But I think the 'self-organising relations' idea is not from Peirce, but from 20th century organic chemistry - Prigogine, Kauffmann, and the like. — Wayfarer

You might be surprised. Peirce was Harvard's top of the class for his first degree in chemistry. He was up with the thermodynamics of his time.

So yes, self-organisation has only become real maths since computers showed up to make the calculations tractable, reveal that complex natural patterns really do emerge from simple rules or constraints. But Peirce was already talking about the mysterious self-organising properties of protoplasm. He was looking for a proper account of nature's "vitality". He already could see that Darwinian natural selection could only explain the removal of variety, not its creation. He was already a believer in tychism or productive spontaneity.

By the way, I don't know if you noticed but Kauffman was one of the authors on the QM paper I mentioned earlier. — Wayfarer

Sure, I too am arguing the point that the potential is real. That's Peirce's Firstness or Anaximander's Apeiron.

But the trick is to get the ontic structure right. You can't just have a good old simple duality like the potential and the actual. You need a Peircean triad, or hierarchical relation, where actuality is the hylomorphic meat in the sandwich. It emerges due to the interaction of the potential with the necessary. Or the interaction of material possibility and formal constraints, in other words.

He rejected Cartesian dualism, to be sure, but I don't think it's equally obvious that he rejected idealist metaphysics tout courte. — Wayfarer

In the end, if he was a genuine god-botherer, it doesn't make any difference to the ontic structure that is his legacy. But even the most theistic reading of his writings won't find a traditional theist.

You may get that impression because Peirce clearly puts the ideal at the top of the hierarchy. Physical law is "a habit of interpretance". It is interpretation all the way down as nature does not have atomistically material underpinnings. Drill down and you only get quantum vagueness.

So if anything creates reality, it is some kind of "mind" or interpretive process.

You can see that as affirmation of a theistic worldview if you like, or even another way of talking about Plato's realm of form. But really, it is incredibly more radical than that.

My only real point of divergence with you, is that you seem to think the whole process is fundamentally physical, still, whereas I think in the overall scheme of things, matter is not causative - in other words, it can't be truly 'self-organising'. — Wayfarer

But we agree that the material "stuff" drops right out of things. So this is a physicalism in which we see only constraints all the way down. The material bit is just a vague potential that gets shaped or excited in some direction.

So yes, I am fundamentally physicalist in thinking that the connection between formal and material cause must be there. These are the two halves of the equation. We can't just turn one or other side into some monistic ground like realism and idealism want to do.

But that is about as far as my "materialism" goes. I mean I'm even rejecting any notion of "mind" or "divine" which just presumes them to be "other kinds of stuff".

A bit off topic, but I've always noted that the orientation of the three spatial axes (X, Y, and Z) is arbitrary. If there is an actual x axis, which way is it? But if the universe is a 3-torus, all three axes have a preferred orientation, and this defines a preferred frame as well, even if not an inertial one. If the spatial axes are fixed, the temporal one, orthogonal to the others, is fixed as well.
This is only a minor violation of the principle of relativity, but it galls me enough to discount the significant probability of such a finite topology. — noAxioms

The three axes are orthogonal. So not arbitrary but fixed by this exact relation to each other. They don't need to be fixed in terms of some larger "space" any more than the curvature of 3-sphere surface needs to "flex" or "swell" within an embedding space.

Goedel and Mach explored these issues pretty thoroughly. If the Universe was tied to three constant axes as you seem to imagine, then it could also as a whole have a rotation. And that would be a little awkward.

You seem to have a very biased picture of what MWI is. All it states is that any closed system evolves according to Schrodinger's equation. — noAxioms

I have no problem with decoherence as a formalism that describes the time evolution of the probability of sets of observables. As such, it "safely" sidesteps pretty much everything of ontological concern.

But folk want to know if it is really "me" who gets split in a way that "I" can't notice just to make this mathematical account work. So once MWIers start saying yes, we just have to accept any old weirdness the maths implies, then the interpretation bit comes into play.

Tom/Odo is pushing the justification that "simplicity" warrants us making this further interpretive leap. I point out how there is nothing simple about it at all. The simplicity is merely a fact of quantum theory doing things like presuming the existence of time, presuming the definiteness of initiating observables, presuming some entropy-less notion of observers.

Any formalism is going to be simple if you chuck out enough reality. :)

So I am all for decoherence - QM+statistical mechanics. It is the claim that MWI is simply "the maths sans interpretation" which is the sly stunt that I'm objecting to here.

So you are fine to say the same object can have the two locations at the one time?

Cool. We're making progress.

The 100% similar obeys the principle of indifference. The weirdness of the quantum is coming into sight.

The 'triadic relation' of Peirce's semiotics is between sign, thing signified, and interpreter. I will never understand how, in the absence of mind, there can be 'an interpreter'. — Wayfarer

The point about semiosis is that Peirce worked out a fundamental notion of self-organising relations that could apply both to "the mind" and to "the world". Philosophy had become broken by a duality - realism vs idealism - and he picked it up and put it back together. He showed how the material and the immaterial could be related via the mediation of "a sign".

So it was a deflationary and universalising move. It accepted that reality is formed by becoming fundamentally divided. All our talk about the real vs the ideal, the material vs the immaterial, wasn't simply hot air.

But then Peirce was the one who made sense of it by pointing to the third thing which is the sign that mediates this epistemic cut. The end of one thing could be the beginning of the other. Where materiality left off and found its dimensional limit - the zero entropic dimensions of "a mark" - then that is exactly where immateriality could pick up and get started on its interpretive or modelling game.

So it is like origami perhaps - the point at which twists or folds serve to translate from one realm to the other. A flat piece of paper at some point becomes a swan or fox.

Now you can keep insisting that interpretance = mind. But surely Peirce would have called interpretance the interpreter if he meant to reify the semiotic process in that fashion. Remember, he was trying to fix the subject~object dualism of philosophy with his holistic triadism, not simply perpetuate it in some more obscure and complex way.

Peirce was generalising the notion of interpretance to the point where really you could see how if could be a material or physical process. You could see that even the Comos was a pan-semiotic development.

So it would be ironic if you claim to be arguing for the validity of generalisations - agreeing they are real - and yet denying Peirce's rather absolute metaphysical generalisation of whatever people might mean by "mind"

Which is good, because contemporary physics holds that the universe is finite. — fishfry

The contemporary view would seem to be more subtle than simply that the Comos is "finitely infinite" like the surface of a sphere.

