Orthogonal is a completely different concept from opposition. — Metaphysician Undercover

LOL. You don't say. You mean like ... an opposition so complete it is a total and complete asymmetry, not merely a weak-ass negation? >:O

So if minds have purpose, and physics has tendencies, how do you get to your principle, that purpose regulates dynamism? — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmm. I dunno. [Scratches head.] Grades of purpose?

For instance a monist would say that the two elements of the dichotomy are fundamentally the same, swhile a dualist would say that they are fundamentally different. — Metaphysician Undercover

And nicely, a triadicist would say a dichotomy is how the same becomes the different. That is why the relation can be described in terms of a reciprocal action.

The discrete becomes different from the continuous by breaking it. The continuous becomes different from the discrete by connecting it. So a differencing that begins in the sameness of an indeterminancy - a vague potential which is neither the one nor the other - proceeds in mutual fashion towards its naturally opposed extremes.

You'll see this with any opposing terms negative/positive, hot/cold, large/small, etc. — Metaphysician Undercover

These examples you've chosen are weak and easily reversed differences. They are symmetry-breakings of the same scale - anti-symmetries - and so can quickly erase each other. A metaphysical dichotomy is a full-blown asymmetry. The outcomes look to be orthogonal and as unrelated as possible. The relationship is reciprocal or inverse, not merely additive/subtractive.

So to move from hot to cold, you just have to subtract some heat. But to get from the continuous to the discrete, you must understand the continuous as "absolutely broken". It is the antithesis which is the least possible amount of continuity, or 1/continuity.

A categorical separation is a separation between types of thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It is the separation that produces the familiar list of metaphysically opposed types.

Aristotle's categories were a bunch of dichotomies - quality~quantity, active~passive, time~space, symmetry~symmetry-breaking, particular~universal.

So "constraint" appears to be something you just made up, a word which has nothing underneath it, no substance, just mystery. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's just a normal, well understood, word in science.

And, I see a categorical separation between living and inanimate such that the inanimate is excluded from acting with purpose. — Metaphysician Undercover

Another thing I've explained so many times now. There are semiotic grades of telos. Minds have purposes, life has functions, and physics has tendencies.

The problem being that Peirce's "eternal becoming" as you describe, renders definiteness incomplete. Therefore things cannot be properly fixed, and the claim that the Peircean view "fixes things" must be contradictory. This is the problem with vagueness as a first principle, it is intelligibility compromised. — Metaphysician Undercover

Rest easy, MU. As usual, dichotomies rule. Stability is relative to plasticity. So we are talking here about the approach to a limit. If there is vagueness, then already there is also its "other" of the crisp.

What I would say is that the nature of this relationship is not well known. It is a deficiency in our knowledge, just like the relationship between the past and future is not well known, it is a deficiency. Still, we know enough to say that the past is categorically different from the future, like we know that being is categorically different from becoming. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well we do know the nature of the relationship. It is a dichotomy. We arrive at it via dialectical reasoning. Metaphysics has been operating this way since it began.

A categorical difference is one in which two categories stand absolutely opposed. To each other. And so therefore they are also absolutely related.

In reality, when we talk about a thing staying the same thing, it does so despite changing. So I stay the same person despite undergoing changes. It might be that some aspects of me stay the same while others change. This brings us back to the issue of unity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, already accounted for. Constraints regulate dynamism. The purpose of a thing maintains its identity despite all material changes it might undergo. You can't pretend this is a great mystery.

That would be more convincing if the OP hadn't by then made it plain it was the MWI multiverse interpretation that motivated the thread.

So don't blame me for your poor reading skills.

The efforts of Rich and @apokrisis to make a federal case out of this are way off target. — fishfry

"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again." :)

What is not, is anti-what is (being), but this is categorically different from becoming, which is activity. So being is not anti-becoming, it is anti-not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Being and becoming must have some relationship. You can't have it both ways - that as "different categories" they are related and they are not related.

It is pretty clear that if something can change to become something else, then something can stay the same by not becoming that something else.

The real problem is that being and becoming are so fundamentally incompatible, that it was a mistake to attempt to put them in the same category under the name existence, in the first place. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hence the Peircean process view. Now being is emergent and so an eternal state of becoming. You only have degrees of definiteness.

