Keeping a straight face is the problem here, Rich.

Just give a straight answer. Is the new born mind (a) the result of the development of another infant nervous system or (b) a projected mental quantum hologram just like Bergson-Bohm said?

You've told us your story, remember. Have you suddenly lost faith in it after all? That's good to know.

So you are saying the nervous system is not the cause? On what grounds?

Oh that's right. All reality is a mind field projected hologram.

No, but you do need to invoke some faith that "mind just happened", — Rich

So a foetus develops, the child is born. We kind of know that another mind just happened due to the growth of a nervous system, don't we? Or do you have evidence to the contrary.

You still don't get it do you? Possibility doesn't do anything. It is not actual, it cannot do anything, by definition. — Metaphysician Undercover

In physics, we have got used to considering possibilities as "virtual particles". So the possibilities we can count - as in quantum mechanics - are also "actual" in a special way.

This isn't empty metaphysics. We can actually measure the physical contribution that a cloud of ghostly possibilities adds to any physical property. It is why the vacuum has an irreducible zero point energy, why the magnetic moment of the electron has an added quantum correction.

So I'm not making shit up. Our most accurate theory of nature forces us to take a constraints-based, sum over histories or path integral, view of material being. We can count the effect that unlimited possibility has on the actuality we then measure.

If there is a God, he designed this system we observe. And it is constraints-based self-organisation all the way down to the Planck limit.

Your alternative account - a classically-inspired tale - is experimentally proven as wrong.

That is really the issue with MWI of QM. See how this premise leads to irrational ontological principles? — Metaphysician Undercover

Well MWI is just an interpretation of these proven facts. It is one way of preserving the kind of classical metaphysics you also hold dear. Just as you say you have no choice left but to believe "God did it", so MWI-ers say they have no choice but to believe every virtual possibility must then be something really happening in some other actual world (or mumble, mumble, another branch of the infinite wavefunction).

Again, a logic of vagueness is the way out of this metaphysical impass.

Define emergent product without having a hidden dualism — schopenhauer1

What again? And were you meaning without the explicit dichotomy - the bleeding "apokrisis" that I even choose as a user-name? >:O

Dimensionality is itself a constraint. A "3D flat space" is a constraint. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well that was what I was saying.

Why do you suppose that 3D space comes into existence from infinite possibility? — Metaphysician Undercover

As that is itself an emergent geometric constraint on infinite dimensional possibility.

3D space has special properties that make it the only thermally/energetically stable arrangement. It is only 3D space in which the strength of interaction dilute according to a log powerlaw. Force weakens with the square of the distance. In less dimensions, interactions would be too strong. In more, they get weak too fast. So 3D is a special Goldilocks state of dimensionality - stable enough that it out persists other possible arrangements.

This is what is at issue here, we can always ask, "why is there what there is instead of something else?". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. We have to allow anything could have been possible and yet something particular is what survived all attempts to constrain it, supress it, or eliminate it.

So the answer is that what exists is what worked in an evolutionary sense. That is what Peirce and a developmental metaphysics is all about. You don't need a creating hand, a prime mover. Possibility itself will eliminate its own variety just by trying to express its every alternative at once. That is the essence of constraints-based causal self-organisation.

But when you posit infinite possibility you deny that there is any answer to that question, and this stymies philosophical investigation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. It pats you on the head and points you in the direction of the better alternative you've been ignoring.

As I said, constraints change, but to posit constraints coming into existence (emerging) from an absolute lack of constraint is nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

If constraint begets constraint, then what begat the first constraint?

Oh I forgot. Must be God. :’(

He explicitly refers to mind — Rich

Err yeah. The word gets said. :-}

And now we are doing the big boy thing of reading a whole sentence all in one go.

The critical part of that sentence is: "...tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth..."

So you get what is being said now? The regularity that we call mind is also an emergent product of (semiotic) growth, like the regularity we call nature.

The point of the die example is that constraints do not emerge, they change, so that a new constraint comes into existence from an already existing constraint. — Metaphysician Undercover

If constraints don't emerge for material being, then provide me with a die that is five or seven sided. Why is six-sidedness a limit on this kind of materiality? Are you not in fact free to change the number of sides composing a regular solid? How could any limit exist in advance of our free potential to tile a volume with regular faces? Surely God at least would be able to ordain the real possibility of a five or seven sided die?

In a realm of infinite potential, apeiron, there is by definition, no constraints whatsoever. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. That is the definition. That is also why I call it the limit of definite existence.