The spacetime sphere is also a material thing. It both expands and cools in reciprocal measure. So in some sense, the surface is thinning as fast as it is growing. The maths has to represent that fact. And so the area of the sphere is now measured entropically in terms of an event horizon with some ultimate number of bits.

Making it really tricky, to actually arrive at some future finite Heat Death or entropy limit requires the further thing of a cosmological constant or dark energy. The geometry of spacetime can't be either perfectly flat and infinite, nor finite by being a closed hypersphere, but must in fact be made finite by being faintly hyperbolic and open in its curvature.

So contemporary physics knows from observation - unless dark energy can be explained away as observational artefact - that the finitude is looking secondary to an infinitude. Something is faintly accelerating the Universe so that it is generally flexed hyperbolically - it bends away from flat infinity in the other direction. And that is what is actually necessary to fix a future date on when the material contents of an expanding/cooling surface will come to a halt at a fixed temperature.

So finitude is the long-term fate. But for reasons still left open until we can account for the "force" creating the faintly open hyperbolic curvature.

This all has relevance to MWI multiverse hype. The big problem - if you believe in the reality of principles like the conservation of energy, or causal closure, at all - is that MWI violates energy conservation in the most fundamental fashion. That is at the guts of an instinctive objection.

Now if you are not used to taking the materiality of the Universe seriously, then perhaps it is easy just to imagine the free creation of endless worlds, or endless world branches.

But contemporary physics is pretty concerned with an entropic view of reality. Even quantum theory has been "fixed" by welding on statistical mechanics to give us the new and improved decoherence formalism.

The irony is that MWIers latched onto that to peddle their "free lunch" multiverse. But fads come and go. Decoherence is a way to put a thermally coherent limit on a spacetime volume. It brings in the conserving machinery of event horizons.

MWIers still use sleight of tongue to claim infinite branching within the one collective "space". The cost of producing an unlimited number of observers with an unlimited number of points of view is not yet counted by even the expanded quantum formalism, so they can take refuge in that fact.

The maths still only puts numbers on the observables. There is no conservation rule limiting the multiplicity of individual observer. I can be split across as many alternative worlds as you think might be required at "no cost". And so a certain brand of metaphysical nonsense can be promoted as "quantum mechanics with nothing added".

Anyway, the general point is that we do tend to produce simple mathematical frameworks that are open, unbounded and therefore point towards infinity. Then physics comes along and starts to discover the constraints that in fact bound reality and give if some concrete, rather classical-looking, finitude.

The tension between the maths and the physics boils down to issue of how to handle materiality now. Maths is traditionally a view that is spatial. It simplifies by getting rid of time and change and energy within its conceptual metaphysics. But now time and change and energy need to be re-introduced to the mathematical modelling at a fundamental sort of level. They have to indeed emerge from mathematical considerations, not just get tacked on.

Hence string theory, loop quantum gravity, thermal time, anti-de sitter spaces, decoherent QM, holography and other important research projects in contemporary physics.

Multiverse speculation is just the modern equivalent of time travel or "consciousness" based interpretations of QM. A populist sideshow. Metaphysics-lite for the entertainment of the masses.

Conversely, two different beings can be the same at different points in time. For example, a man and his clone are two different beings that are identical. We wouldn't say that they are one and the same person simply because they are identical. — Magnus Anderson

So we can say that the same thing can exist at two different moments in time, but not that the same thing can be in two different locations at once.

That is, where change is the rule - as in time - you find instead the counterfactual of persistence. And where continuity is the rule - as in spatial locations - you find instead the counterfactual of the discontinuous.

Hmm. See where your own arguments are leading you yet? Hint: metaphysics is always about the dialectics of limits. :)

If the fact of generalization itself constituted a knock-down argument that it, and hence the mind that generalizes, must be "immaterial" (even assuming that we knew what that even meant) then everyone who thought about it would be convinced by it and no one would be able to deny it. — Janus

Yep. This is the interesting point. But then that is why Wayfarer would at least be right about the relevance of the information theoretic turn in fundamental scientific ontology. An appropriate form of immateriality is being introduced in the notion of information.

Science used to deal in the "laws of nature". Reality was some mass of atomic particulars. And yet for some reason, that material state of affairs was regulated by universal laws. It was all rather spooky.

But now science is shifting to a more clearly constraints-based view of reality. Laws are emergent from states of information. We have new principles like holography and entropy driving the show. The regulation of nature is now something that arises immanently rather than being imposed transcendently. Newton required a law-giving God to explain the fact of their being universal physical rules. Now we can see how nature's law's might just develop, emerge, evolve.

So this is a big metaphysical shift. But what is really going on?

As I said, information represents the immaterial aspect of reality that always seems philosophically necessary. Matter alone can't cut it. We've known that since Plato hammered it home.

But then neither are mind, or divine, much good as the other half of reality - the bit that does the constraining, or the forming and purposing. The mind is patently complex, not fundamentally simple. It claims to be free and open, not constrained and closed. It is all about a particular lived point of view and not universalised "view from nowhere".

So our concept of mind as the immaterial half of the ontic equation just offers all the wrong properties. The divine is just the mind taken to another level - minding that is even more potentially capricious, unrestrained, the author of material and efficient causes as well as formal and final cause. Talk of God just collapses all the useful distinctions we were trying to build up and so winds up explaining nothing.

Science - as the only place real metaphysics continues to get done - accepted that the maths of form does represent the immaterial part of the reality equation. This was the revolution wrought by Galileo, Keppler, and especially Newton.

It started out as a mechanical notion of form - the computation of the mechanics of moving bodies and rippling waves. Then moved on to become focused on the maths of symmetries and symmetry-breakings. Also probability theory and statistical mechanics became central as descriptions of emergent patterns and the self-organisation of constraints. And of course, conceptions of space and time were expanded to include geometries that were non-Euclidian, conceptions of mechanics were expanded to include behaviours that were non-linear or feedback.

So science was on a journey. It recognised that its metaphysics needed an immaterial aspect to balance the material one. It started out with mathematical forms that were transcendent - Newton style laws, Newton style dimensions - and has steadily worked towards a picture of reality where the maths is describing immanent self-organisation. The laws and dimensionality simply started to appear as regularities - self-organising attractors that governed dynamics quite directly.

It became possible to see how matter could form rules to shape its own behaviour - even perhaps form the forms that actually produced "matter" in the first place. Particles became individuated events, localised excitations, persistent resonances.

Then along comes information theory as the latest improvement on this trip from transcendent cause to immanent self-organisation. Reality still needs its immaterial aspect to explain its material aspect. But now science has a new maths that is suitable for describing and measuring reality in terms of actual "atoms of form".