Matter and form now become the hylomorphic triadic relation in which chance is opposed to necessity (Peircean firstness and thirdness, or tychism and synechism), and then their interaction results in substance or actuality (Peircean secondness).

So the Peircean view fixes things with a hierarchical structure. You have two opposed limits on being - material spontaneity or local degrees of freedom and formal necessity, or global constraints. Then definite being emerges as the concrete action that arises between these two bounds.

Again, what determines the sequence of a set of traffic lights. Is it a physical determinism or an informational one? Or do you think causally the two are the same?

It becomes a local observer illusion. Although you could salvage a global story in that the branching at least always increases in the future direction. But even that ain’t much given that unlimited branches can be conjured up at zero entropic cost ... apparently ... if you drink the MWI Kool-Aid.

But then even mechanical determinism doesn’t make metaphysical sense if it doesn’t admit to some kind of chance or spontaneity. That view over-determines causality as much as allowing MWI to run rampant with causal histories under-determines it.

What? — fishfry

Unless you want to claim nature is literally a finite state machine, then what you’re missing is that is what you appear to be claiming.

Can you explain what I'm missing about the basic operation of a traffic light? — fishfry

Does the fact we can make machines mean that nature is mechanical?

Hah! Quantum mechanics still presumes Newtonian backdrop time. That's the problem. The apparent reversibility of the wavefunction physics is the reason why the irreversibility of an event, a collapse of the wavefunction, doesn't compute.

So QM imports the determinism of mechanics because it imports time as a global backdrop dimension with a basic symmetry of direction. If things look the same going forwards or backwards, then the theory can't say anything else than the future was always completely determined.

MWI tries to fix this by grafting on statistical mechanics to the QM formalism. But this only buries the issue even deeper under the reversible mechanics of thermodynamics. You still need an "observer" to break the symmetry of the maths being used.

MWI is a modern mysticism. It avoids the fundamental issue that a mechanical notion of time creates. When QM gets replaced by a fuller theory of quantum gravity, time is going to have to be a properly emergent feature like space. Instead of time and energy being connected by the uncertainty principle in the current kluge fashion, it will have to be cashed out properly like location and momentum uncertainty.

The mirror test tests self-recognition, not consciousness, and even that based solely on the visuality. — BlueBanana

It is correct to make the distinction between self-recognition and what we really mean by self-conscious.

It is quite natural for big brained social animals - like chimps, elephants and dolphins - to have a sense of self that goes beyond just a perception of their bodies and intentionality in contrast to the world about them. They are also aware of this difference in terms of their social world too. They are aware of being surrounded by individuals who are also loci of intentionality that must be factored into the equation.

Indeed, the primary reason for having metabolically-costly big brains is to underwrite these kinds of complex social computations.

So the mirror test is a test of an animal's ability to see the world in terms of the presence of other minds - other social actors. And then to recognise an image in the mirror is that of themselves - their own embodied presence.

But self-consciousness goes way beyond this in being a linguistic structuring of the whole of the mind. Language use underwrites a narrative or autobiographical approach to memory. It allows "voluntary recall" of our past history as a self. The animal brain can only apply past experience to the present moment. So recognising - making sense of the flow of the present - is the biological-level ability. Recollection is the learnt language-based skill that only humans properly have, and the one that culture cultivates so as to ensure we "never forget ourselves" in polite company. :)

What Aristotle demonstrated is that "continuous change" is incompatible with the logical principles of what is and what is not, being and not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

I like that you cash out the formal half of the story in terms of "what is and what is not". But that itself then says that becoming has to apply to the becoming of what is not, as well as the what is. So when we are considering "states of existence", we have to explain why they are failing to change and so partake in the "what is not". So that anti-becoming is happening continuously while actual change is failing to take place.

While things are changing, the mystery would seem to be how one state of non-change becomes the next state of non-change. But a non-changing state then has a matching (ie: dichotomous) mystery on this score. There is the puzzle of how it is continually expressing its "what is" by preventing the actualisation, or maintaining as potentia, its "what is not".

That was a nice summary.

However notice also your triadic resolution of the dichotomistic categories...

