom-up construction.

But anyway, the basic division is into two types of causality - formal constraint and material construction. And Aristotle's four causes then breaks this down with another set of dichotomies. It splits constraint into formal and final cause, construction into material and efficient cause.

Is this helpful or needed? Well they do seem to map to a useful temporal distinction - the synchronic vs the diachronic.

Efficient cause speaks to a triggering material push in the past. Finality speaks to an ultimate constraining goal to be arrived at in the future. Formal and material cause are then creatures of the present - the structure and the matter that are actualising some state of substantial being right now.

My question to you is how this attempt to derive a scientific TOE differs from your conception of metaphysics. — Janus

As epistemology, it doesn't much. But then I am a naturalist in my ontic expectations. So science is simply carrying forward that general project.

And I am happy to be explicit that I have ruled out the supernatural or the dualistic in taking that view. They are no longer avenues of inquiry worth exploring if metaphysics is understood as an inquiry into Being.

Now you may take a different view. Fine. I simply ask, on what grounds? Convince me with an argument.

My conception of metaphysics is that it consists in producing a picture of what entities there are, what the most fundamental or necessary entities are, and how those entities are related to one another. — Janus

Again, all well and good. But my specific argument here is that a mathematical language producing a mathematical picture is the gold standard. Ordinary language lacks precision.

(And rather than entities, I would be thinking more in process terms. So it would be about reality's fundamental or necessary structures.)

So, you have broadly, theistic and atheistic metaphysics. In theistic metaphysical systems God is posited as being necessary to ground the possibility of the intelligibility of nature (as well as freedom, rationality and so on, but I think intelligibility is really the most salient point in such positions). — Janus

Yep. And so I would have no problem in ruling out theistic systems on the grounds they are "not even wrong". If they purport to be theories of nature, yet don't cash out in empirical consequences for nature, then they aren't actually theories of nature. We can't find evidence for them in the actual world.

But I would also note that I find a lot of theistic scholarship very useful because it does tend towards the holistic systems view. It rejects the mechanicalism of reductionist science - the Scientism that leads to plenty of quite terrible metaphysics.

And theistic metaphysicians often arrive at rather immanent and pantheistic notions of the divine. Like Peirce, they have to say to the degree they are believers, their God is very different from the conventional concept.

So I think that this is just a case that regardless of your starting point - religious or scientific - all paths have to converge on the kind of holistic metaphysical naturalism expressed by Aristotle, for instance.

You mentioned Deleuze. Even he is converging on the same essential metaphysical story from his PoMo beginnings. You can discern the same triadic structure of being, despite plenty of missteps along the way.

As I remarked to @Dfpolis, now that I look again at Plato through the lens of neo-Platonism, he too looks to be converging more than diverging on the same essential understanding of the structure of being.

So - for me - the degree of convergence from all directions is a sign that all parties wind up feeling the same elephant. A lot of peripheral nonsense falls to the side as the central structure of existence begins to emerge.

And then fundamental physics is arriving at the same party now, with its strong and testable mathematical models. So I don't know why anyone would waste too much energy on fighting for the right to free poetical metaphysical speculation. No one is stopping you. But I'd rather be where the action is myself.

In Husserlian terms, it means that a lived, as opposed to an idealized, moment is both retentive and protentive. It carries the past that in-forms it, into the future that is expected in it, and which it will, in turn, in-form. — Janus

Nice.

Can an individual 'occasion' of process philosophy be said to actually exist?
Or is an individual occasion like the present moment, of zero duration, therefore not actually existent? — rachMiel

Not speaking for Whitehead, but for process thinking in general, the problem for the process view is how does "atomistic" individuation arise when everything is united by a common flow? So an "occasion" would be like a whorl in a stream - a feature that arises as its own momentary thing while also being part of a greater temporalised flow.

The whorl thus exists both as an expression of its context, and also marked by its momentary departure from the over-riding character of that context. A whorl is a rotation that fleetingly betrays the possibility of other directions of flow and so marks itself out even as it is borne off downstream.

So as @Janus says, an occasion is its own temporal duration - a localised past, present and future. From the point of view of the river, the whorl is a general kind of regularity that is expected to break out in unpredictable fashion. So the general history of the river is a constraint that makes whorls likely to erupt at "any time" in its future. And at any present moment, there will be whorls that have appeared and shortly to depart.

But within the whorl itself, it is characterised by itself being a departure from that prevailing general flow. The whorl opens up the possibility of a brief spin heading upstream. It itself constrains the water flow locally, and any objects bobbing about on the surface, to its quick little rotation. Locally, the past/present/future is set up with its own fleetingly distinctive sense of direction.

Thus, in the physicalist reading of process philosophy, you have a general character to time as @Janus outlines. And it can sound pretty psychological. History locks in a set of expectations as far as the present is concerned. Time itself is thus a process. It has an internal story arc rather than just being a collection of structureless instances.

So time has a general global flow like a river. And that in turn can become particularised by local events that are marked out by being fleeting twists in a different direction. Local moments of temporal structure can arise that go in a different, more personal-seeming and individualistic, direction.

The general flow had mostly suppressed those other directions. But locally, they can erupt as constraint can never completely eliminate freedom. And what cannot be stopped is something bound to be expressed. Like the whorls that spot a stream.

you might want o read my article, "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle," — Dfpolis

Thanks for that. An excellent paper. It shows that Aristotle's view evolved a lot. But also I would say that Plato's view evolved too, and is far from the usual caricature version, especially if you give credence to the unwritten doctrines and Pythagorean system of the one and the indefinite dyad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines

So it is tempting to do the usual simplifying thing of setting up the master and the pupil as saying the opposite things, and only one of them able to be right. The historical reality looks more like that they both got the essential duality of a formal principle and a material principle as the causal arche. And they both played around in various fashions to get this schema to fit the metaphysics.

But the modern mind - so accustomed to ontological atomism - is no longer alert to the subtlety of the metaphysical answer both look to be evolving towards. As described for instance in Kolb's - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236756740_Pythagoras_Bound_Limit_and_Unlimited_in_Plato%27s_Philebus

In brief, I take a constraints~freedom approach to the issue.

The material principle is that of an Apeiron or the Indefinite - chaotic action. Everything wants to happen in an unstable and directionless fashion. So "prime matter" would be action without shape or memory. It is an active principle, but not one that results in anything with the definiteness of individuation and actuality.

The formal principle is then the order that regulates this chaos of fluctuation. Tames it, channels it, gives it structure and intent. It limits and imposes a unity. It is also an active principle in a sense. But active in imposing a form, a limitation, that keeps all the action organised and heading in a shared direction that is intelligible and so persists.

So the material principle is a formless energy wanting to go off in every possible direction and amounting to nothing in particular. The formal principle is an intelligible order that limits all this wildness so that it is channeled into some generalised unified direction or purpose. And then out of that arises the actuality of substantial being, the multiplicity of the accidental individuals.

So in a developmental sense, it all begins with a raw energetic potential, that becomes constrained by some intelligible organisation, and then the result is a fracturing of that into an abundance of actualised substantial beings. The vague is regulated by the general to produce the particular.

It is this step from the simplistically dual to the complexly triadic which eludes most tellings of hylomorphism. But Aristotle and Plato both look to be groping towards that actually holistic or systematic view of metaphysics.