As soon as you have any dimensionality - on free action in some number of particular orrthogonal directions - you also have the complementary fact of constraints on the resulting geometric possibility.

From as soon as you have 3D flat space, five and seven sided dice are an impossibility. And six sided dice a matchingly definite possibility.

That is why Apeiron is not strictly a "ground" of being but its " lower limit". Go in that direction and crispness loses its crispness to become vague. The Apeiron would be the pure vagueness that then "doesn't exist".

Always better to go to the source: — Rich

But you've got a problem, Rich, if you don't understand what you read. :)

So: "tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth"

It seems only a minute ago that you were being snarky about Tychism. And perhaps you haven't even stumbled across its complementary of Synechism yet?

And note here that it is both nature and mind that arise as the semiotic "taking of habits". It is neither mind arising out of (material) nature, nor vice versa. Instead it is a triadic story of both emerging from tychism (Firstness, vagueness, spontaneity) and arriving at their constraining limit (the continuity of synechism or inveterate habit).

and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialised and partially deadened mind." — Rich

Yep. There must be some reason Peirce found Schelling's Naturephilosphie both a historical inspiration, yet also rather in need of fixing up.

Schelling did have a similar take in many ways. And Schelling scholarship likewise raises the further question of "which Schelling?" as his arguments evolved and changed over his own lifetime. But Schelling was more clearly idealist as he did not put semiotic/universal methods of reasoning at the centre of his thought. But then who else was a foundational logician like Peirce in the history of metaphysics (besides Aristotle)?

Googling for quotes doesn't replace scholarship I'm afraid.

the universe is in some sense possessed of awareness. — Wayfarer

Yes. And I am asking you to define what that might actually mean - in Peirce's view especially. What does such a statement commit to you in ontic specifics.

If you think Peirce is a panpsychist for example, support that. Does he anywhere say that fundamentally consciousness is a universal property of material being?

Peirce seems very concerned with the idea that existence is somehow bound up with "the universal growth of reasonableness". Hence the emphasis on interpretation and habit. But where is the "self" - the experiencer of experiencers - in his metaphysics? There seems no particular ontic commitment to that coming through in his writings.

Not as 'substance' as he rejected Cartesian dualism. — Wayfarer

Yes. He really did, didn't he. A big clue, surely.

The Wiki entry on 'objective idealism', — Wayfarer

That is a poor summary of what Peirce proposes. Peirce argues that even the material world emerges (via semiotic reason as a universal process of constraint-formation).

So that Wiki entry makes a distinction between objective and subjective idealism. And objective idealism is suppose to accept the reality of a material world, yet reject a naturalism where mind then emerges from that material world.

But Peirce was arguing for a "total emergence" naturalism. So in the beginning, there is neither matter nor mind in any useful concrete sense. Everything that comes to exist arises because of sign relations.

There are, I agree, some big inconsistencies about this. Peirce equivocated about Firstness. Sometimes he described it in very physicalist language, sometimes very mentalist. He was working his way to an abstract logical description - his unfinished logic of vagueness - and also, late in life, he took a definite religious turn of mind that coloured his writings from yet another direction.

So you can keep triumphantly waving this one little phrase - "matter is effete mind" - and yet my question to you is show that you've really understood what Peirce was saying, and how that evolved even over the course of his life (in response to how his life was going).

You can have momentary realisations that are utterly real, — Wayfarer

Again, the fact that these states of "heightened disembodied blissful sense of complete insight" can be mechanically stimulated must produce something more than this casual shrug of the shoulders if you are being honest.

It seems to me, from the reading I have done of Peirce, — Wayfarer

Cool. So perhaps you can sum up what "mind" then means in Peircean terms. What actual ontic commitments follow?

Do you think he is actually idealist, dualist, panpsychic, or what? Is reality immaterial for him? How is mind defined for him? Is it disembodied reason? Is it a substance, an awareness field, something else?

But I do think the state of 'sama-sambuddhasa' (perfectly realised enlightenment) is real, not reducible to various forms of psychologism or evolutionary-grounded illusions, at which point the individual realises him/herself as being in some essential manner, beyond death. — Wayfarer

But if you find the same states of oceanic feeling or religious ecstasy can be the result of temporal lobe epilepsy, or drugs, or magnetically induced stimulation, what then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology

To talk about unbounded awareness is incoherent. There is only awareness-of. Or the lack of that particularity, and so a lack of a definiteness of concepts and impressions at some moment.