So I think that in its early development the category of "existing" was produced as a wider category which could include both the categories of "being/not-being" and "becoming". Both of these categories, which are inherently inconsistent, are allowed to be real under the category of existing, which is therefore the more general category. — Metaphysician Undercover

So existence was the more generic category that could subsume being~becoming as a dialectical possibility. You had two contradicting extremes of metaphysical possibility. And they could be resolved by the unity of becoming one within a higher order abstraction. Being and becoming became merely two forms of the same basic thing - existing.

The scholastics though, then produced a dichotomy between existence and essence, and in this way they re-introduce the incompatibility. "Essence", is now the category of what is, and what is not (1), while "existence" is relegated to the material realm of becoming (2). — Metaphysician Undercover

But then scholasticism buggered this up because of the need to bolster Christian dualism. Existence became about material/effective cause alone - the world experienced through the senses. The world of material accidents. And essence - the formal/final cause of being - became split off and associated with the separate realm of mind, spirit, nous, the ideal. The world known through the human intellect. And then ultimately through beatific vision. Men could know God just as directly and surely as they knew the world.

So an actually logical metaphysics - one that treated reality as individuated being - became one based on the acceptance of an actualised contradiction. A dualised or disconnected ontology of matter and mind.

A philosophy of the supernatural replaced a philosophy of nature.

MWI would be a trade-off. You get to save wavefunction determinism at the expense of causal localism. So every possibility gets actualised. But in a way that then makes no difference as there is no interaction between these outcomes. They all happen. And none of them make a difference to each other.

The phrase, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, comes to mind.

On the whole, the principle of locality seems more important to metaphysics than the preservation of determinism. The reality of chance - as in wavefunction collapse - is after all the world as we experience it. And it would be nice to keep all the causes of the world within the one world, not just abandon causality because we haven't yet got a final theory of the quantum.

This is dualist picture when there is a separate substance--"I"--which is experiencer. In another picture, experience create by the brain activity is the only thing which is real. Experience is the first thing which attaches us to the reality. I can doubt "I" and say that it is byproduct of brain activity. But I cannot doubt experience. — bahman

Experience requires a division between what is self and what is world. To know where the world and its recalcitrant nature starts, the brain has to know where the body and its intentionality leaves off. So to experience the world requires the equally primary experience of the self.

My favourite example is chewing your dinner. Somehow you have to be very sure which bit is your tongue, lips and cheek, which bit is the grisly steak, as your teeth chomp away with savage abandon.

But as has been said, you seem to be talking more about self-consciousness rather than just conscious awareness.

All animals have a sense of self as part of their states of experience. In seeing the world, they see it from their own point of view - the view that includes themselves in the sense of an embodied intentionality that contrast with a world of external material possibilities.

But self-consciousness is a linguistically-structured and culturally-evolved learnt skill. It is not biological but social. We humans learn to objectify our being so as to be psychologically self-regulating. So the reason we are self-conscious is that society needs us to have that habit of attending introspectively - to be policing our own behaviour as socially-constrained creatures.

Biologically there is every reason to make a psychological self~world experiential distinction, but no particular way that this experiencing could be experienced as experiencing. Animals lack the meta-structure that language can provide.

Socially, you can't be a proper human unless you have mastered self-regulation through language. Objectifying your own psychological being is the central skill required to be part of a social order.

Thanks for your opinion.

Yep. Either that or your syllogism failed to capture the sense of Wayfarer’s position. The latter I believe.

I draw a complete blank as to what you could possibly mean by that. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well obviously God has his reason for at every instant forming the idea of all the individual avians in the world in his Almighty mind and so giving shape to their existence. But he does move in mysterious ways I hear.

Being A is essential to being B.
Not all B's are A. — creativesoul

Being a bird is essential to being a duck, but not all ducks are birds? Sounds legit.

I would really like to know how earthlings would respond psychologically to an alien visitation. — Bitter Crank

We already had such a moment when we went into space and looked back at the Earth. Suddenly we realised it was a tiny and delicately balanced "spaceship". We immediately resolved to look after its ecology, change our wicked ways.

So evidence of aliens would produce an existential shock that would turn into a psychological shrug as we turned back to business as usual.

It was mentioned in Fred Hoyle and Chandrawickramasingha's book The Intelligent Universe, — Wayfarer

Paul Davies was Fred Hoyle's student by the way. Davies (and Lineweaver) have done the maths to convince that interstellar panspermia couldn't feasibly be the case - not enough time to cover the distances involved. So it could only be Mars impregnating the Earth now.