The materiality of the world is reduced to pretty much a nothing - just the vague hint of an action with a direction, a bare degree of freedom. And at that point where reality approaches its limit of dematerialised nothingness, it can become semiotically united with an immaterial notion of mathematical form coming the other way. The maths proving itself useful for describing reality was becoming steadily less immaterial and transcendent, or "spooky action at a distance". It was becoming steadily more material and immanent in that it talked about symmetry breakings and statistically probable approaches to limits.

Now with information theory, you have the exact point (hopefully) where each of these realms - the dematerialising materiality and the steadily materialising formality - finally converge and become one. They translate. Pan-semiosis is achieved as the material description and the immaterial description are two ways of saying the same thing. The measure of one is the same unit for measuring the other. We can go back and forth across an epistemic cut that formally relates the two realms or aspects of being.

This is a tremendous and historical achievement in metaphysics. It is stupendous that it is happening right now in our own lifetimes.

Science of course is still going off in all directions in the scramble to finalise the details of a final theory of reality. But at the level of metaphysics, we can sit back and be entertained by the spectacular outlines of an understanding that is now coming in to dock.

Sameness isn't something that can only be approached. It is something that is regularly attained. — Magnus Anderson

Heh, heh. Almost surely!

Do you have any literature for this claim? — JupiterJess

Thanks. One slightly mad yet really excellent collection of phenomenological descriptions of dreaming is Andreas Mavromatis's Hypnagogia.

But try it yourself. Next time you catch a dream, ask yourself if anything about each "frame" was in fact moving.

There is always a sense of moving, panning or zooming. But it is like the kind of giddy feeling we get when getting off a roundabout and the world still swirls as an after-effect.

If I'm not mistaken, human nature according to the Eastern social construct doesn't contain a "beast within." Rather, the true nature of sentient beings is that of emptiness, according to Eastern philosophy, and it is social constructs like the concept of self that obscure this nature. — praxis

Yeah, you're right that the beast within is the Western view. If we are talking Buddhism in particular, that agrees with social constructionism in that it teaches that the self is an over-concrete illusion we hang on to.

So that part of the psychology I agree with. But where I disagree is then treating the social ground of this selfhood as also an illusion to be dissolved away.

My argument is that society and self form a complementary interaction. Each is busy producing the other. And together they make something more complexly developed.

It is natural and right that human existence is a balance of competitive and co-operative actions. There is nothing wrong about becoming individuated as a striving self, so long as there is then also the balance of the socially co-operative self. Whereas the Buddhist ambition would seem to be to dissolve both aspects of being human back into detached nothingness.

So for me, sentience is the delicate and complex balance - mastery over instability. Whereas the Buddhist view is that things that arise and become complexly individuated should return back to the undivided vagueness from whence they came.

Transcendence, which may or may not be achieved via a religious practice, isn't about transcending biology. It's about transcending the conceptual construct of self. — praxis

Well the question would seem to be what functional role does some set of cultural beliefs play in the flourishing of that society?

The Western model of mind has evolved to produce people with a striving and competitive mindset. To be individuated is the highest state of development.

But Eastern cultures were appropriate for their time and place. A stoic collectivism gives a different social dynamic. It puts the emphasis on the compassion and co-operation.

Either way, what matters is putting human biology in its place and allowing a rationalising culture to be in control of things. Culture comes to encode the behaviour that works. And culture produces a model of the ideal self as the way to shape up those habits in an individual. We learn to be self-regulating according to a general social script.

Defined in this way, you would be right to say that 100% similar = the same. — Magnus Anderson

Great. Glad you agree.

Still, it makes no sense to say that "the same" is the idealized limit to "the similar". The concept of limit, as defined in mathematical analysis, refers to a value that is approached but never reached. Sameness isn't something that is only approached. — Magnus Anderson

I dunno. Why not check out actual set theory concepts like measure theory, almost surely and negligible sets. You might find out that this is in fact exactly how it works.

Does a 100% similar = the same? And if not, how not?

We are talking about a similarity with a lack of any actual difference. So don't just keep asserting that there remains some difference. You can't wriggle out of it that way.

What about Plato's charioteer? Freud's romantic tripartite division of the soul has ancient roots.

No, A dichotomy is a separation between two things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Bollocks. In metaphysics, the logic of a dichotomy is used to define the complementary limits of any thing-ness or Being.

Anyway, it's likely the word can be used in different ways, but this is all irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It is completely relevant to the matter in hand.

As I said, what is relevant is that "same" expresses an exclusion of difference while "similar" expresses necessarily, difference. They are categorically different and cannot be "complementary limits" of the same thing, that would be contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Keep twisting but you won't wriggle off the hook.

Is "100% similar" saying exactly the same as "the same" or not? Likewise is 0% similar saying just the same as "absolutely different" or not?

You know that they do mean the same yet continue to obfuscate.

It is impossible that similarity lacks difference, by way of contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well now you are just arguing my point about "the same" being an ideal limit. It doesn't exist. It is just the asymptotic limit on the complementary idea of "the different".

Simply put, if I know something as contradictory I will not accept it. — Metaphysician Undercover

So in your extensive readings of Aristotle, you simply ignored his notion of contrariety?

This understanding is explicit in Indian traditions as they have a long history of renunciation. Those who dwell 'in the forest' are understood to be outside social structures; this is what 'the forest' represents in that cultural context. — Wayfarer

Yep. But I question the view by which being apart from society is in any way an improvement on the human condition.

If your culture is somehow bad or toxic, then you might want to escape its constraints. But you would still need some new culture within which to flourish.

This is why, for instance, there are teachings in Buddhist meditation on 'bare awareness', through which the student is trained to simply notice the habitual reactions and thought-formations that arise more or less automatically in the mind. That act of noticing is 'seeing how things truly are', which is the basic practice of liberating insight, insofar as to directly how reactive emotions occur is to lessen their hold. — Wayfarer

Again, I don't see this as a stepping up to anything, more a regression ... unless it is the unlearning of habits that allows for the learning of some new and more pro-social set of habits.

So as a social practice, I can see it may have merits. But as a theory of mind, it is quite wrong.

But the point I want to make is that we're not socially conditioned all the way down; we're the artefacts of something more than simply human culture. — Wayfarer

Alternatively, human nature is fundamentally a social construct and so humanity is quite concerned with "taming the beast within". It wants to put a distance between its cultural self and its biological roots.