We know from observation that the intensity or power of awareness goes with the complexity of the modelling, the complexity of the neural processing, taking place so as to give an organism its first person point of view. To then argue that awareness would reach some even higher state by becoming unbounded from such located structure is a logical nonsense. It is not an extrapolation from the evidence.

A notion of universal mind makes no sense because the prime quality of being sharply conscious is to be in a most particular state of minding. Awareness-of, in your terminology.

Individual brains can then also be defocused, inattentive, even vigilant - norepinephrine-tuned in terms of noise~signal firing threshold so as to be standing ready to pick up events coming from any direction. All explicable in information processing terms.

But that just reinforces the fact that a memorable intensity of experience is due to the moment to moment development of highly particularised states of information. To posit an oceanic state of disembodied love, a cosmic awareness, is unsupported romanticism. Yes, a popular idea in culture. But not one that reasoned inquiry supports.

What's uncertain or vague about a die? It is an engineered cube with clearly marked faces. Are we in doubt that it must land on one of six numbers when it finally comes to rest on a flat surface?

Oh yes. We in fact add the constraint that maximises our uncertainty over which number will turn up by throwing it in a way that is as if we don't care. In any dice game, that is the rule - the principle of indifference. And thus a constraint that emerged at the dawn of dice games so as to make them even intelligible.

Pure random unintelligible infinite potential cannot give rise to intelligible constraint, because this would mean that it negates itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Err, yeah. That was the point. The self-negation of unintelligibility (the constraint on chaos) is what Peirce's "growth of universal reasonableness" is all about.

Can pure, absolute randomness suddenly become ordered? The order must come from somewhere. — Metaphysician Undercover

Back to efficient causes, hey? Good luck with that.

Or maybe I have replied a sufficient number of times in the past?

I see no problem in presuming the "ground of being" to be instead the "limit of being". Indeed, that is what makes sense given that I am talking about emergence and challenging a brute existence based ontology.

If intelligiblity is what arises, then the foundational limit to that developmental trajectory is "the unintelligible".

Sure, the story picks up at the first inkling of intelligibility. The whole epistemic approach is internalist or immanent. But that is the bleeding point.

We actually have to start from the "subjectivity of our being". And we can't hope for some transcendent leap to a God's eye point of view of the facts - the Kantian thing in itself. So internalism - a la Peirce - is just good metaphysics.

Happy now?

Sounds legit.

You know how it goes, MU. If one finds oneself going in the opposite direction to you, then one is definitely not getting it backwards. So thanks for that (backwards) vote of confidence. (Y)

Nevertheless, what you seem to be missing from the terminology of Ein Sof (and related terms from other cultures) is the very plausible (at the very least, quite fitting to all works in which it is mentioned) metaphysical interpretation of the intended referent being that of awareness sans awareness-of. — javra

Not missing, but explicitly rejecting.

Although I'm certainly also sympathetic to the idea that all differences disappear as we work our way back to vagueness.

So we are both arguing from opposite sides of the fence. In the end I am speaking in a physicalist register, you (I assume) an idealist register. But I agree also that "in the end", experience is what is epistemically primary (for us). Dasein, Firstness, or whatever term one uses. To talk about grounding experience in the world is the beginning of an explanation. But we never transcend the limits of the fact of being grounded in .... not mind, or even awareness, but whatever is experience as vague being.

So there is something to meditation and other such ego-shedding spiritual practices even within my scheme. I am indeed talking of vagueness as physics. I have the explicit project of pan-semiosis where even "the world" is organised by a "mind-like" process - both world and mind being recognised as labels we apply to an experience thus divided. So pan-semiosis is ontically idealist to the extent it is not brute realism (and reciprocally, not brute idealism to the extent it its realist).

However, in terms of experience itself, as we can discover it to be, then shedding structuring thoughts and returning to some bare ground of "just being" is a legitimate project from the idealist side. I guess that was exactly what interested me a long time ago when I was getting started.

I did spend a lot of time investigating actual phenomenology - uncovering the fact that the organised mind is a busy place, and so how it could be relaxed back into a generalised nothingness, a vagueness, by zoning out, or a floatation tank, or that point where one falls asleep, or what it is actually like in the depths of deep non-dreaming sleep.

So I say Zen is bunk because of the notion that it is a self-mastering path to personal power. I realise that also there are varieties of Zen. The particular one I encountered at 10 was all about martial arts. It was about centering the mind so as to be able to muster strength and speed in action. And I thought sod that as the mosquitoes descended. Finding that kind of mental focus is not difficult in a sports situation. It's practical training. No need to dress it up with transcendent significance.