(And hey - science politics at work - a space agency has good reason to drum up interest in spending a trillion getting there. Trump thinks its a noble idea. By now every bullshit detector should be flashing red alert.)

The OP was about the supposition that if we as humans travelled to another planet with the same atmospheric composition would we survive, and this together with the title about aliens arriving on earth can cause - by extension - the octopus result. — TimeLine

So the very mention of "aliens" opens the Pandora's Box of crackpottery, hey?

My argument was that only the most tenuous "extension" let Wayfarer introduce his personal hobbyhorse of panspermia. His barely acceptable justification (implied if not stated) was, hey look, we've already been exposed to possible alien biology - who hasn't eaten an octopus?

So sure, you might have grounds to clamp down on derailing a thread. But Wayfarer would still have been able to legitimate his extension - if only just.

And again, any comments about the merit of the OP should focus on the OP's actual content. As what is reasonable about expecting it to explicitly add "...and don't go running off and talking about panspermia, anyone".

The onus was never on the OP to rule out every possible derailment of its stated focus.

I am doing a subject on astrobiology next year so I would be interested to read more about the subject as a whole, despite my concessions. A close friend is studying her PhD in astrogeology and knows him pretty well. — TimeLine

Well then, why not just rebut Wayfarer in the first place? Use your more serious interest in the subject to say something worthwhile.

It just increases my confusion here that you say you are about to study the very subject that you seem to want to rule fringe science at best. What are you going to write in the exam when its says discuss the evidence from extremophiles like tardigrades?

"Ducks lay eggs" is true if and only if ducks lay eggs. Some ducks do not. — creativesoul

Here again you just expose the limitations of a nominalist metaphysics. Predicate logic is optimised for reasoning about particulars. Universal predication becomes just an exercise in set theory - a nominalistic claim of congruence. So your weapon of choice simply lacks the firepower to make any impression here. It's a classic case of bringing a knife to a gunfight. ;)

If you check out his Posterior Analytics, Aristotle was trying to steer a middle course between Platonic realism and Atomistic nominalism. So his genus~species distinction is an attempt to understand the ontological issue in terms of hierarchies of constraint. A universal speaks to a disposition - a tendency, function or purpose. And thus is is not contradicted - in its generality - by exceptions ... so long as the exceptions are accidental and don't count as essential.

Universals can thus be seen as allied with the top-down constraining causality of telos and form. A generality, like a genus, is defined as some kind of telic intent. A way of being that is organised by a reason. Then a species is some particular form that expresses that intent. A species is a general desire made specific flesh.

So if we are going to say something truthful-feeling like "ducks lay eggs because birds lay eggs, and ducks are birds", then we would have to look towards the reason why birds would even lay eggs. Birds would be a genus - a real distinction in nature - because there was some essential natural purpose that "a bird" expresses. And then a duck would be a bird as a particular form that in turn expresses that purpose in terms of some more specific design.

Then "this duck right here" would be the individuated being which is the form of a duck made locally and materially definite - complete with all the accidents of matter which can be deemed not to matter as they don't really affect the globally real purpose.

So behind every individuated duck, we have a hierarchy of increasingly general, but absolutely real, constraints. And the constraints themselves have a directional organisation - one that points always from general telos towards specific form.

By definition, telos tolerates material exceptions of every possible kind - except any differences that would make a difference in terms of that purpose. So a constraints-based view of "universal predication" says not only that what is not prevented, could be the case. It says if an exception could happen, it must happen. Exceptions are a prediction, given that the very idea of the essential is dichotomous to that of the accidental. You couldn't have the one in any definite sense without having also its "other".

So your attempts to keep forcing regular nominalistic logic onto a discussion of the problems of nominalism is quite amusing. Your dogmatism is a symptom of the intellectual disease in question.

Why can't it be answered? I've been amazed instead how close we are getting to a fairly complete answer.

Why something and not nothing is of course a dead-end causal inquiry. But why something and not everything starts to become an answerable one. We have a ton of science that now speaks to that.

An octopus is now an alien and they probably can start predicting who will win the world cup. — TimeLine

I'm confused as the OP did not mention panspermia let along tardigrades and octopuses.