So philosophy - east or west - makes sense in this context. It is the next step in breeding a detachment from "the beast within". It makes us more social in being more rational and less emotionally driven.

Letting go of "yourself" and "the world" is only a cultural injunction to transcend whatever biology that society wishes didn't dominate your thinking so much. And once you have been trained to let go like that, you can start to fully participate in a calm, rational, linguistic culture where all actions become pro-socially reasonable.

So it is just another cultural game - and one actually designed to strengthen culture's hold on your thought patterns.

So, I've talked about consciousness and awareness. Is introspection something different? — T Clark

Well, I would describe it as the difference between biological consciousness and culturally produced self-consciousness.

So animals are certainly aware of the world in a direct or "extrospective" fashion. They are wordlessly plugged into the here and now in terms of how they are feeling, thinking and reacting.

Then humans have a speech-structured mind. Language is a machinery that allows us to step back and comment on the further fact that we are "selves" doing all these things. Language creates a distance from just the doing and so makes the doing reportable, controllable, memorable, interpretable.

The real mystery of consciousness is the biological one - why brain activity would feel like something. Then self-consciousness is just a linguistic trick. Language allows us to develop the habit of turning our attention inwards on the flow of action, seeing it all as something happening to a self. Then responding to that meta-view in terms of thoughts, feelings and actions.

Isn't the essence of self-awareness an ability to see things we have not been taught to see? Maybe I don't mean "self-awareness." Maybe I mean "enlightenment." Otherwise, how do we get beyond our personal and cultural illusions? — T Clark

Talk about enlightenment or higher states or whatever would be more cultural framing. Every religion - as a cultural practice - has to invent a suitable view of what it might mean to have a certain kind of mind. And then that is what we would learn in that culture. It would become the social script to which we would try to live up to.

So if you are Catholic, you will look inside and see your beastly self in conflict with your purer spirit. You will be trying hard to feel guilt at the right things. You will be looking for evidence of sinful desires. Your introspecting may become very focused on a particular social role it has to play.

And just the same if you are brought up in a completely different culture - like say Buddhism - where a different model of your internal workings will become the lens through which you see yourself.

And yet again if you are a modern neoliberal aetheist, or a wet PoMO liberal.

All cultures promote some model of how your mind ought to be inside. You learn those concepts and apply them in a way to gain some proper control over this introspecting "self".

I'm standing in a dark room. In front of me, maybe on a stage, is a cloud that fills the whole front of the room. — T Clark

Yeah, that does sound interestingly different from me. There is the same sense of a peripheral feel. But I guess I conceptualise it more in terms of the neuroscientific models I know. So I am quite aware of switching between a focused goal-pursuing left brain attentional state and an open vigilant right brain one. There is a different feeling when you are still searching for the connecting elements versus when you are working through the details of a path that you already expect to fit together.

So maybe you are talking about the same general thing, but conceptualising it in metaphors, like a room with a glowing cloud before you. My conceptualising doesn't have that habit of imagery, but I do conceptualise it in terms of a familiar brain process.

She told me she had just realized she is one of those people who have no mind's eye. It is very difficult for her to see images of even things and people she knows very well. — T Clark

Yep. It seems like a Bell curve distribution. So 10% of people are highly visual, 10% are surprisingly lacking in such imagery.

Two points. The difference is easy to explain as it relates to how far down the visual hierarchy you can push an idea so that it becomes fleshed out in concrete detail. The high level impression of a giraffe would be highly abstract - hazy. But if we focus for half a second, we can generate some particular giraffe experience that is "painted" across the primary visual cortex. Although people vary in how easy they can do that.

Then also, the visual pathways are strongly divided into separate object recognition and spatial relations pathways. So you can be highly visual in terms of one and not the other. One path would generate the concrete pictures of actual scenes. The other would generate a "concrete" sense of some set of objectless spatial relations or transformations. So if you are good as an engineer, its important to flip shapes around in your mind and really feel how the spaces fit together, or put different forces on each other.

Well, it is odd. Actually, it's terrible, horrifying. Of course there were feelings, I was just not aware of them. Did you ever go to the bathroom in a public toilet and have trouble peeing because others were around? Imagine if you felt that same panic every time you were with other people and might have to provide an appropriate emotional response. — T Clark

So it sounds like you just didn't have the "right" training in how to conceptualise that part of your experience.

If you are good at compartmentalising your thoughts - another attentional skill - then it is easy to make that kind of disconnect a habit.

One of the things you have to teach young kids is to recognise their emotions. They are quite confused until they have learnt some concepts that explain their rapidly changing shifts in state. After that, they can start to regulate and feel in more socially accepted ways.

If they see someone get hurt, what should the feel? Physiologically they may feel a natural aversion, an anxiety, an urge to move away or even laugh. We want to teach them instead to feel a suitable empathy. Their fluttering nerves and shock can be reframed as being natural to wanting to help rather than being natural to wanting to flee.

Arousal is just arousal. Then we learn to frame it in a socially correct fashion.

I come back to what I asked before - isn't it possible, even if only for Buddha, to go beyond that cultural conceptual structure. — T Clark

Well my answer is only going to be that Buddhism is just another form of social mind-control. It is a model of how to be a self that is promoted within a certain culture as it is pro-social for that culture. It serves that society's organisational interests.

But then I'm also arguing that we are only ever creatures of our cultures. So it is not a bad thing in itself that we are culturally programmed to have a particular view of our "selves".

And some cultures of "self" may be better than others in long-run evolutionary terms.

So there is no going beyond some kind of conceptual structure. There isn't any truth to be found in being a human that isn't somehow a reflection of a culture.

Yet we certainly these days can make some choices about the cultural framings we allow ourselves to be most influenced by.

One excludes difference while the other includes difference, so the two are logically dichotomous. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you are presuming that dichotomies are dualities and not in fact dichotomies? I see where you are going wrong.

Dichotomies describe complementary limits on being. Thus they talk about the being that lies in-between two opposing limits of the possible.

You are then treating the limits on the possible as the actuality which has the being. Rookie error.

I really do not know what you mean by "100% similar". Similar implies that there is difference, and same dictates that there is no difference. Therefore whatever you mean by 100% similar, it cannot mean "the same", without contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. That is a question you will really want to avoid having to answer.

You are trying to squirrel out of it by saying similar implies the existence of some difference. Well of course. There's your dichotomy. The similar is that which is the most lacking in any difference. It is formally reciprocal or inverse to difference in being as far from that "othering" limit to itself. It is the least difference you can have - which means accepting difference as the something that sameness is different too.