But then being able to still the mind - or rather empty its attentive foreground so as to allow a background natural restless manifest - is a useful trick when having to be creative in your thinking. You have to be able to strip away existing mental organisation, go back to a vaguer mental state, and catch the novel ideas or associations that flower.

So in a pragmatic way, understanding this about the mind is a useful thing. The ability to control our experiential vagueness has value, even if it is not of transcendent significance (no deontic dimension).

You do seem to want to defend the crisp existence of bare awareness - the generalised state that is about nothing in particular, and thus quietly, restlessly, about potentially everything.

And I would say something similar, but with different emphasises because of my own interests. It is the restless potential - the everythingness rather than the nothingness - which would lie at the end of my naturalist phenomenology.

So the Zen I criticise (which you may rightfully say is a caricature in speaking of the Westernised new age take) is wrong in making nothingness the goal. Somehow even the inkling of thoughts and urges must be stilled to the point of not existing. And this impossibility is why you might get a smack over the head from the Zen master, or spend a lifetime never achieving this idealised state.

My view - which fits with the neurology - is that the whole point of foundational mental being is to be a rustle of a billion possibilities. You need the mind as a sea of fluctuations - a Peircean Firstness of flashes of uncontexted thoughts and bare sensations - to then have some Tychism or creative spontaneity to shape up into an organised structure of awareness-of.

To me – and no doubt the arguments will persist on this – you seem to reify epistemological vagueness into a sub-stantial Apeirion and then proceed to make conclusions with use of this Apeiron as a premise. — javra

In fact I am trying to avoid the usual substantial take on the Apeiron, just as I am of Mind.

But also, I am a physicalist in that I accept the scientific evidence that consciousness is emergent from complexity. It is not a simple. We know that because there is such a clear explanatory connection between brains and behaviour for a start. Drink and you feel drunk. It becomes foolish after that to deny mental states are not supervenient on material ones.

So to talk about what could be "the fundamental" - the foundational vague potential - we have to reason via whatever we know to have popped out of it emergently. And that boils down to the duality of matter and form (according to our founding metaphysics). So there must be some kind of materiality, as well as some kind of organisational structure, present in the Apeiron - at least as its unexpressed potential.

That is the argument that leads back to the notion of the Apeiron as a sea of chaotic fluctuations. Actions with a direction.

Of course, that is already "too much" in terms of an actual vagueness. But also, it seems the least possible form of definiteness. A bare action with a direction unrelated to any other is a nothing really.

It is like standing on top of a fog-bound mountain and stabbing a finger as if towards a path. It seems a meaningful event, yet it just ain't without a larger context that can make it so in relational fashion. Pointing in any other direction, in any other way, would have been just as good at that first moment.

So yes, hylomorphic substantiality is what emerges. And that is then how vagueness must be modelled or understood. We can roll our imaginations back to the very first breaking of its symmetry by the most meaningless possible fluctuation, the most relationless relation between a material action and a formal direction or organisation.

Talk about the Apeiron will thus always have to carry an air of substantiality. But the Apeiron is then formally the vague limit to substantiality. It is the boundary to reality, not itself a further state of reality. That is the subtle further bit of the story.

Your system explains awareness thermodynamically; my system starts off with awareness as ontic, brute, fact. — javra

My system starts off with symmetry-breaking and hence there must be some duality from the first moment. If there is awareness, then there must be equally also its "other" - however that is then correctly conceived.

As argued, mind and matter just don't pan out as that dichotomy. This is obvious from all the problems that bedevil ontic dualism. There is just no way to see each as the cause of the other in interactive fashion.

But another dichotomy - constraints and degrees of freedom, or information and matter - does have that intrinsic complementary machinery. We can translate from one to the other in a way that shows they are causally related. Each crisply exists to the degree its "other" is absent. The metaphysical relationship is not one of opposition or negation but instead of the inverse or reciprocal. The symmetry-breaking is not one that just brutely exists, but one that has to develop with the fullness with time.

According to you, accepting that there is inner experiential qualities of (at least certain) processes is somehow antithetical to your theory. — schopenhauer1

Hardly. My question to you is how is that not explained (in at least some tentative fashion) by agreement that a modelling relation with the world seems the kind of process that simply ought to "feel like something".