The doctrine of the One and the Indefinite Dyad in the Philebus does that in helping to focus on the developmental nature of the Forms. It allows for a hierarchy of form which begin vague and loose, then become more definite and specified. It also allows substantial being to incorporate accidents during the history of its development or individuation.

So the simple "stamp and sealing wax" Platonism is easy to criticise. It makes the material principle simply an already existent passive stuff. For a laugh, you could even call it fascist in its implication that the world always takes a faulty impression of the Ideal stamp.

But Platonism was never that simple. It evolved - even if we can only reconstruct that evolution in guesswork fashion. And a sympathetic reading would arrive at a constraints-based logic where form is a developmental outcome - the imposition of habits of regularity on a chaos of possibility, which thus always emerges as substantial actuality that is a blend of the necessary and the accidental.

Constraint only has to limit the accidents of individuation to the degree they actually matter. That itself is the other face of finality. So the variety to be found in the substantial particulars is not evidence of imperfection. It is literally that which doesn't matter in terms of some generalised purpose.

Rather than fascism, it is more like democracy. Some general rule of law or bill of rights is in play to constrain a citizenship to fundamental level of unity. And then within that scope, there is a matching absolute freedom of action. All the particular ways of being that are possible are not only allowed, they will almost certainly get expressed. Multiplicity is guaranteed by the fact that constraint ain't control.

Anyway, the point is that your paper argues for a more complex Aristotle. The same case can be made for Plato. And both of them seem to have a lot more in common than modern ontological atomism could imagine. They were grasping in the direction of this basically triadic metaphysical scheme I would suggest.

Picking up on these comments from your paper...

What of prime matter? We must remember that there is no indeterminate potency in Aristotle. Hyle is always the dynamics to become some particular thing. But Aristotle does recognize a hierarchy of hyle: the chest is wooden, the wood is earthen, and perhaps the earth is fiery. If no further analysis is possible (and that point must come because an infinite regress is impossible) then that unanalyzable hyle is a kind of primary matter.

From the logical point of view, the traditional doctrine of prima materia makes no sense. How can one have a concept of a principle which, by hypothesis, has no intelligibility? If all intelligibility is contained in form, matter must be unintelligible.

...I would say that you have a problem in that your reading of hyle leads you to suggest it contains form within it in some sense. You appear to be angling at a (theistic) vitalism where you say "Hyle, on the other hand, bears within itself the life-force ready burst into leaf."

Now definitely I agree that hyle is an active principle. But now I would triadically break it down so that we have the three things of a Vagueness, Apeiron or Firstness that is the ur-potential that gets the game started. And the Material and the Formal are the two complementary limits of being that emerge into definiteness in the co-evolutionary fashion described in the Philebus.

So - as you do seem to say - hyle evolves. It becomes a bunch of particular substrates, like gold or wood. And before that, it is four more generalised substrates - fire, air, water and earth. And even physics recognises that categorisation as the four states of material order - plasma, gas, liquid and solid. But we want to go back another step towards whatever is prime. And that is when it all turns tricky as it is so hard to leave behind some notion of the material principle as already some kind of definite stuff - like a space-filling, but formless and passive, chora.

What resolves the issue is that primal hyle is just action without unity. And so, more subtly, it is the possibility of intelligibility itself. It is the bare possibility of instantiating a dichotomy, a difference that makes a difference. So it is some kind of ability to remember, to encode, to record, to establish a history that speaks to a common direction.

A material fluctuation in itself has no meaning or identity. It lacks a context that makes it anything at all. So more primal is that it could be an action with a direction. It is the formal possibility of that dichotomy that marks the beginning of "stuff".

It is a hard point of view to articulate. But the Philebus looks to be saying something like that. The material and formal principle are always co-dependent from the point of their ultimate origination. They have to arise together for there to be the start of anything definitely and historically actual. And so all that "exists" at the start is the potential for that dichotomy.

It puzzles me as to why you seem to have such a passion for mischaracterizing what I have said. — Janus

I am simply prodding you to make explicit your position. It ain't crystal clear.

I distinguish science from metaphysics and each of them from poetry on the grounds that they are three different disciplines — Janus

And I dispute that being a hard difference. My position is that they are all united as forms of semiotic discourse about nature. They are united by the same method of reasoned inquiry - which includes measurement, or however else we term the empirical aspect of the deal.

I can't see any way in which metaphysical speculation is constrained by empirical measurement, much less necessarily so constrained. — Janus

All reasoned inquiry is constrained by that if it aims at "truth" or "knowledge".

As I explained, speculation can be free. Indeed, it is a necessity that all reasoned inquiry makes a creative leap to get started. So metaphysics has that special quality of being the speculative breeding ground for useful new ideas. But then those are ideas to be tested. Otherwise, they are not really very useful - even if they might provide light entertainment or cod support for social constructs.

As to whether metaphysical speculation should be, or necessarily is, constrained by "aesthetic experience", I'm not sure what you would mean by that. — Janus

Nor did I say it. I did say that there is an "aesthetic" dimension to mathematical-level thought in terms of being able to contemplate abstract dynamical structure in a sensory-feeling kind of way. Patterns composed of numbers can come alive and reveal their necessary form.

...and by good sense; meaning being in accordance with the generally evident logic of our thinking about the broadest categories of meaning; the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and determinism, similarity and difference, change and identity, being and becoming and so on. One term of each of those dichotomies seems to be involved in the ordinary empirical world of sense experience, and the other not. — Janus

I would say that each dichotomy - to the extent it is metaphysically right - manages to define the polar limits of possible sense experience.

Jointly, they set up the opposing bounds of what exists. And then that ensures every possible particular is to be found within those bounds.

So they are the limits that define the spectrum. And that is where the measurability begins. With black and white defined in some absolute fashion, the spectrum in-between can be divided into its shades of gray,

A point to note about Peirce is that he was heavily influenced by Schiller. So the poetic or aesthetic is important as the "other" to any rationalism or logicism.

That is why his triadic semiotics is a metaphysics which is large enough to be totalising. Look closely and your own concerns are found to be bound up within his system of reasoning.

So when it comes to any exercise in human rationality - such as scientific inquiry - it has to start somewhere. It has to begin in what Peirce called musement or some kind of free imaginative play of thought and interest. What he called abduction - the creative leap towards fruitful hypothesis.

So the mechanical nature of rational or logical thought itself demands the "other" that can animate it. To the degree that we refine the one - some rigid method - we have to also develop the other that complements it. We have to have that aesthetic or poetic element to our thinking which gives us something meaningful as an idea to explore by way of that method.

Now I don't think that Peirce properly clarified this aspect of his system. But it is key. To the degree that you have the one - a mechanistically constraining logic - you need just as developed a version of its other, some kind of basic freely associative imagination which plays about in ways to breed fruitful speculative lines of thought.

Like Schiller (and even Kant) then, Peirce saw creativity and spontaneity as being as basic as constraint or logical habits of thought. You couldn't get anywhere in thought without both.

So what I criticise is where the two aspects of a developed mind are treated as representing a disconnected duality - as in rationality and irrationality, or science and poetry. The Peircean view is that the two are the complementary aspects of any general process of reasoned inquiry.

Likewise, another dualism regularly forced on the discussion is the one of rationality vs empiricism. You try to split off science from metaphysics on the grounds that metaphysics is so free, it doesn't need to be constrained by empirical measurement, possibly not even by aesthetic experience - as somehow mind or spirit is all about some absolute freedom ... getting us back to that Cartesian dualism that semiosis is all about getting past.