So back to the 100% similar. Why are you so reluctant to admit that this is no different than any claim about "the same". A complete lack of difference could only be a complete presence of the same.

But you must avoid admitting this otherwise your sophic house of cards collapses.

You are obfuscating the meaning of "the same" appealing to "similar" as if it were "the same", in order to put forth an unsound argument as if it were sound. That's why I accused you of sophistry. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where is the difficulty in recognising that "the same" is the idealised limit to "the similar"? Why are you obfuscating the matter with your unsound sophistry?

If things are 100% similar, are they the same? And if things are 99% similar, are they nearly the same?

You seem to be striving after a distinction in language that isn't properly there.

For the purpose of this discussion, by consciousness I mean the capacity for putting experiences into words. Awareness, on the other hand, is pre-verbal. — T Clark

Interesting OP. Speaking from psychological science, what you are noting - in my view - is that the ability to introspect on "the contents of the mind" is a learnt and linguistically-structured skill.

So first up, introspection is not some hardwired biological brain capacity - intrinsic to "being conscious". It is very much a learnt skill that we pick up as part of our cultural upbringing and made possible because self-directed speech does allow us to focus our attention and create a narrative story of "what is going on inside".

So it is therefore quite easy to miss stuff in our own heads if we haven't formed the right conceptual structure to notice it. We can be like infants who still find the world a buzzing confusion, or remote tribesmen transported to a big city, who don't quite yet have the eyes to make sense of what they see (any more than a big city person would be able to make proper coherent sense of a tropical forest if dropped straight into it).

We have to learn what to expect when we introspect to actually even begin to "see it". This could easily be something we haven't learnt to do even as teenagers. And then our ideas about what we should find inside are so culturally dependent that we are only going to see what our cultures kind of teach us to see.

Take how dreams were widely thought to happen only in black and white back in the 1950s. Seems ridiculous that this was an academic belief.

Yet I thought that dreams were only visual, so was surprised that once I started asking the question and paying attention, I found there were smells and tastes as well.

Likewise, I believe that there was of course motion in dream images. Yet on closer examination, I realised that there is only a swirling sense of flow or zoom. The image itself was a static single frame with a sense of motion added.

That made scientific sense when I thought about it. Motion and shape are processed separately in the visual cortex. But maybe without this other kind of cultural explanation, I might not have believed the evidence of my own eyes. I might have still reported actual moving imagery as my introspective state.

Generally, my introspective understanding of my own thinking and experiencing processes utterly changed after a few years of studying the neurology of the phenomenology. Once I had learnt the correct constructs, I could know what to expect to see and so actually start to see it accurately. It became a habit to not just think thoughts, but to be also able to catch how a pattern of thought came together.

I can see the universe – everything, stars and electrons, love, god, macaroni and cheese, my brothers - as a cloud. When I am putting ideas together to describe what I know or make an argument, I am very aware that I am putting together a story and I see a curve, a narrative arc, that shows the sequence of facts, ideas, and conclusions I am using to make my case. — T Clark

I was puzzled by this. When you say you see a cloud, do you mean visually see a jostle of images or do you mean something more kinesthetic and visuospatial, like having a sense of all these things "more or less within reach"? So they swim as possibilities on the periphery and can be brought sharply into view as required.

You might indeed be much more concretely visual than me. People do vary.

When I was a teenager, I was almost completely unaware of what I felt emotionally. Worse, it didn’t seem like I felt anything. I felt inauthentic in a fundamental way. Numb. Frozen. — T Clark

Again, this sounds odd the way you describe it. It is hard to imagine not feeling things, even if the feelings are confused, inchoate, hard to pin down.

But neuroscience says it is quite possible as reportable emotion does depend on the strength of linkages between the frontal cortex and the limbic emotion centres. There could be biological reasons for a lack of access.

On the other hand, again there is a learning issue. Positive psychology does try to train people to notice the fine-grain detail of what they feel. It is a skill to be learnt, and one that thus involves the learning of a conceptual framing. People might not realise when they feel anxious or tense. Once they start looking, they can see how their body is responding and separate their feelings in that fashion.

So the general message is that all introspection is a learnt art. We have to have the concepts which tell us what to expect before it becomes easy and habitual to see our own internal world in a stably constructed way.

The flip side of that is that we mostly only get to learn the framing of our interior world that comes from our cultural backdrop. Our families and childhood relations can be as distorting as enlightening. Society teaches us the habits that best suit it.

We can broaden our view of what should be going on through art and literature. Books and films paint a picture of what "being a person" ought to be like. But even this is going to be more cultural than accurate.

Then we can start to introspect through the eyes of scientific knowledge. This should be the truest picture. However even psychological science is heavily socially influenced. It perpetuates many of the traditional cultural stereotypes itself. Phenomenology is rather fringe to its concerns. So there are only a few talented folk - like Oliver Sacks - who really get into it.

Another problem for psychological science is that we are all in fact neurologically varied. So there isn't in fact a one size fits all account.

For instance, both my daughters have synesthesia to different degrees. Words and numbers provoke sensations of colour. Neither properly realised it until we happened to be talking about it one evening when they were teenagers.

It is the kind of neuro distinction that society has no use for and so there is no cultural tip-off that warns people it might be a possibility. Whereas kids get tested for colour blindness.

Another interesting one is dyscalculia - a basic problem imagining the kind of visuospatial relations needed to be good with handling numbers or telling the time.

Society took a while to diagnose dyslexia as a widespread "problem". It came to the fore as a literate workforce became a universal educational need. Dyscalculia only started to get the same recognition in the 1990s. Until then, it was OK to just be a lazy maths hater. It was natural and socially quite normal to be bad at sums.

So society really does shape what we believe about what we should find "inside". It is the prime source of any conceptual structure. And it approaches introspection in its own often quite self-interested way.

No. I said the opposite. I said that sets A = {1, 2, 3} and B = {4, 5, 6} do not have "belongs to some other set" in common. Rather, it is your sets, let us call them sets X = {1, 2, 3, belongs to some other set} and Y = {1, 2, 3, belongs to some other set}, that have this element in common — Magnus Anderson

Hilarious. If you are going to invoke set theory formalism, then you have to stick to its rules, not just make up any old shit.

Your claim is that if we are not aware of some portion of reality that whatever portion of reality we are aware of is not reality itself. That's nonsense. — Magnus Anderson

If that was anything like what I said, I agree it would be nonsense.