Even just a crude "picture in the head" representationalism, says there is something inner. There is the outer world and the inner picture of it. The problem is that representationalism is homuncular. It sets up the expectation that there is still "an experiencer" required to look at the pictures.

The modelling relations view aims to get past that in the fashion of ecological, enactive or embodied theories of cognition. Or Peircean habits of interpretance.

First, human consciousness needs to be deflated. We have to see that self-consciousness - the further habit of self-regulatory introspection - is a socio-linguistic skill. The ego, the self, is a verbal concept which we learn to apply. The "experiencer" is now a social-level selfhood, a view of our biological self taken from an externally anchored vantage point. We learn to view our actions, our behaviour, our "animal" urges, our accomplishments and acheivements, as if from a third person point of view - the generalised judgement of our family, peers, betters, and indeed entire cultural milieu.

So that social self is still a result of semiosis. Our cultures have some idea of the right way to be a human. And that becomes a constraint "we" learn to apply to our behaviour. In the Western romantic/individualist tradition especially, this social self becomes reified as an actual being living inside our heads.

Anthropology finds that simpler tribal cultures know right from wrong as simply being about how they would be judged if their actions were visible to their peers. But the Western way has been to make right and wrong a property of "the self". Sin and saintliness are properties of an inner soul. The third person social point of view gets internalised as part of the general modelling relation with the world.

That is why the psychology of modern man is so complex and existentially fraught. We live life through society's eyes. Our heads are crowded places with complex decisions. We find ourselves being pushed about by a confliction of selves. That is, "we" wind up in the middle between the social super-ego and the biological id, as Freud put it.

So first there is the socially constructed sense of self that worms its way into our heads to structure our experience. This illustrates how "points of view" are semiotically constructed. When we talk about "the experiencer", we are really talking about a system of constraints that kick into organise the flow of action.

We may personalise that machinery - call it "a self". But really it is just a machinery of constraints that reliably kicks in to focus action. It is a habit of interpretance. And that then contrasts with the individual novel acts of interpretance which may be how we form a point of view from one monent to the next. So every state of impression is some particular point of view in which an experiencer vs experience dyad is formed. It is another fleeting state of orientation in which we imagine an external or detached angle that makes "personal sense" of some particular state of the world.

Now I'm getting on to the biological level of semiosis or selfhood.

It just is the case with neural modelling that a discrimination between "self" and "world" is core to the process. If I am chewing, I have to have a constant sense of what is food, what is tongue, in my mouth. Confuse the two and it is painful. So right at the foundation of perceptual processing, there is a self/other discrimination that starts the show.

A "self" is implicit in working out constantly where the boundaries of our bodies and their intentions, their capabilities, lie. And then, from the same computation, the world - as everything "other" to that - is also implied. The world exist for us not because it is there, but because we understand it to be there as that which brutely resists our wishes and interests.

This is what an embodied approach to cognition is about. What comes first is neither self, nor world, but the unbounded and so vague experience of the infant. It is only as habits of interpretation are built up that we become practiced and secure at making an automatic, subconscious level, running discrimination in which there are the two things of a self and a world. We divide things into the experiences of what is "out there" and the experiencer which is "in here". Self and world co-arise as the definite categories of experiencing.

So the "experiencer" is revealed as a processing habit. There is no "I" at the fundamental level. But I-ness is what arises in conjunction with other-ness. We get a reified notion of there being a homuncular experiencer, an inner witnesser and willer, along with an equally reified notion of "the world" as a place of brute physical facticity.

So a good theory of mind is one that can track the semiotic reality of how both self and world co-emerge via a modelling relations process. They are both "inner" - as Kant argued. Which leaves the third thing of actual world outside, the thing in itself.

And Peirce then turned that into a more concrete formalism - a triadic description which correctly sees that what is going on is a habit of interpretance that forms for itself the signs by which it responds.

The fact that we can talk about "the self" and "the world", and find that meaningful in terms of knowing what to usefully do next, shows we have indeed reified these things as the signs that are needed to anchor acts of interpretation.

If my elbow knocks over the crystal display in crowded shop, I can immediately determine who is to blame. Well, at least I will know the grounds of the complicated debate that must ensue in my head. Was it me being clumsy? Was it my troublesome id acting out deliberately? Is it is the shop's fault for crowding its wares and almost ensuing an accident like this would happen? Maybe the shop is even being sly and deliberately setting customers up for costly breakages?

A whole host of third person points of view. Pick one as the correct first person experience of the situation.