This is a wrong move. Again, dialectics requires that to go in one direction, the other direction must be real also. So all thought - that has any shape at all - is a fruitful mix of idea and impression, concept and percept, theory and measurement. Whether you are a poet or a scientist, there is this same dialectic of generals and particulars in play. All thought is rational~empirical in structure. If you were born lacking senses, there just wouldn't be any thinking.

That is why I highlight the special nature of scientific experience. It asks us to feel and sense the world in terms of numbers or logical quantities - information. So it is a completion of the development of a logical form of discourse. A mathematical-strength conception of nature quite naturally depends on a mathematical-strength perception of nature.

Now the objection is that this is too mechanical. It winds up seeing nature as a machine. And that can be true if you have a reduced model of causality - the model that disposes of formal/final cause.

But philosophical naturalism embraces all four Aristotelian causes in a holistic systems logic. And Peircean metaphysics takes that forward by seeing holism in a process/developmental light. Then finishing the job, making explicit a dualism of information and matter which allows a physicalism which is divided by a fundamental difference without being dualistically disconnected. Information and matter become formally reciprocal, the inverse of each other.

Anyway, it is perfectly possible to take a fully holistic position as a scientist. And pragmatically - as Peirce emphasises with abduction - the aesthetic and the poetic are fully included in that as musement or creative spontaneity, a fundamental animating ingredient of rationally-constrained inquiry.

Then science does cash out a mathematical conception of reality in a mathematical perception of reality - experience constrained to the act of reading numbers off dials. But there is then the other side that results from this. Scientific level musement. The ability to enjoy a poetic or aesthetic level play in the new realm that is the mathematico-logical reality. The land of abstract dynamical structure.

Platonism does give an image of this realm as being frozen and rigid. But the Peircean view would be of a realm that is dynamical and developmental. A realm of processes of growth and purpose.

So all the way down, the Peircean view is trying to make sense of the whole of things in a naturalistic fashion. In laying the foundations for modern rationalism, it was trying to do justice to the creativity and spontaneity that makes nature a self-organising process and not some Cartesian machine, dualistically divided within its own house.

As a result Plato's "matter" (chora) is an entirely different concept from Aristotle's "matter" (hyle). The fact that both Greek terms are translated by the English "matter" only adds to the confusion. — Dfpolis

That question has always interested me. What is your understanding of the difference?

Metaphysics: needs to be logically consistent but does not need to be based on empirical evidence (not sure if it even can be). — Janus

If it is about the big old world out there, then sure it needs to be empirically based. What we believe would be constrained by the evidence of experience.

Science just ups the game by shifting from feelings and sensations to acts of measurement - reading numbers off dials.

And that makes all the difference. It lifts us out of our embodied biology and into a new realm of pure abstracted reasoning.

But if you want to say that metaphysics can be based on feelings and sensations rather than acts of measurements that are themselves part of the conceptual apparatus, then go for it. Rhyme away.

As I tire of saying metaphysics is neither poetry nor science; it is in between. — Janus

Whatever that means.

Bugger modesty. If that were truly in effect, you wouldn't be championing your laissez faire pluralism against my totalising unity of thought. You have an axe to grind like anyone else.

So I can see your game plan is to reduce rational method to just another form of semiosis - like poetry or art. In the end, all epistemologies are equal, none intrinsically better than any other, etc. We've been around the house on that enough.

And I've already laid out the reason why one stands at a higher level than the other. One is merely the view from social linguistics, the other is what has developed as a result of stumbling into a mathematico-logical modelling of objective reality. You failed to dent that argument.

a poetic 'truth as revelation' to evoke insight into the human existential situation, then to contest it "at a meta level' would be to commit a category error. — Janus

Agreed. Objective umwelts and cultural unwelts are different levels of semiosis. It would be a category error to use social ideas as the basis of completely open and rational metaphysical inquiry. The human sphere exists within the realm of nature and not the other way around.

But to say that these perspectives 'explain' religion, again, can't be anything other than reductionist, as it is saying that the rationale is other than, and less than, what its devotees understand it to be. — Wayfarer

There has to be a difference between doing religion and explaining religion. Explaining is the meta story, the third person objective story.

So sure. If the devotees pretend to have some meta story of why they do what they do, then that is contestable at a meta level.

It is the rules of that contest which you now need to justify.

I say the meta method has to be a process of rational inquiry. And that simply is what metaphysics is historically. It cashes out as Peirce's method of abduction/deduction/inductive confirmation. And science confirms the universal value of this kind of system of reason wedded to a process of measurement. We believe x because it is probably true in terms of the signs that we take as providing adequate confirmation of what we deduced from some set of axioms.

Now you may have some other method for doing metaphysics. But can you spell out how that works exactly. Then we can do some meta-metaphysics to see why your method might have any actual merit.

So we can be certain of our intentions? — Banno

If we can doubt them, then we can certainly be relatively certain. Epistemology as usual boils down to pragmatics. Doubt and belief ground each other in logically dichotomous fashion.

Them Ruskies are cunning. First it was always the left-wing - trade unions and students - as the way to undermine the UK establishment in the Cold War years. Now the right-wing seems the best way to affect domestic politics.

The wind of reform used to blow from the globalising international direction. Now it blows from the populist nationalist direction. Russia is set up to exploit the wind whichever way it blows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_Brexit_referendum
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nato-uncovers-russian-plot-spark-12044455
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-plot-against-the-west-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-europe/
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/12/how-the-bbc-lost-the-plot-on-brexit/

Two other stories deepen the impression of Putin exploiting useful right-wing idiots as part of his long-term geopolitical cold war.

First, just as Trump's attempts to break up Nato are a puzzle, so was Trump's attack on the Iran nuclear deal. So who wins if Iran is constrained on its oil exports? Well Russia of course.

When President Donald Trump declared in May that he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, he vowed to reimpose some of “the strongest sanctions that we’ve ever put on a country.” Among the biggest targets: Iran’s booming oil fields, an economic engine that fuels Europe and Asia with 4 million barrels of crude a day. But as Tehran and other world leaders recoiled, one country celebrated: Russia.

https://www.newsweek.com/2018/06/08/irans-loss-will-be-putins-unexpected-present-us-sanctions-drive-oil-prices-948173.html

And then there is Putin's engineering of Brexit, another intelligence coup exploiting the gullible right.

In Britain, billionaire businessman Arron Banks financed the Brexit referendum with the largest donation in British history. Initially, he copped to having one meeting with Russian officials. After the Guardian obtained secret documents blowing up this claim, he admitted there were actually three meetings. Now the Times has even more information, and Banks concedes the number of covert meetings has grown to four.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/the-british-russia-collusion-scandal-is-breaking-wide-open.html

As background on Putin, this is interesting. He was always much more the outsider than I realised. It may have taken Western intelligence some time to wake up to the extent of Putin as a threat.

Putin was an outsider even to Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika (restructuring or transformation). He was posted in Dresden during the critical period when Gorbachev took the helm of the USSR.

Shevtsova and many others cautioned in 1999 against seeing Putin "as some kind of superman" based on his previous, and brief, position as head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. They concluded that "he [Putin] will be greatly limited in what he is able to do."

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/how-the-1980s-explains-vladimir-putin/273135/

And the American people are happy to have as an inept a deal-maker as Trump locked up in cosy one-on-ones with this guy?

because the idea that mind has a task is bunk. — Banno

Brains are optional? They don't evolve for a reason?