You are trying to oversimplify this process by reducing it to "it's all about what works". — Magnus Anderson

So you describe the naive realist position and then accuse me of oversimplifying.

Sounds legit. :)

The Level III Multiverse (Tegmark) gets a lot of stick, despite the fact that it adds zero complexity to our conception of Reality according to known physics. — tom

It seems a stretch to say the many worlds interpretation doesn't add an unnecessary amount of complication to our metaphysics.

I still prefer to hope for a physics that fixes the MWI's unbounded world-line branching by incorporating the actuality of a generalised wavefunction collapse.

But with decoherence maths - QM+statistical mechanics - we get a workable collapse anyway. So there's no burning need to embrace the extravagant ontology of MWI. Decoherence delivers a quasi-collapse that makes the theory fit with the world we observe quite adequately while a "proper" theory is still under development.

So while you claim that MWI adds zero complexity to the maths, you have to admit that the same equations produce too many answers. It is only natural to expect the maths therefore misses some constraint on its unbound fecundity. And now just such a thermodynamic limit has been tacked on with decoherence.

So MWI has become more realistic, more in accord with the world as we know it classically. Yet the very fact that QM+limits is an improvement should be evidence that multiverse thinking was always wrong-headed.

MWI has already begun the job of denying itself, even though many people think it is the "decoherence interpretation". We need something extra by way of a world-constraining mechanism so as to actually reduce the complexity of the QM maths.

What exactly is self-organizing? — Harry Hindu

Dissipative structure. So mountains, tornadoes and tomatoes are all natural in that they are expressions of the structure that arises to dissipate entropy gradients. That is what nature has in common. It rearranges itself into the forms that best serve entropy production.

Human beings and other organisms don't self-organize. If they did, then they could exist in any environment, but they don't. — Harry Hindu

Nature is a hierarchy of entropy production. So life and mind are just the complex expression of a general principle. The environment is already entropifying with a physical simplicity. Life and mind can then build on that. That is why we would regard ourselves as part of nature. Our existence serves the second law of thermodynamics.

What about the stars, rocks, water, air? Do any of those things self-organize? Are they not natural? What about fire? — Harry Hindu

Exactly. They are dissipative structures. So they are natural. As processes, they are all expressions of the one common imperative. Entropification is the essence of what it is to be natural.

I really can't see your distinction between cars that rust and cars that don't be natural vs. artificial. Plastic may not have been around prior to humans but neither was iron around prior to stars creating it in their centers and exploding spilling out their contents to the universe. — Harry Hindu

Iron was produced by super-novas as an entropic outcome. Oxidation of iron is an energetically-favoured dissipative process. So all natural.

But humans building cars are trying to halt entropification as much as practical. We want our machines to last - to not be subject to self-organised erosion.

Plastic is an artificial material. Well, so is sheet iron protected by enamel. But plastic is more artificial in this context as it is more enduring, less prone to natural decay processes. It holds whatever form its human designers had in mind rather better.

Again, I think that the word, "artificial" is antiquated as it stems from our old knowledge that we are specially made and separate from nature. — Harry Hindu

As Wayfarer says, just check the dictionary. It means something humans make as opposed to something humans might find. It is a form that is mechanically constructed rather than a form that organically grows.

The old religions were animistic - everything, even the trees and the wind - were alive and mindful. If it moved or made a noise, it had an inner spirit. So there was no real separation from nature at all.

Then the theistic religions arose. Man became separate from nature. But now because man was touched by the divine. He had a soul. Or whatever.

I agree true AI would look to blur the lines. But consider that we would still be likely talking of hardware that is manufactured rather than grown. It wouldn’t be self organising development like the growth of a body. It would be some kind of factory assembly.

So we are talking about a mentality that might be natural in being self organised via a purposeful interaction with a world, yet running on a machinery that is not natural.

An interesting hybrid situation. Yet I’m not advocating for a hard line between what is natural and what is artificial. Although also, I doubt that true AI is going to be achieved in a hurry.

That's not true. I do not concede that sets A = {1, 2, 3} and B = {4, 5, 6} have an element in common. — Magnus Anderson

No. You concede that what the sets have in common is the claim of being elements of the set of all sets that have no elements in common.

So what you concede is the hierarchy of constraints that is the basis of your argument. All elements are really just sets of elements. That is the logical structure to which you appeal.

And that's fine. I'm all for ontic strength structuralism.

But there is then your implied promise of being able to cash out the "elemental" at some ground zero level. And that becomes logical atomism. We already know that to be a busted flush.

The elements of reality have to be cashed out by acts of measurement. If you are really "Heisenbergian" as you briefly claimed, you would get this. The elements of reality boil down to the questions we seem to be able to ask of nature - the ones that return some concrete sign, like a binary yes or no.

That is what the information theoretic perspective is about. Does reality return the sign of a 1 or a 0 when asked some particular question.

And as I say, acts of measurement are themselves informal, not part of the logical structure used to generate good questions.

It might be a good question to ask if that apple in your basket is really a pear. But whether we decide on closer examination to read the reality as "pear" or "apple" remains an epistemic choice.

In the end, we can only satisfy ourselves as to what is the proper symbol - a 1 or 0 - to the degree we choose some end-point to inquiry. To make that translation of reality into information, we have to apply the principle of indifference as a matter of art. It comes down to a judgement that works, not a judgement that is based on some objective "fact of the matter".

Noone cares whether the fruit is ripe or unripe. In fact, noone cares whether what appears to be a fruit is a real fruit or just a toy that looks like a fruit. That's your problem. — Magnus Anderson

You keep speaking for this mysterious "no-one". But clearly you have a very big problem if you want to claim that these are differences that make no difference.

Not least of all because you immediately contradicted your whole position by admitting that differences can fail to make a difference. Ie: You already concede the principle of indifference as your basis for trying to contest it.

A curious logical move at best.

I think that obscurantism is a more fitting name for your position. — Magnus Anderson

I think you confused yourself by trying to maintain a simplicity rife with inherent contradictions.

I mean, what was with that Heisenberg claim?

What you're doing here is you are pretending you are comparing sets A and B when in reality you are comparing sets that are not A and B but that are sufficiently similar to A and B. Properly speaking, you are comparing sets {1, 2, 3, belongs to some other set} and {4, 5, 6, belongs to some other set}. These two sets, you are right, are not absolutely different. However, they are not sets A and B. They are different, albeit similar, sets. — Magnus Anderson

Great. You concede the point. We're getting somewhere.

And as you say, this applies all the way up and all the way down.