So far I've seen plenty of experiencers in your model, but they are hidden. — schopenhauer1

Of course you have. That is how conception works, remember? It shapes your impressions. You always feel like you find what you are looking for if you look hard enough.

All of these are kind of like place holders for "and experience happens"... — schopenhauer1

Or maybe they're not. Maybe they are how we might label aspects of experiencing. Maybe that's how we talk structurally about a process.

For you its all reified nouns. I'm trying to get you to think in verbs. But I can see that ain't happening.

They have the quality of being experienced by an experiencer. — schopenhauer1

Ah, up pops your "experiencer". Because of course if you have experiences, then an experiencer is there already just waiting for his Cartesian theatre to roll. It's "logical" says the simple-minded "cause an effect" reductionist.

Talk about horse and cart.

When it comes to getting semiotics, its like you are trying to play Blind Man's Buff and everyone has left the room. Vainly your outstretched fingers grope for something to clutch hold of.

In crude but familiar psychological terms, general concepts shape our particular impressions while those particular impressions in turn build up our habits of conception.

Sorry that this still doesn't answer your Hard Problem for you. But you haven't even decided if green is a concept, an impression, or even the interaction of the two. You are not even taking baby steps away from a rigid substance ontology.

How is that not a dualism? You cannot get out of it be referring back to the constituents and ignoring that its emerged ( — schopenhauer1

We could be here forever and you won't get the first bit of it. In my metaphysics, the constituents emerge too. The global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom.

This is holism here. There is no point you trying to understand that reductionistically.

The fact that there is a feels-like-something along with the modelling. — schopenhauer1

Have a go at supporting the counter-factual - that there is the kind of modelling relation the human brain has with its environment and that that feels like ... nothing?

When is that the case?

If you are dead or in a coma, for example, there is no modelling relation. But when you are in a lived and active engagement with the world, what supports your claimed counter-factual here?

Not seeing it. (Hey, another counter-factual!)

But that's the point! It exists qua its own phenomena. There is no counterfactual as there is just feeling-like-something, the territory that you keep missing for the map. — schopenhauer1

It's like you have zero comprehension skills. Don't just claim counterfactuals are irrelevant to facticity. Demonstrate how that is an epistemically credible stance to be taking.

You have a rather important dichotomy to existence: that of conflict v. harmony. Some of us emotive people can interpret the same as hate v. love. Some of other folks can interpret it as states of chaos v. states of order. It doesn’t much matter how the processes are interpreted here; nor at what levels of existence they're addressed; the two processes of becoming remain the same. — javra

Yep. Anaximander confused the heck out of folk as the only recorded scrap of his actual words talked about cosmic justice vs injustice. Heraclitus likewise talked about this unity of opposites - flux and logos.

So that is what I cash out when talking about constraints vs freedoms. A system is the necessity of both in balance.

When it comes to the science of social relations - sociology - we see the same story playing out at a higher level. What is fundamental to a natural notion of a social system is that it is the successful balancing of two necessary oppositions - co-operation and competition.

The main difference here then is you want to add some further twist - another metaphysical dimension to your analysis. And that is based on the opposition of good and bad, or some such deontic distinction.

So my position would be deontically neutral. Neither competition nor co-operation would be inherently either good or bad. It is their balancing act that counts. And even that resulting outcome is not inherently good or bad in a Platonic "the Good" way.

As a natural philosopher, nature just is what it is and doesn't have to answer to transcendent values. Existence has no further moral dimension (although culturally we are free to construct a morality that pragmatically works for us in terms of achieving an optimal balance of competition and co-operation).

But I get it that for you existence does probably just have this inherent value. It is fundamental and so top of your concerns in any discussion we might have.

So I can recognise the legitimacy of adding further dimensions to our metaphysics that go beyond the simple-minded reductionism we all complain about. I've just argued again for the vague~crisp distinction of anyone taking a developmental position on ontology. And so your choice to defend a deotological axis of description - if that is what you are doing - is both a valid epistemic move in my view, yet one that I of course contest vigorously on ontological grounds.

Harmony can occur in the absence of all conflict. This is not a “crispness” that requires both dyads to be. In the latter form, the given of harmony / love / order can exist just fine in the complete absence its opposite – to not even address any relation in -between. — javra

Ah. There you see where now I would disagree even epistemically. Nothing can be spoken of intelligibly except counterfactually. Harmony makes no sense as language, as proposition, unless not-harmony refers to something more solid than just "whatever not might mean".