Sounds legit.

No, it's a pattern of events, occurrences, observed appearances. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, there might be a bunch of events. But you are talking about a pattern. And to even think there is a pattern is to hypothesise the existence of some set of relations, some explanatory form of connection sufficient to produce an observed regularity. A generic cause, in short.

...don't think Russia entrapped Trump, he's a willing participant. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is the point. The trap had to be so clever that Trump sees himself as its central willing player.

So it could be that Trump just consistently has adopted the Russian geopolitical agenda as his own. He had a nice time being wined and dined in Moscow. They seemed keen for him to build a Trump tower there. Gorbachev and Perestroika were still in play. It wouldn't have been so treasonous to see Russia as being a future democratic ally and lucrative business partner.

It could just be that Trump was a very impressionable person. He received warm hospitality. He was encouraged that he could be a larger political voice. Being Trump, that was all he needed to imagine a tilt at being president.

It was a co-incidence that his first policy statements reflected Russian wishes - quite reasonable wishes - for a breaking down of Nato and a united Europe as a precursor to a geopolitics which would give the new Russia some growing room. Also, if the US could wind back its international defence presence generally, that would be comradely too.

Trump was grasping for something interesting to say. So he parroted what he had heard conversationally over a few vodkas and strippers a few months earlier.

1986 — Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announces perestroika, economic restructuring

1986 — Soviet Ambassador invites Trump on all-expenses-paid trip to Soviet Union.  Trump had lunch with Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin. At the lunch, Dubinin told Trump that the ambassador’s daughter “adored” Trump Tower. Dubinin proposed that Trump build a similar tower in the Soviet Union. Soviet officials then visited Trump in New York, inviting Trump on an all-expenses-paid trip.

July 1987 — Trump’s first trip to Soviet Union. He told reporters that he’d read Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika to prepare for the trip. Trump told reporters that he was invited to go to Moscow for a possible plan to build a hotel across from the Kremlin.

Sept 1987 — Trump drops first hints that he’s considering a run for U.S. presidency.   He spends $94,801 to buy full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. The ads read, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” And that America “should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.” The advertisement also criticized American foreign policy “as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

Dec 1987 — Trump talks with Gorbachev at State Department lunch . Gorbachev asked Trump to build a hotel in Moscow, Trump told reporters.

https://medium.com/@abbievansickle/timeline-of-trumps-relationship-to-russia-5e78c7e7f480

All very innocent really. But why now, when he is actually president and horrifying his own hawkish generals and intelligence chiefs, is he persisting with this anti-Nato line?

In July 2013, Trump visited Moscow again. If the Russians did not have a back-channel relationship or compromising file on Trump 30 years ago, they very likely obtained one then.

The leaked conversation also revealed something else about the Republican Party: Putin had, by then, made very few American allies. Among elected officials, Trump and Rohrabacher stood alone in their sympathy for Russian positions. Trump had drawn a few anomalously pro-Russian advisers into his inner circle, but by early 2017, Manafort had been disgraced and Flynn forced to resign, and Page had no chance of being confirmed for any Cabinet position. Trump’s foreign-policy advisers mostly had traditionally hawkish views on Russia, with the partial exception of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO who had won a Russian Order of Friendship award for his cooperation in the oil business. (Romney had been Trump’s initial choice for that position, The New Yorker reported, but Steele, in a separate dossier with a “senior Russian official” as its source, said that Russia used “unspecified channels” to influence the decision.)

Now that he’s in office, Trump’s ties to Russia have attracted close scrutiny, and he has found his room to maneuver with Putin sharply constrained by his party. In early 2017, Congress passed sanctions to retaliate against Russia’s election attack. Trump lobbied to weaken them, and when they passed by vetoproof supermajorities, he was reportedly “apoplectic” and took four days to agree to sign the bill even knowing he couldn’t block it. After their passage, Trump has failed to enforce the sanctions as directed.

Trump also moved to return to Russia a diplomatic compound that had been taken by the Obama administration; announced that he and Putin had “discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit” to jointly guard against “election hacking”; and congratulated the Russian strongman for winning reelection, despite being handed a card before the call warning: “Do not congratulate.”

More recently, as Trump has slipped the fetters that shackled him in his first year in office, his growing confidence and independence have been expressed in a series of notably Russophilic moves. He has defied efforts by the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, and Canada to placate him, opening a deep rift with American allies. He announced that Russia should be allowed back into the G7, from which it had been expelled after invading Ukraine and seizing Crimea. Trump later explained that Russia had been expelled because “President Obama didn’t like [Putin]” and also because “President Obama lost Crimea, just so you understand. It’s his fault — yeah, it’s his fault.”

During the conference, Trump told Western leaders that Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia because most of its people speak Russian. In private remarks, he implored French president Emmanuel Macron to leave the European Union, promising a better deal. Trump also told fellow leaders “NATO is as bad as NAFTA” — reserving what for Trump counts as the most severe kind of insult to describe America’s closest military alliance. At a rally in North Dakota last month, he echoed this language: “Sometimes our worst enemies are our so-called friends or allies, right?”

Last summer, Putin suggested to Trump that the U.S. stop having joint military exercises with South Korea. Trump’s advisers, worried the concession would upset American allies, talked him out of the idea temporarily, but, without warning his aides, he offered it up in negotiations with Kim Jong-un. Again confounding his advisers, he has decided to arrange a one-on-one summit with Putin later this month, beginning with a meeting between the two heads of state during which no advisers will be present.

“There’s no stopping him,” a senior administration official complained to Susan Glasser at The New Yorker. “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.”

Even though the 2018 version of Trump is more independent and authentic, he still has advisers pushing for and designing the thrusts of Trumpian populism. Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross are steering him toward a trade war; Stephen Miller, John Kelly, and Jeff Sessions have encouraged his immigration restrictionism. But who is bending the president’s ear to split the Western alliance and placate Russia?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html

So yes. It all could have started in the most untreasonable fashion. Russia was on the way to becoming a friend in 1987. It was a valid question why US tax dollars would be needed to create a ring of Nato and US military bases around the now broken up and broken down USSR. Regan had won the Cold War. Time for the conciliation. One can see that the only thing truly of interest to Trump was a golden phallus powering into the Moscow skyline with his name written in giant capitals.

But now, there is a question of why he would continue to push the same line in a way that today has real geopolitical consequences in a time when it is clear that Russia under Putin is a very different animal?

What's in it for Trump? Does he still just want a Moscow Trump tower? Is he just loyal to old friends? Who can explain the psychology of taking a line that must offend his own US fan-base - assuming of course they see that collapsing Nato and fracturing Europe is not in the US self-interest on any count.

Why would you need to know anything about the causes of the patterns? — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean, the pattern of the causes?

Let's get real. What do you even mean by "cause" here? What is your model of "a cause" - the "true" one?

The OP started as a discussion of the Aristotelian model of how to break down the holism of substantial actuality in some generically useful fashion. That is what leads towards the necessity of four "becauses". And as I've often mentioned, that reduces to a general model of holism based on an systems-style interaction between top-down acting constraints, or boundary conditions, and bottom-up constructing degrees of freedom, or initial conditions. A causal story composed of generals and particulars.

So we can contrast, in a broad sense, between an atomistic model of causality and a more properly holistic representation of reality. One model is larger and more comprehensive than the other. The other is matchingly more compact and less work.