If that is your specific concern here - you haven't mentioned a specific criticism of the OP - then that should have been stated in your expression of moderatorly discomfort. You could have just called Wayfarer out for doing his usual thing of introducing panspermia into the conversation at every opportunity and, more especially, asked him to source his comments about tardigrades and octopuses (but only if you wanted to encourage him to derail the OP - a reason I passed over it in silence).

Panspermia research does offer the evidence of extremophiles like tardigrades. But talk about octopuses being alien is - as far as I can see - just a meme. Wayfarer might be able to show to the contrary that it is part of panspermia as a serious hypothesis. So if you were really looking to draw some line, tardigrades would be some kind of accepted science, octopus become the lunatic fringe.

So you are attempting to justify drawing a boundary line in terms of hyperbole - "An octopus is now an alien and they probably can start predicting who will win the world cup." But hyperbole is a rhetorical device and not a suitable method for the drawing of fine distinctions. If you defend your position, as you have, with hyperbolic statements, then that is a bigger failure in critical thinking than the one you meant to criticise.

I do respectfully agree and reiterate that I will certainly be cautious before ever making a decision otherwise, but my intention really was to understand whether this subject could indeed be considered Philosophy of Science and not about moderating risks and what not. — TimeLine

Cool. But again the OP seems utterly unproblematic in that light. It sets out a chain of reasoning in full. It asks a question that is worth answering - on moral grounds, if we are going to cart our bugs to Mars, if nothing else.

It contained a "scientific error" at the last step, in my opinion. The OP assumed that our immune system has to be evolved to recognise invasive biological threats. But we now know our immune system instead can learn because it generates a variety of antibodies on a "just in case" basis. It doesn't know what might be coming down the pipe, so it produces a range of receptors and uses these to discover what might be "alien" in terms of what it knows to be not "the usual biology out which 'I' am constructed".

So, my point is, even if we found an Earth like world - with similar gravity, atmospheric composition etc - this similarly is only superficial - and its biosphere - especially life at the microbial level - would make moving and colonising this planet impossible - unless we develop immunity to its biosphere as we have done here on Earth. — JohnLocke

So - given the OP's constraints around this other planet having a very Earth-like chemistry in other respects - it is reasonably unlikely that alien life would escape detection by our immune system, especially if the life was biologically similar enough to be infective. And even just being an unrecognised organic chemistry would be enough to set off an allergic reaction.

But because our immune system learns, then it is possible we could adjust in months rather than millions of years.

Thus the OP asks a completely reasonable question - one that is speculative and yet also one we can start to make more precise sense of; break it down into more specific questions to be answered.

Wayfarer of course went off at a tangent. The idea that octopuses could be aliens in our midst is a risible hypothesis with little to no scientific motivation.

If Wayfarer thinks something he read somewhere does provide proper motivation, he can cite the source. He would need to present a similar careful chain of reasoning that leads towards some central well-focused question - a question that would have maximum impact on the holding of the theory outlined.

And then even a risible hypothesis is meat for philosophy of science. Learning how to deal with crackpot suggestions is central to learning critical thinking. Bad ideas teaches how good science should work.

If PF has a serious function, it should be not to close down uncomfortable discussions but instead to expose what faulty thinking looks like.

I have actually been to a lecture by Davis, by the way, and I find his ideas on evolution and cancer research to be really compelling. His suggestions about tracing this works similarly to his ideas of Mars, of going back to a time when it may have been habitable and how this could indeed initiate the biosignatures now on Earth. — TimeLine

Davies is one of my favourite scientists. He is more prepared than most to speculate wildly because that speculation could bring great rewards.

And unlike Crick, his speculation is careful. It always has a good metaphysical grounding.

It is also not without controversy. — TimeLine

How could any new and good idea be anything else than controversial? I don't get why you seem to think that a lack of controversy is a plus. If you aren't challenging accepted paradigms, then what is the point?

The trick is to be able to tell the difference between well-motivated challenges and charlatanism. But if you aren't living on the edge of controversy, you just ain't living.

Perhaps the prime moderating rule here should be "this isn't sufficiently controversial". :)

The question of “why anything?” seems deeper.

It is not mainstream science. — TimeLine

You appear to be confusing mainstream research with mainstream belief. If you check, you will find there are journals of astrobiology and centres of astrobiology these days.