That was the problem of the Platonic good - especially right through all Christian theology. Evil has to exist to make sense of goodness. And yet the existence of evil, or worse yet, its deliberate creation, does not compute. How could a God of perfect love and harmony allow the stain of Satan to come into being?

Theology tries to say the paradox of that formulation is somehow resolved in Hegelian fashion by making the re-establishment of perfection at the end of Earthly time somehow a fact that reinforces the concreteness of God's purity.

It doesn't fly logically. But that is what happens when theology becomes the sound of one hand clapping - the notion that only one half of a dichotomy is "true", the other necessarily "false".

So I would say you are fooling yourself in not actually even granting yourself a deontic dimension anchored securely at either end by the complementary notions of good and bad, harmony and strife, order and disorder, heaven and hell.

Metaphysics works because it got the hang of proper dialectical argument. Theology retreats from that at its peril. Or rather, retreating form the fray is the only way theology, tied up in its paradoxical knots, can survive.

(I don't mean all theology. A lot of it has flirted with proper systems thinking. The re-discovery of Peirce was certainly led by religious scholars.)

"you label me, I label you" — javra

I suggested you focus for a change on why ein sof or dependent co-arising might be something shared here. But it is your choice to see only divisions.

our answer of "vague~crisp" does not answer the question that you replied to … unless it is to explicitly say that the metaphysical beginning is unknowable. — javra

Mmm. Still not getting it even when it is said explicitly?

It is epistemically fundamental - I take it as true - that questions no longer have answers once they become totalising and lack counterfactuality.

But then you are seeking some ontic certainty despite that explicit epistemic caveat.

So I say no go. That is simply brute fact argument. You are presuming a truth that has no means of test. You have gone beyond epistemically reasonable metaphysics. Sorry to have to be the one to break this bad news.

Then returning to what I'm saying, I'm saying - epistemically - we are safe in talking about the emergence of existence right after the earliest moment that its symmetry in fact just broke.

So vague~crisp does that. We are dealing already with a developmental process busy growing. We are in the game now in a measurable fashion.

This won't satisfy ontic absolutists. They will cling on to their ability to appear like sceptics, opposing any explanation even though they are now - at this level of rarified questioning - operating without the oxygen of proper counterfactuals.

You can't stop folk talking even when what they say is just nonsense. But you can show that it is nonsense when they can't pose their scepticism, their endless questioning, in grounded counter-factual terms.

How did Life come from no-life? — Rich

It was a quantum mind field projection bit of trickery by the big daddy hologram up in the sky. Or something like that. Can't actually remember straight.

But I saw the YouTube clip on it by some guy who builds banking software. And he wasn't even wearing a tin-foil hat. He had to be legit.

The point is WHAT is experience? — schopenhauer1

No, the point is WHAT IS IT NOT? If you can't provide the suitable counterfactual, you ain't got nothing, buster.

Funny, I had Helen Keller in mind. — javra

You know Helen Keller wasn't born that way? And she always had the senses of touch, taste and smell.

Is vagueness an uncaused presence of "lack of crispness"? — javra

Sigh. I said totalising questions have no resources by which they can be answered. So eventually we arrive at brute fact. "There is existence," is all we can say. Proper counterfactual questions no longer exist.

So that is the negative conclusion. I'm sure you will pounce on it gleefully as an admission that thus nothing has been said at all here. Any argument I made lacks its factual - or rather, counterfactual basis - and so must be "inadequate" to the question you still insist on asking. The question that has no answer as it ain't actually a question.

Sigh. The way you folk keep circling back to that burning need for efficient cause absolutism. If there is an effect, there just has to be a reason. As soon as any terminating concept is named - like vagueness - off you must go again.

So stop and think. We can't totalise. But we can safely dichotomise. We can work our way towards the most fundamental of metaphysical-strength counterfactuals.

I've explained how some traditional "dichotomies" like mind~matter don't work. They are merely broken dualisms rather than formally mutual divisions - definitions that meet the requirement of being "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive".

Mind and matter just speak to different and unrelated varieties of substance - real stuff and soul stuff. Plato and Aristotle already took metaphysics down below the level of "substance", revealing it to be the emergent hylomorphic product of formal and material causality.