Where do you think your "true story on causality" fits into this metaphysical analysis of nature's underlying causal structure?

The "underlying causal machinery" if that's what you want to call it, is irrelevant to the predictive capacity, which is what is valued. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you can't model the world predictively unless you are modelling the causes of its material patterns. That is what the mathematico-logical framework of a theory does. It describes a formal structure of entailment.

The pattern - as a prediction of a future state - is generated from some algorithm. You plug in one set of values representing a state of the world and crank out another set of values representing it at some other moment in time.

Or more holistically - as with Lagrangian mechanics and other models that apply global constraints - you can plug in the start and the finish so as to predict the most optimal path that then will connect them.

Of course it is always "just a model" even when modelling the causality. And I've already discussed why mechanical notions of causality finally break down with QM. We don't have some fully generic model of holistic causality as yet. The maths is still a scientific work in progress.

If it is true that Russia managed to entrap Trump as described, then this raises new psychological questions.

How could such a reckless narcissist become so accepting of his captivity? What trick of his psychology are the intelligence agencies managing to exploit?

It is of course important that the suborning started back in 1987 when Trump was cultivated as a useful foreign idiot. Flattery and financial advantage, coupled to Trump's lack of any moral centre, would have made peddling the Russian worldview a costless psychological exercise. It wouldn't conflict with the narcissism as it would be just Trump agreeing with his new friendly pals.

But come the run for President, the entanglements had grown wide and deep. Presumably his case officers did play Trump skillfully - never threatening him with what they could expose, but keeping him focused on what he could gain. In particular, the attention and adulation he craved. Trump would accept anything - breaking up Nato, letting Russia reclaim its territories - for one more Trumpian rally before an adoring, affirming crowd. It is not as if he was emotionally connected to the geopolitical realities of the world in anyway. He lacks the capacity to feel anything about the importance of that.

And now the Russian project is to get Trump re-elected. That raises the stakes in so many ways. How far are they willing to push given the level of scrutiny that exists. Is the US body politic so decapitated that it can't react even as it is being gnawed away?

And if all this is actually true - the most spectacular of conspiracy theories - then what does that say about the usual conspiracy theories that would see Trump being taken out by an "unfortunate accident" - an in-house coup? Are the US intelligence chiefs trusting to due process - Mueller doing his job before real damage gets done?

This is going to be such a terrific story when the truth of it is finally told!

Yes, science is "in part, descriptive", but the trend in modern science, due to the way that scientific projects are funded, is toward usefulness, and that is mostly found in predictive capacity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your emphasis is back to front. Science begins in observational description so as to proceed to the modelling that cashes out in predictions. The end goal is not to fit all observations to some descriptive system or other. It is to find the pattern, the formal organisation, that gives the clue as to the causal machinery. Once you can model that underlying causal machinery, you are in business. You can generate predictions.

So science does start at the surface - the observational phase which is simply trying to discern some pattern to events. Then the modelling tries to find the deeper mechanism that could generate such a pattern of events.

You are confusing yourself with your attempts to oppose truth and utility - the usual idealist vs realist trope. Pragmatism has moved beyond that.

Great. You do things your way and I'll do them mine. We don't even have to compare outcomes.

Correct. I don't construe him as having acted as a Russian agent. — raza

Have you read this? It’s going to be bigger than Nixon or Clinton when the tale is finally told.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html

One of us is a paid professional writer. Is that what makes you so butt-hurt?

I mean, I know this sounds ridiculously dickish... — Akanthinos

So why did you say it? If you are so smart that you could boil it down into fewer words, great. But I think what you meant was that you are unaccustomed to any demand being made on your attention span.

(Which would be about the size of Twitter. Again we see how culture is shaping neurodevelopment right there in a way everyone is now quite familiar with.)

Lets say you, as an homosexual man, have an heterosexual sister. Her genetic material is not yours, but it is about as similar as it can possibly get. If all you can do is make sure that her child is well taken care off, and she does successfully, even if you didn't, you didn't quite lose the reproduction race. — Akanthinos

Rather than looking for the hidden genetic advantage - which is always going to be a long-shot given the realities of neurodevelopment - it makes more sense to view the development of sexual identity or gender as a complex process. Genetics gets things started in a general fashion, pointing the foetus is roughly the right direction. But culture and experience play a larger role in finishing the job off than perhaps we suspect.

So we can say that it is logical that at a genetic level, the intention is to produce a binary outcome. There are males and females for a good evolutionary reason. That has all the advantages, so far as biological evolution goes.

But the construction of that differentiation - at the level of the brain's sense of gender as well as the body's development of definite sexual traits - is a complex business that can wander off line fairly easily. The sex organs can lack a typical degree of differentiation. So can the brain and the endocrine system. In the womb, there could be exposure to the "other" developmental signals at a critical time. Or even while growing up - the effect of environmental hormone-mimics.

So norms might be an average that genetics shoots for. Then it is normal that genetics only shoots for norms and so there are many ways that development might wander off towards the rival pole.

Now in animals, this kind of natural variation probably encounters little selective pushback. Animals with "homosexual tendencies" likely still end up copulating with the opposite sex and having babies in the usual way. There is not a great reproductive penalty that would cause genes and neurodevelopment to become more tightly regulated. And also, genes don't really give that level of control over behaviour anyway.

Then coming to humans, now we are talking about cultural creatures. Behaviour is especially plastic in humans due to large brains - expanded precisely because of the demands of being socially-scripted animals. Even adolescence - as a phase of post-puberty continuing brain development - is a very modern human thing. It seems to have been absent even in our hominid ancestors a million years ago.

Humans become sexually capable about four years before they become sexually active and reproducing. In the "wild", the female pelvis doesn't reach full size until about 19. That is also when birth becomes the norm. Pubertal boys likewise have to wait before they actually grow into men. They are put on hold between 13 and 18 in developmental terms, unlike any other species.

So there are big differences with humans that are biologically evolved - to support social lifestyle needs. And which also make our sexual development more complex and hence prone to the biologically "unintended" happening.

Now think of the wide variety of cultural norms that can get established - further social ideas that frame gender roles and define sexual identity - because there is this basic neurodevelopmental plasticity. There is a new kind of information that can shape the individual - the cultural imprint that follow the genetic attempt to establish a binary reproductive division of sexuality.

This doesn't make homosexuality now learnt behaviour in a strong sense. But it does mean that the human individual is growing up as a response to both an inherited biology, and an inherited culture.

In animals, my argument is that even if an individual wanders off the straight and narrow, it will likely wind up reproducing anyway. There is no cultural input to create any different idea, or introduce any further possible confusion.

But humans may be far more responsive to social cues from the youngest age. And now we get into the interesting territory of how that plays out.

For example, there has been pretty crude shift in child-rearing to gender specific environments. Every new baby comes colour coded in its clothing, nursery decoration, its toys. You are either meant to be pink or blue. So a strong dichotomy is being imposed on your identity from the moment you first opened your eyes. And that forces some kind of choice - do you now accept or reject that culturally binary identity?

Instead of leaving things to be a little ambiguous and personal, society pushes the question in your face and it has to be answered one way or the other.

And likewise, coming from the other side, there is that other aspect of modern culture where society is loud and proud that it makes no judgements about your sexual identity. That too is a judgement that is constantly present in a growing child's life - even in being a "non-judgement". Some kind of definite response seems demanded. And the logical response to that becomes an identification as gender fluid or pan-sexual.