Now if we are talking about some set of elements - actual baskets of fruit - then how do we know that the apple in one is actually an "apple"? It could be a rather unripe and round pear.

We can set up logical descriptions that account for nature in terms of claimed hard distinctions - the LEM applies. Something is either the same or different in terms of a more generic classification. We can demand binary boundaries that carve nature at its joints. It all works pretty well.

But the act of measurement, the act of propositional "truth-making", is always an informal business. It is a matter of judgement where to draw the line when we come to borderline cases - like the apple that might just as well be a masquerading pear.

That is, the principle of indifference applies. The very fact we can claim to make measurements, satisfy propositions, is based on our always claiming the right to ignore any details we decide not to matter. We grant ourselves as much flexibility about what counts as we think we need.

Pragmatism rules. As it ought.

interpretation is always done by a subject. — Wayfarer

Interpretation might be always subjective or a point of view, but isn't it a reification to insist on the existence of a subject who does the interpreting? Is it wrong to say the subjective arises via the process of interpretation?

And then in accepting the primacy of "a point of view", what are we to make of the notion of a maximally generic point of view? What kind of "mindfulness" or "divinity" would be involved in the Universe having "a point of view"?

So as usual, I do seek to take the deflationary path without just simply rejecting the mind, or the divine, out of hand. However, it still is a deflationary story.

It is that faculty which attributes or discerns meaning; which means, it actually rather close to the 'active intellect' of the classical tradition of Western philosophy. — Wayfarer

But that is the complexly developed knower. That is the knower modelling a world in a fashion which in fact creates "a knower" as a transcendent self with a purpose. That is a knower able to impose his will on nature.

So it is that knower which I seek to deconstruct to metaphysical simplicity. That is the pan-semiotic project. The question becomes how is the Cosmos itself a kind of memory structure that is dissipating vagueness and becoming crisply developed due to the accumulation of a weight of constraints.

But we don't know what that 'knower' is, because it's never an object of perception, it's never a 'that' to us; trying to say what it is, is like the hand trying to grasp itself or the eye trying to see itself, which is impossible on account of the 'epistemic cut' you refer to, which is the 'gordian knot' of existence. — Wayfarer

We can't actually put our hands on this self. But it arises as that part of experience which constructs the world as its contrast. So the self is "there" when the world is "there". They both emerge sharply in experience to the degree that reality is being interpreted.

So it seems like the self should be another object of perception. And we pretty much succeed in making it feel like that. It is necessary that this is so for "us" to be aware of "the world".

But yes, in the final analysis - as we drill down to discover the primal division - we discover the self, along with "the world", slipping away. Instead of finding a fundamental duality of mind and world, we just discover a generalised vagueness. The self is revealed as just an emergent construct, along with its co-construct, our notion of "the world" as formed in a system of sharp signs.

Contemplative mysticism dissolves that knot through 'union' - in Eastern spiritual traditions, 'union' is conceived not in theistic terms of the 'unio mystica' but in (shall we say) more naturalistic terms, whereby the aspirant realises his/her own being (atma) as to be fundamentally on par with the being of the cosmos (brahman). That is the elaborated in such modern Vedanta texts as the Teachings of Ramana Maharishi. — Wayfarer

I agree that Eastern metaphysics - especially dependent co-arising - is close to what I mean by pansemiosis. But the key difference is that semiosis accounts for the ratcheting memory mechanism by which complexity does get stabilised and so doesn't simply collapse.

This is the important metaphysical advance.

So you run away from the question? You don't want to risk saying your sets are the same in this regard? You pretend instead that this would be irrelevant?

Cool. ;)

No signs without minds, — Wayfarer

You mean without interpretance and a world?

And what does interpretance boil down to? I agree that is a tricky issue. But it seems the productive question in opening up a new and interesting avenue for philosophy.

Interpretance starts with having some sort of memory, some sort of encoding machinery, some sort of epistemic cut.

Turing boiled down computation to something mathematically universal. There is hope interpretance would yield to a similar bare bones understanding.

Or have you already decided there is no interpretance without "the feeling of what it is like to be interpreting". :)

Actually I found a quotation on a reference site about ‘objective idealism’ which puts it well: — Wayfarer

Yep. Metaphysics which attempt to to make reality objectively dependent on the mind, or the divine, don't pan out. But a metaphysics that makes reality objectively dependent on the sign - the possibility of a semiotic sign relation - are a way to bridge the familiar divide.

There's no point in my attempting to address your arguments because they are based on starting assumptions I don't accept (the most glaring of which is that the axioms of your system are not assumptions at all but are somehow self-evident)... — Janus

So I said that naturalism presumes hierarchies founded in ultimate simplicity. You are free to challenge that presumption as well as its consequences for your view. But the fact that it is the generic definition of naturalism is rather a problem if you want to claim some variety of immanent explanation here.

And then likewise, I would only believe in the presumptions of naturalism to the degree that they check out. That is what seems reasonable, wouldn't you say. Or do you not even accept an evidence-backed approach to belief?

If your views boil down to your personal faith, then of course - by definition - you seek no common ground here. Or at best, you can only hope that I find that I want to believe them too because of their aesthetic appeal.

So this thread was about an information theoretic view of reality. And the key thing is that information allows us to treat all reality as a composition of "atoms of form".

That is what modern information theory is about - the surprising quantum fact that reality is atomised at base. And atomised not in terms of matter, but in terms of form.

What limits reality at the foundational level is that top-down constraint turns out to be "grainy". There is a fundamental size to differences. So that means reality is composed of the smallest possible broken symmetries, or degrees of freedom, not the smallest possible "uncuttable" fragments of matter, as conventional atomism suggested.

Materiality pretty much drops out of the picture as a result. So far as we need a theory to explain nature's variety, it is a physical fact that it is constraints all the way down. Particles emerge due to contextual causes. And there is a foundational grain where this in-forming reaches its indeterministic limit - the Planck-scale.

This is why particles are fundamentally unstable - any particle could become any other if the Cosmos is small and hot enough. And yet also, some particles can become utterly stable as the Cosmos cools and expands. It is their formal properties, their internal symmetries, that mean they can't be broken down into anything simpler. At the Planck-scale limit, particles are like knots or twists caught in a solidified fabric. They are directions of action that have become crystallised.

So it is form all the way down. Until order reaches the Planck-scale and then you just have quantum vagueness - unbound material fluctuation.

The information theoretic view applies this to spacetime itself, not just its "material contents". Every point in the vacuum dissolves into unbounded fluctuations if you zoom in close enough for it to be hot enough. The particular forms - like electrons or protons - disappear from sight to leave only a sea of virtual particles, a zoo of all possible forms, all possible symmetry-breakings.