And Peirce of course heralded the modern re-conception in terms of information and dynamics. The symbol~matter dichotomy. This works as the source of the mutual exclusiveness is there in plain sight. Material dynamics is all about dimensionality. Signs then exist at the limit of dimensionality, They are what is left once physics has been removed from the equation as much as possible. They are what must arise as a new concrete possibility once dimensionality has been constrained as a possibility - shrunk to a zero dimensional point.

It would be worth re-reading my lengthy post on the biophysical basis of biosemiosis. The physical zeroing of dynamics - the convergence of many varieties of energetic process at the quasi-classical nanoscale - is another spectacular proof of this fundamental insight.

But anyway, the point about the vague~crisp is that it arises as the limit of our metaphysical inquiries into the question of "why existence?".

We can't answer the question in some monistic fashion - A caused B, and that's that. It is already accepted that existence itself is a brute fact because it is a totalising question bereft of counterfactuals (well, no one has imagined a good one so far).

But as a positive metaphysical achievement, we can say that we pushed the limits as far as was possible. And my argument - the one I say many ancient wisdoms share, even if in groping, informal fashion - is that the vague~crisp defines that epistemic limit best.

However if you can argue against that, go for it.

Your posts are dissolving into incoherence. Relax and take a moment to read what I've actually written.

Even think why it is so important to you that I remain "other" to the ancient wisdoms you quite like. Why do you treat that as the ultimate disaster here? Why don't you look for the possibility of a friendly connection in that fact? What could you have been missing in our discussion so far?

Think of the four Aristotalian causes, together with all other possibilities of causation that have accumulated in our history (such as that of co-arising, etc.) and logically justify the causal principle by which the firstness came to be. It could be an uncaused given (another possibility of causation). Whatever you choose, how do you justify it was ontically so. — javra

So you are asking what causes vagueness? Apart from a lack of crispness?

What bit of my account of counterfactuality and the legitimacy of causal questions did you fail to get?

And yet these mystics you gleefully put down in their place, with nothing more than their states of (non-measurable) awareness, came to the same conclusions you did via "scientific rationalism". How? — javra

It is hard to reply if you insist on being ridiculous. Anyone who ever came up with a powerful metaphysical view was reasoning from experience of the world.

Do you think it would be possible to have clever thoughts about existence if you are blind, deaf and dumb?

Have I not explained this often enough. The first thing is to stop talking about it as a nothingness. An apeiron is an everythingness in being a pure potential without limitation.

So if you want a mental image, it is a chaotic sea of fluctuations. A maximally confused host of actions in "every direction", and thus expressing "no direction in particular".

Constraints then emerge to regulate this chaos, give it form, bring it into a state of relative peace and order - an equilibrium that persists.

So start by switching out the image of a nothingness and bringing in an image of a seething directionlesss everythingness. Then start to subtract the concreteness that that imagery appears to demand.

I agree it ain't easy. But that is also how you get your head around mathematical conceptions of symmetry, or physical conceptions of quantum path integrals. With practice, you start to get the required level of abstract intuition.

But also, at the end of the day, any kind of "picture in the head" is not the point. The scientific method accepts that the final judge of all conceptions is not "how convincing it feels to my imaginative powers" but "is this idea publicly useful as a system of theory and testing?" - a modelling relation or interpretive habit.

Secondly, you hold a long history of degrading them mystics / spiritualists while you then go ahead and use their own notions to support your views. — javra

Yes it must be baffling. I acknowledge all the efforts in the same obvious direction and yet also criticise those efforts to the degree they remain mystic and unformalised.

I'm also a constant critic of Peirce, don'tcha know? The ability to be self-critical like this - to highlight flaws so as to keep improving on the understanding - is such a rare thing. Outside of a scientific training.

Lots of words to say: to my best current reasoning, nobody can know if existence ever had a beginning. — javra

Nobody knows as usual. This Mr Nobody sure seems one heck of a smart guy.

It is always just so easy taking the sceptic's position isn't it. "I don't believe you yet. Tell me again. Nope, still not believing you." Etc, ad infinitum.

Anyway, the Peircean answer - like other ancient wisdoms - is that if there was a beginning, it would also have to be the opposite of a determinate event, the product of an efficient cause. It would have to instead be a beginning that was some form of ultimate vagueness or state of indetermination.

Rather like a quantum Big Bang indeed. Why did the atom decay right at that moment? We now have physical models that say efficient cause evaporates when you get down to the fundamental level of material events. We have to start thinking less conventionally, more holistically, about causality.

So now there is a happy coincidence between the physics and the metaphysics. And why - actually understanding the metaphysics - would we not see it is more than just some coincidence?