So it ain't about right and wrong, of course. But biology did have its intentions. And to look for a hidden selective advantage in homosexuality or gender confusion is a stretch.

And then humans are by design more neurodevelopmentally plastic, more designed to be developmentally completed by cultural programming, anyway. Natural selection has been at work at the level of social norms for a long time with Homo sap.

And now we get into the ways that culture forces the issues. It logically seeks binaries or dialectical divisions. And so every individual becomes forced to interpret his or her own feelings in terms of gender norms. Human culture has evolved to a point now where being non-binary is itself a binary issue of great social importance to how you understand yourself as an individual.

Didn't homosexuality use to be simpler just a few generations back? You were queer and so spoke and walked a certain way. The choice was just straight or gay. Although where homosexuals could construct communities, then they started to impose their own further binaries to create a variety of sub-types. You could have butch vs fem, and so on. As much variety as you please - so long as there was the wider homosexual community to supply and support these contrasting modes of expression.

So the mechanics of it are complex. And also, still socially evolving. The human capacity for gender fluidity - under the right social conditions - is probably far greater than anyone would believe. But also there is the issue that if you are born with one set of sex organs and cultural factors leave you confused about how to interpret that, is that a happy state of affairs for all concerned. Is there a price to that kind of social liberalism - just as we can ask about liberalism generally when it robs individuals of the identity-stabilising context they in fact often seek.

So there are philosophical questions to make both the liberal and conservative uncomfortable. Does either understand the nature of gender sufficiently to be able to arrive at sound social policy?

(And yes, I realise that political identity is another of those binaries that society likes to impose upon us as confused and unformed individuals. :) )

Look, what's the point of confining metaphysics to science? — Janus

But I don't. I confine it to pragmatic inquiry - that combination of theory and measurement that we would use to organise our experience in intelligible fashion.

Instead of arguing against what I say you want to reduce it to some 'old cultural war playing out'. — Janus

You are the one saying it is art against science, not me. I am just pointing to the familiarity of that good old cultural war.

That is why you need me to be saying that metaphysics is confined to science and excludes art. It would fit into your world as you understand it. It frustrates you that I say something wider than that.

You actually don't have any good argument for why people should not be interested in ideas that cannot be definitively cashed out; the very idea of "cashing out" reveals your instrumentalist bias. — Janus

Is an artist who doesn't make works an artist? Does an idea exist if it is not articulated in some particular semiotic form or relation?

Again, there is no proper idea without its impression, no actual theory without its acts of measurement.

I just think you are blind to what semiosis is actually about. You imagine that selves - being "unworldly" - should not need to measure themselves against a world. But selves are the result of the making of umwelts - models of worlds with selves in them. So selfhood is always "worldly".

But then that world can be the social world that makes humans as social creatures. Poetry, art and religion are all about that. You can call it doing philosophy or metaphysics if it pleases you.

And certainly organised social structures, like churches, found it actually useful to force people into binary logical positions concerning questions of faith, and hence social identity. The kind of logicism you are promoting has become a core pragmatic tool of cultural control over individual psychology. You want to give folk no choice but to "be free to feel their own truth". :yikes:

However I am interested in metaphysics as an actually objective inquiry into the nature of being. And that requires a full understanding of the logicism which is the semiotic tool to be used. The danger of ideas that seem "logical", and yet lack the other thing of testability, is like top of the list as a red flag.

To you, that puts pragmatism in the camp of the enemy. Science! But as I have pointed out, all ideas must be rooted in impressions to have reality. Ideas can't exist by themselves ... Platonically. They must exist hylomorphically - cashed out materially in some particular impression so as to have substantial actuality.

If you disagree then it is on you to show how measurement is possible in metaphysics; or how metaphysical ideas could be assessed in terms of their practical outcomes. How does metaphysics differ from natural science, taken as a more or less unified whole, in your view? — Janus

I’ve already made the arguments in this thread. Science is simply metaphysical speculation cashed out. Naturalism is what worked best in terms of reducing our practical uncertainties about existence.

That also then leaves the creative possibilities. It leaves plenty of room for art, poetry, etc, as forms of cultural expression tied to pragmatic social purpose.

Your assertion is that metaphysics is larger than science because it is the one that contains the further creative possibilities. But that is just the usual anti-Scientism that @Wayfarer peddles.

I have been at pains to show how my Peircean metaphysics is holistic naturalism. It can include your cultural anthropomorphism along with a more generally cosmic view. Peircean metaphysics says creative possibility is already the ground zero of existence.

And from there, it is no surprise to find science emerging as a hierarchy of increasingly specified complexity. We have a succession of constraints, a cascade of semiotic symmetry breakings, represented in the familiar explanatory pyramid of physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology and psychology.

Nothing gets left out. It is just recognised that at the psychological end of the spectrum, the scope for creative spontaneity becomes hugely developed in terms of its complexity. In particular, it makes that key transformation to becoming organismic. Selves emerge to localise the semiosis. You get life and mind arising as instances of a modelling relation.

So all your responses are turned towards advancing the Romantic cultural project of denying the very notion of rational or intelligible constraints on action and being. You want feeling to remain transcendent - beyond the grasp of the scientific imagination. But then you want feeling to be immanent or foundational also. So metaphysics - as the ultimately liberated exploration of being - has to be seen as focused on feelings first, facts later.

You are defending a very traditional response to the socio-cultural threat posed by the Enlightenment. This old cultural war still wants to play out.

And beyond that tired dichotomy is the naturalism, the systems view, which is the holism of metaphysical pragmatism. Unity is achievable by a conceptual frame willing to be large enough to encompass nature's apparent contradictions.

I expect you to disagree and continue with your assertions, but it is probably a waste of time; — Janus

It is certainly a waste of time when you both put forward the importance of faith as an act of measurement, a form of evidence for a belief, and then refuse to discuss the consequences of having said that.

As a matter of faith I assume that eventually some new thing will be found and understood that will render the strangeness and weirdness of QM merely amazing and beautiful, but understood. — tim wood

Yeah. And so how will that happen except by not in fact just accepting locality rules as you seem to believe?

You don't appreciate that you are constructing a rationale based on a contradiction. You will believe in reductionist materialism even if our best physical theories are based on axiomatic holism.

The fact that the holism has to be presumed to allow the reductionism to be demonstrated doesn't bother you at all. Even though, with QM, the ability to ignore the holism finally got broke.

QM is only half a theory of reality. It gives you the time evolution of possibilities. It can no longer give you the counterfactual definiteness of a collapse to actuality.

The actual world is no longer calculable! And that is because it is the world that contains "the observer".

It's all in your god-damned mind (says the default Copenhagen interpretation)! The material world that QM models is now nothing more actual than a shadowy infinite dimensional space of probabilities!

Nothing spells the death of naive direct realism, the death of materialism, like the facts of QM.

But as I have pointed out, the same has always been true of mathematical physics. At the level of axiom, it has always had to incorporate a telos - that of the least action principle - as the way to collapse the possible into the actual.

From a modelling point of view, this ain't mysterious. You need to fix a backdrop to be able to model a play of dynamics. And that is what least action does. It hardwires a telos into the physical, material, backdrop. This thing called the Universe, this thing called spacetime, is also a thing called the universal application of a global entropy optimising principle. It flattens the Cosmos in terms of energetic effort as well. Events take the paths that require the least information.