This means we can now use information theory to count the Universe in terms of its maximum density of "informational locations" - the volume of degrees of freedom, or entropy, it could possibly contain. We can count every potential atom of form - both the empty locations and the ones filled by some particle - and describe reality as a rule-following pattern of bits.

This informational view of reality bypasses the issue of whether the degrees of freedom are meaningful or meaningless. The semantics is a higher level issue.

Semantics is the further act of making an interpretation - sorting a pattern of bits into the categories of signal vs noise. The information theoretic perspective just grounds our view of reality in terms of the total possible information content of a spatiotemporal volume.

And it is an astonishing fact discovered by physics that the information content of the world does have this strict quantum lower limit. It has been shown that reality is formed by constraints all the way down. At the bottom level, even spacetime is composed of atoms of form. Beyond that, lies only radical indeterminism.

I don't think naturalism has to be defined in terms of science, but rather in terms of what is immanent to human experience. — Janus

Naturalism presumes a world regulated by its fundamental laws. So it is a hierarchical vision where the complex arises from the ultimately simple.

Science embraces that understanding of the natural. It all starts with some bottom-level simplicity.

If you want to argue for some kind of immanent theism, then any notion of the mind, the divine, the spirit, would have to have the same character. It would have to be spoken of as an ultimate simplicity with the potential to become complexly developed.

Human experience is complexly developed. So whatever is "in it" - like a self and its experiences - is already too much.

Science is only one part of human experience, so what is immanent to human experience would also include aesthetics and ethics, religion and the divine. — Janus

And so all those things would be suspect as they would be the products of an already complex state of organisation. There is no grounds for claiming them to be suitably primal.

By the time anything appears in a human mind, it is long past being connected to a fundamental level of existence.

Science of course is our method for turning our thoughts and observations towards the fundamental. It is how we can hope to drill down towards whatever turns out to be actually primal.

It's been a huge success in this regard.

Since the proposal of the theory of evolution by natural selection we have come to realize that human beings are products of natural processes, just like every other organism. So why wouldn't humans and their creations be considered natural? If bird nests are natural things, then why aren't human homes? — Harry Hindu

Naturalism opposes itself to the supernatural in that it claims all four causes of being are immanent, not transcendent. So it lays heavy emphasis on lawful self-organisation.

The artificial would then be creations within the natural world that are not the product of holistic self-organisation. Their existence would be the result of causes transcendent to them - particular formal and final causes.

So the machines humans make are artificial in that sense. They are not organisms but are engineered. Cars and laptops can't spontaneously self-organise or grow, develop and replicate. They are artificial in being designed to be completely constrained, with no internal degrees of freedom and thus no autopoietic possibilities for change or adaptation.

Cars used to be more natural. They rusted pretty easily. But now they are so plastic that that freedom has been taken away.

Thus it is easy to define the artificial. It lacks four cause self-organisation. It lacks a dynamical dependence on its context. It lacks holism in being crafted.

Like all dichotomies, the difference between the artificial and the natural would only be relative. It would define a spectrum of possibilities. So there would be borderline cases.

A bird's nest is a clear borderline case. And more on the side of the artificial than the natural when it comes to fancy constructions made of mud, woven with chambers, or decorated with collected shiny objects. A more natural nest would be perhaps bent foliage - just nature momentarily flattened into a bowl.

So naturalism vs supernaturalism is an absolute claim. You can't have a little bit of transcendence anymore than you can be a little bit pregnant.

But natural vs artificial is a relative claim. Even laptops and cars are still prone to natural processes like entropification. We can build them, but nature can still express its more general desires and find ways to erode them, like cosmic rays, or floods, or earthquakes, or whatever.

But these two sets do not have "being a set" as an element. — Magnus Anderson

Do these two sets belong to the set of all sets that have no elements in common?

I don't care about QM. — Magnus Anderson

Good luck with your classical realism then.

You have yet to show to me how two well-defined portions of reality that are evidently different in all regards are in fact not different in all regards. — Magnus Anderson

I thought you had to show me two well-defined portions of reality which share nothing in common first. Good luck on that. You've been strangely silent on things like the issue of the collapse of the wavefunction so far.

We distinguish necessities from accidents based on our purpose or intent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Except now we are talking about what the Cosmos thinks about the issue. How does it understand the difference between the necessary and the accidental?

Oh come on, you cannot distinguish what is necessary from what is accidental by reference to the genome. That's nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

If it's all a matter of viewpoint, why do you refuse to generalise your very subjective notion of viewpoint? Why are you so violently opposed to an immanent naturalist metaphysics?

I am not arguing against what you call "the principle of indifference". I am arguing against your claim that there is no such thing as absolute difference. — Magnus Anderson

I'm asking you to think about what viewpoint justifies talking about any absolutes here.

This is the standard problem of a physicist description of material reality. Physics keeps finding that "everything" is only relative. Absolutism keeps melting away and proving only to be an emergent limit. And so I adopt a metaphysics that accounts for that kind of reality.

You keep responding in terms of the predicate logic, the laws of thought, which are designed for reasoning about concrete particulars. And so they take reality to be constituted of parts that are crisp and definite. Things can be absolutely the same, or absolutely different, in the simple-minded fashion you try to demonstrate with set theory. The axiom of choice just applies, no problems.

But the physical facts don't support such a view. The physical facts say that is just the sufficiently coarse-grain approximation. It is a point of view from somewhere in the low energy/large scale middle of things - the classical scale of reality modelling.

You are then falsely extrapolating from a low energy/large scale view to a view universal enough to include the indeterministic quantum foundations of the Cosmos. Congrats by the way if you can do that. You'll get the Nobel for finding the solution to quantum gravity for a start.

So there are two metaphysical views in contention here. I'm pointing out that your logic and its associated classical ontology just don't apply in the final analysis. They are an excellent duo for the middle ground description of what we experience. But we already know a different logic is needed for the actual universalised view of a quantum-based reality.

I also disagree with your claim that reality is not composed of concrete particulars. I have to note that this claim does not follow from "the principle of indifference" either. — Magnus Anderson

It's the other way round. We know from close observation of reality that it doesn't conform to our simplistic logic.

Your ontological vagueness merely introduces vagueness. It makes things unnecessarily complicated. I see no reason for it. — Magnus Anderson

So you are arguing against the principle of indifference by telling me all about how you personally choose to apply it. Congrats.