A good example of credible research is https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0403049.pdf

Now cynics like me would also be quick to point out the self-interest NASA has in generating public hype about the value of a manned Mars mission. Why wouldn’t it seed curiosity by supporting panspermia research?

However as a general issue of policing debates here, this site ought to be enforcing standards of critical thinking, not trying to enforce some mainstream belief system. It is how folk handle what seem to be extraordinary claims that matters. And going and checking the facts - is panspermia a mainstream research topic? - would be an example of critical thinking in action.

From the fact that I deliberately posted a sceptical response you ought to be able to deduce where my own sympathies lie.

But it remains the case that science treats it as a possibility even if an unlikely one. That seemed to be what you were asking for opinions on.

I’m not convinced for a minute, so kindly don’t address me as if I am saying it is something you ought to feel convinced about.

But it is published theory. Experiments have been done. The issue you raised was whether it is sufficiently within the purview of the scientific method. Clearly it bleeding well is. End of.

Oh that. Yes, it seems crackpot. But Francis Crick for one published an argument for directed panspermia - deliberate seeding by aliens - in the 1970s. Scientific experiments have been done - https://www.space.com/22875-alien-life-claim-space-microbes.html

So it is certainly within the bounds of science. It is not regarded as impossible or uninvestigatable.

So if there is a point where reality comes to an end, you want to say that it doesn’t in fact come to an end there? The end ain’t real?

Sounds legit.

Pfft. T Clark is right. SETI is accepted science. There is a ton of constraints based papers seeking to sharpen an understanding of the probabilities. A question about the risks to aliens landing here is the mirror of the one any space expedition to Mars would have to answer. You will have to be more specific to show how the discussion might be unscientific, let alone unphilosophical.

Exactly. Nothing is more minimal than zero. So zero is the asymptotic limit on somethingness.

The logic of dichotomies is apophatic. We are talking about reality - definite somethingness. The limit on reality is then where things stop being real. And if limits didn’t come in matched pairs, there would be nothing in-between to be real either.

Your approach demands that limits are what exist. And singularly. That’s obviously crazy.

Would it have some sort of genetic coding that is recognizable? — T Clark

There are those like Nick Lane who make a good case that the basic metabolic options for creating life are so limited that it is much more likely that all life would have quite a lot in common in terms of the basic respiratory chain machinery. That counts as a surprising recent twist in theoretical biology.

But then while it might be that protein structures formed from amino acid sequences is somehow evolutionary optimal, would the DNA coding machinery have to look so much the same? Arguably not if all the code has to do is represent the instruction to go grab some particular amino acid.

So logically, the metabolic similarity might be surprisingly more close than expected, while the genetic coding mechanism would almost surely be a completely different kind of language as the meaning of a sign is essentially arbitrary.

Such speculative claims that cannot be verified by the scientific method — TimeLine

Which speculative claims exactly? And how is science not able to constrain the speculation involved?

Then you described "reciprocal limits" in a way in which they clearly were not mutually exclusive. — Metaphysician Undercover

What could be more minimal than zero?

We were discussing dichotomies, not reciprocal limits. And your attempt to turn dichotomies into reciprocal limits is misguided. . — Metaphysician Undercover

Dichotomies are reciprocal limits on possibility regardless of whatever you might pretend to be discussing.

Right, so rest and motion are clearly not mutually exclusive when defined in this way. — Metaphysician Undercover

They are mutually excluding.

So I’m taking an active dynamical or process view of ontology, while you want to believe in some theistic eternality where existence is some god-given brute fact. Where you think in terms of nouns, I am thinking in terms of verbs.

Yes, so it appears like you do not know what "mutually exclusive" means. How are rest and motion mutually exclusive when you define rest as a minimal degree of motion? . — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmm. Will you ever master this tricky notion of reciprocal limits I wonder?

Rest would be minimal motion, and motion would be minimal rest.

It is evident that some things remain the same, and we do not have to wait until the end of time to observe this. — Metaphysician Undercover

Given that the Universe is now scrapping along at less than 3 degrees above absolute zero, you are observing Being towards the end of time.

I accept dualism as the only coherent understanding of reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Oh well, with dualism at least you are halfway there. :)