That is why we live in a Universe of apparent classical certainty. At our scale of being, all the uncertainty and indeterminism has been filtered or themalised away by the global holistic action of the PLA.

That seems so obviously true, we can afford to axiomatise it. Our models can focus on what still might change or surprise us in unexpected fashion - because we have this backdrop global coherence that acts as a universal reference frame.

And that backdrop is neo-Aristotelian. It contains also the forms as the global symmetries which can be locally broken. It contains the global telos that acts as a universal constraint on energetic change or entropic uncertainty everywhere.

I agree. Physics doesn't play up this fact. Yet it is still true.

Yes. though I'm not sure it needs any defense so much as acknowledgement of what it is, for what it is, as what it is. — tim wood

But that would rule out pretty much everything science has discovered. If the needle of a compass spins, how does that magic happen - explained in terms of everyday perception and not employing weird scientific stories about imperceptible fields.

I have now watched Leonard Susskind discuss and describe the holographic theory on Youtube. — tim wood

Well one of the key things to realise in such discussions is that folk are usually talking about one physical theory of lower dimension capturing what matters about another physical theory of higher dimension. So it is a dualistic relation between descriptions of reality.

It is like a hologram in the sense that a two dimensional image can capture all the same information that exists in a three dimensional image. At this level of analogy, we are not talking about actual worlds.

The most celebrated result is the AdS/CFT correspondence. This says one representation of reality - a string theory story of gravity acting in a negatively curved spacetime - equates to another representation of reality as a conformal quantum field theory that lacks gravity.

So it is a formal equivalence of models with different ingredients. One can be viewed as a limiting extreme on what the other contains in freely expanded form. This is a really useful technical result as you might only be able to make successful calculations about reality in one or other base. And then the two incomplete descriptions can be glued together via this relation to give you the more complete model you seek - like the holy grail of a theory of quantum gravity.

Of course, holography arose out of a more directly physical story - counting the entropy content of black holes and other relativistic event horizons. It says that - due to a Planckian granularity of entropy or bits of information - what is inside an event horizon can't be more than what would be "written" on its surface.

This gives event horizons a material reality. They will emit radiation due to the Unruh effect. You can measure their physical existence. It is a generalisation of the blackhole radiation story - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect

So beyond the pop sci headlines - we live in a hologram like some weird supernatural projection effect! - what we are talking about is the material physics of event horizons. Then a next level equivalence of the theories employing that mechanism. One theory can be seen as the collapsed extreme of another theory, both containing the same finite set of local observables or entropic degrees of freedom.

More of a problem is wackdoodles of greater or lesser wackdoodleness who grab this idea and run with it into science fiction and science fantasy. I do not think you are such, but in your choosing to adhere to theory over reality it's hard to tell. — tim wood

Or maybe what is wackdoodle - from a scientific point of view - is believing that we can know reality in a fashion unmediated by a model. So what I adhere to is that metaphysical truth - it is all models, all the way down.

And that is why I argue for modelling based on the holism of neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism. As I say, physics already thinks structurally now. It sees reality as arising from the mathematical inevitabilities of fundamental symmetry - downward acting formal cause. And from the telic necessity of some optimisation principle. The world can only exist stably because instability can be suppressed or cancelled away.

Anything is possible. But for every possibility to be actual would be pure chaos. The PLA shows that nature in fact is the organised result of a holistic sum over all possibilities. We live in a regular, lawful, classical kind of Cosmos because everything contracts and tightens according to a tensegrity or ricci flow type optimisation algorithm.

Now that might be weirdly non-local, and so outside current physics - as a stated theory of observables. But it is also completely within current physics as just one of its axiomatic truths - one of the three essential principles expected to characterise all possible physical laws (along with the cosmological principle and the principle of locality).

...and I ask you what you do when it rains, that's a serious question. At the least it puts the question to you, "Is it raining?" — tim wood

So you can expect some definite fact of the matter ... because you have a theory about what qualifies?

Water droplets are falling out of the sky. One would put on a raincoat to go outside. It matters to us if we get wet.

If we examine it, we would find that your theory of rain encodes all four Aristotelian causes. And that holism - which encodes also a pragmatic purpose - would be why it would seem such a reasonable and straightforward question. It does matter if it is raining.

But now I look outside and see that it is mizzling. Does this fit my theory of the world being divided so sharply between the wet and the dry? Maybe I can go out without a raincoat as I'm not really going to get wet - not to any degree that seems to matter.

Alternatively, it is a really muggy day. The humidity reads saturated. But again, a raincoat kind of day? And yet can I say it is actually dry out there?

So the point is that material facts are always ultimately psychological facts. It is just that they are also the recalcitrant facts of experience. We can't just wish them away.

But then also, to the degree they make no difference in terms of our pragmatic wishes, we would have no reason to even notice them as "facts".

It is this kind of epistemic subtlety that is missing from your approach to the issues here. You are arguing from the position of naive realism. Time to stop and think about the fact that it is all models of reality as far as our experience of anything is concerned.

if you have to dig up that antique, — SophistiCat

It’s the OP. Send your complaint to the publisher.

We are more used to thinking in terms of unfolding forward in time, but there is no time asymmetry in such systems. — SophistiCat

The maths might go backwards in time with no trouble, but we are talking about the physical event.

If you agree that it can go backwards in time like its mathematical description, then how does this support your local notion of cause and effect?

And it has least to do with Aristotelian final cause, which is bound up with anthropomorphic, psychological categories of goals and intentions. — SophistiCat

Isn’t neo-Aristotelianism the de-anthropomorphic version? The PLA is about path or effort minimisation.

There are deeper and more interesting ways to make sense of such alternate explanatory frameworks. — SophistiCat

And what were they? You never said.

Rational coherence is simply a matter of avoiding inconsistencies or contradictions in your system. How would we go about testing "empirical correspondence to a theory of everything"? — Janus

No. It creates a rationally predictive framework that encodes predictions as deductive necessities. So it is capable of being now actually a theory which can be right or wrong in terms of the empirical facts.

As I say, pragmatism even accepts that such rational frameworks are always purpose dependent. It isn't taken for granted that they deliver the truth of the thing in itself, only an umwelt that has meaning to someone.

And pragmatism also accepts that every rule has exceptions. It takes a constraints-based approach in which chance and spontaneity are also metaphysically basic.

So pragmatism deals with the usual complaints against Scientism. It deals with the epistemic issues before moving on to the ontological.

You can say there are good reasons to believe it, but those reasons will always be the ones you prefer to use as criteria, rather than some alternative set of reasons. The absolute superiority of any set of reasons cannot be demonstrated. — Janus

If you don't care about theories that make predictions, then you simply are left with an odd notion of a theory.

You could argue that you don't care about modelling reality. But then I've got to wonder what you would mean by metaphysics. How is it still a communal philosophical inquiry into being and knowing, and not something else, like a subfield of poetry or theology?

So, I would agree that assertions about the existence of God, or Eternity, or the Good, and so on are not rationally decidable; but they do have an affective, a metaphorical, an aesthetic and a poetic sense, and in terms of those senses such assertions are not meaningless nonsense. — Janus

They are not metaphysics either, to the degree that metaphysics is an inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality.

And the fact is, which I doubt you will dare to deny, that people's faith in such figures may make enormous differences to both individual lives and societies, so they may also have pragmatic value or dis-value, depending on how the effects they produce are judged. — Janus

Rather than deny it, I've offered that as evidence. It is the pragmatic social utility of theistic or romantic constructs that accounts for their evolution and persistence in human linguistic culture.

Anthropological science explains why people come to think that way.

Let's stick to what I actually claim. I assert that a Peircean pragmatic/semiotic approach to metaphysics is the best. Best in terms of both its rational coherence and empirical correspondence to a theory of everything. Best as its theory of epistemology is also its theory of ontology. Best because it unifies mind and world in a modelling relation.

I am always happy to defend this contention.

If you want to make this about philosophy vs science, you are changing the subject as far as I'm concerned. The Peircean perspective is already larger as it spans everything conventionally regarded as particular to either domain.

Does science produce consensus? Ought philosophy not? Already we are off on an excursion into LEM-strength categorical distinctions that wind up imposing impressive, but essentially illusory, barriers on discourse.

A totalising Peircean metaphysics incorporates consensus and dissent from the get-go. It already says that there must be both the continuity of agreement (synechism) and the discontinuity of spontaneity (tychism) to have a crisply developed state of being.

So once again, you are reaching for the smaller view - where something must fundamentally divide the philosopher from the scientist. And you can't even hear me when I am laying out how they simply represent the naturally emergent dualities which would develop to produce a living structure of being.

Of course there is also art, poetry, awe, romanticism and all the rest. But you want to make it fundamental. And actually it might only represent the particular and the contingent. To the degree it is ontically structural or necessary, that would be captured by a naturalistic metaphysics and its ability to define humans as the product of novel grades of semiosis. Social creatures due to language. Technological creatures due to logic.

So yeah. Let's hear your counters on the specifics of my position. Test those. But be clear about what it is I have actually claimed.

I don't see any convincing arguments that metaphysics can be done by science or as a science — Janus

And all I see is your assertion on that count. Yet the thread is about neo-Aristotelianism. And the criticism of reductionist science relates to its neo-atomism. So I don't need to say much else.

And in philosophy it doesn't matter what ideas you entertain beyond what creative and interesting ways of thinking about the world they open up. — Janus

You are expressing your personal preference. That's fine. It is your philosophy of philosophy.

I've argued the essential incoherence of your position as you say it can rely on acts of personal faith as evidence. I await a counter on that.

"Getting it right' in some determinative sense doesn't matter except in the sciences. — Janus

More nonsense. Getting it right in the sense of some absolute truthiness is what in fact obsesses the logicists and rationalists. And theologians tend to fall into that trap for the reasons I outlined.

Science speaks to the pragmatics of a modelling relation with the world. That is an utterly different epistemic mentality.

And even there it is about "what works". — Janus

It is completely about whatever works for you, for your purposes. And hence it opens the door to the kind of free creative speculative bent you seem to think so important.

But the difference - the one that I was drawing out - is accepting the constraint of a community of rational inquiry. You are more inclined to see philosophy as some kind of pluralistic exercise in individual exploration and revelation - the Romantic model of epistemology.

I have argued that the communal approach clearly trumps the personal one - primarily as there is no such real thing as an ontically personal point of view. We are all the products of social construction so far as any rational philosophising goes.

So far, you haven't countered that argument, simply re-asserted your position and ignored the underlying incoherence.

That's the point I think you fail to see, because you are so starry-eyed about science. — Janus

You are wasting your time with the ad homs. The failure here is your failure to counter arguments.

To bring this back down to Earth, what do you mean by "particle"? Does the property of concrete atomistic particleness not develop in time due to the cooling and expansion of a Big Bang cosmos?

So you are presuming the timeless existence of little itty bits of matter floating free in an empty spatial void. And there is zero physical evidence of that being the true story of our Universe. It is how we might usefully conceive of the Universe right now. But it was not true at its start. Nor will it be at its Heat Death.

The bit of your multiverse or ergodic return speculation that can still work is the idea that the universe in its current cold and expanded state - the one where particles in a void is a reasonable classical physics summary - is infinite in its spatial extent. And so there is room enough, if we kept crossing the universe, that we would "have" to encounter an unlimited number of replica Earths, with replica you's and me's living the exact same lives.

There would be an infinite number of near replicas - all the ways those Earths, those us, could be fractionally or, more often, substantially different. And then an infinite number of absolutely exact replicas.

But a logical argument that always returns the answer "yes" on any question ought to be suspect.

"Would multiplying by infinity result in an infinite number of exactly 'me's' on top of an infinity of 'nearly-me's'?" "Yes. Anything times infinity equals infinity."

At what point would one start to wonder if this kind of simple extrapolation - one that turns any possibility into an actuality - is a little metaphysically sus?

But the evidence is the accounts and testimonies of philosophers and sages, over millenia. — Wayfarer

Most of whom thought the world was flat and slavery ethical.

That's what a secular account would say, as by definition, it can't accomodate the soteriological dimension, as there's nothing in its conceptual framework to accomodate it. — Wayfarer

By definition or due to lack of any evidence for why it would need to be taken seriously.

Sure, if you believe in reincarnation or the dangers of Hell, then maybe there is something to be rescued from.

But why would we believe in such fairy tales - except for socially constructed reasons?

It is this soul that accounts for the ability human beings have to reason and engage in higher order cognitive function (i.e. knowledge of universals).

Again, why would we believe that given what we now know about evolution and development?

If, in order to make your physics "easier," you want to suppose you live in a hologram or some such thing, you're free to do so — tim wood

That is just pop sci hyperbole. Don’t believe the headlines, read the papers. Holography is far more subtle than that.

And you have it the wrong way round if you believe that metaphysics is just pragmatic modelling - which is my own position here.

We don't believe the intuitive picture that a successful theory appears to support. We believe the theory. And the intuitive picture is only that. A helpful stepping stone as a mental image to get our heads around the theory.

So you are defending the "material world" ... as the everyday perception you have of living in a world of medium size dry goods. But perception itself is just a constructed impression of the world, a model that works. The first thing physics starts to do is strip away that cosy certainty that we already experience the world just as it is.

So why defend materialism with blind faith? Newton had already broken that model of reality with his mechanics.

As I said, Descartes and others couldn't make the mental break to drop the atomistic idea that the void is jammed full with jostling particles. Forces were created by particles swirling about like an aetherial fluid. Stars would be caught up and swirled about in the heavens by a cosmic flow of corpuscles.

And Newton came along and said nah, don't need that. Gravity can reach across space to pull on objects. Bodies can spin or move forever without needing the constant nudge of impetus.

Mathematical physics got started by accepting the immateriality of physical cause. It was disturbing at the time. Then we got so used to it that we don't even think twice about it. It's QM that is the weird one these days.

Did you know that Shannon calculated the limit entropy of an ordinary English text to be just a little more than one bit per letter? — tim wood

Or 2.6 bits. But that is an average.

My posts might be a little long for you. But the real problem might be that each sentence approaches a black hole density in information content. :)

Look, there aren't many people who are more hard-nosed realists than me. And that is why I insist on pointing out the shallow graves in the physicalist forest.

The principle of least action is a good example of how "mystical" the most material-appearing mathematical descriptions of nature already are. Our most fundamental law of physical existence - the second law of thermodynamics - is openly teleological. Quantum interpretations show that non-locality is real and yet still intellectually unacceptable to most folk.

It goes on. Science is a human enterprise. Things start to feel dangerous as we let go our perceptual impressions and just believe what the damn theories say in an abstract structural sense. But that is where modern metaphysics has got to.