We always differentiated between instrumental interp from CI, though. — Moliere

As you say, even if you go back to Bohr and Heisenberg, you can't recover some pure CI position. And perhaps I should have said pragmatist or logical positivist rather than instrumentalist initially - even though instrumentalism is only Dewey and Popper trying to strip down Peircean pragmatism of its "unfortunate" metaphysical leanings.

So I find that when I talk to modern proponents of CI, they are essentially arguing pragmatism - all we can know is that the maths sure works. And then the metaphysics that lingers at the back of this is the idea that the mind of the observer works on the classical side of the equation, so something that sure looks like a definite collapse of quantum weirdness must be the case in that we manage to extract classically understood measurements from the world (within the bounds of uncertainty).

So even the instrumentalism relies on a background metaphyics which I would say should be troubling. And it certainly was for Peirce who was working on a "fuzzy logic" view of metaphysics for just that reason.

Generally, I struggle to draw sharp lines between interpretations. But when given some central issue - like wavefunction collapse - people are going to divide quite logically into the three camps of (1) it must do, (2) no, it can't, and (3) can't know so learning not to care.

CI as people currently use it seems more 3 than 1 these days.

What bugged Einstein is his native faith that reality was 'there anyway', whereas the Copenhagen advocates all said that in this matter, the line between observer and observed was no longer clear-cut. And I'm with them on that, as far as I can understand it. — Wayfarer

CI itself comes in a rainbow of variants. But the central idea in my view is that in the end what we can be sure of is that we don't know how to define what looks like a necessary division between observers and observables when it comes to quantum scale observations of observables. So we know there is an explanatory gap, but can see no watertight way to fill it.

So CI says there is a line for sure. We sit on its classical side. And where that line gets drawn to rule off the quantum side is something we can't answer.

And my response to that is that it is this notion of there being a definite line which is questionable. Instead, I see the classical and the quantum as complementary models of the two perfect limits on existence. So CI gets it wrong in persisting in believing in a dividing line. Although, as I say, CI comes in so many varieties that it can be seen as a "shrug of a shoulders" intrumentalism even about hard line vs fuzzy line ontologies. Who cares because we can use the maths to deal with the world and built great machinery?

Then Peirce comes in here because he was already dealing with this precise problem - the nature of observers. And he extended that epistemological question to make it a ontological answer. His semiosis is a way of defining soft dividing lines in worlds where observers and observables are fundamentally entangled, but can - thermally - develop robust habitual divisions.

So you keep claiming Peirce to be an idealist - someone somehow arguing that divine mind conjures the world into being. And at stages in his life, he may have well wanted to believe that.

But if you look at his actual metaphysics - his semiotic approach - then he was talking about signs rather than minds. Observers weren't localised experiencers but contextual habits of interpretance. The difference might be subtle, but it is also huge.

Rather than being defensive, why not critique Orzel from your point of view? That would be more interesting.

That's close to my own thinking, but was obviously written before the discovery that the second law of thermodynamics is violated more frequently the smaller anything becomes and completely ignores the Quantum Zeno Effect. — wuliheron

I'm hardly ignoring the quantum zeno effect. Remember that that too requires "perfect watching" to stop the particle ever decaying. So it is both remarkable that we could slow down a decay, impossible that we could create the energy-demanding experimental conditions that would stop a decay.

The simplest explanation is that time can flow both forwards and backwards because a context without significant content and any content without a greater context is a demonstrable contradiction. — wuliheron

I'm all for some version of retrocausality. But you are invoking a globally general version that again betrays perfect world thinking and not the fuzzy logic approach that I would take.

So our bulk model of time and causality is best described by this kind of thinking I would say - http://discovermagazine.com/2015/june/18-tomorrow-never-was

This thermal view of time says the past is pretty much solid and decohered, the future is a bunch of open quantum possibilities. And then quantum retrocausality would be about very local and individual events which are criss-crossing this bulk picture.

The bulk seems definitely sorted in having a sharp split between past context and future events. But on the fine grain, past and future are connected because - as with quantum eraser experiments - the context can take a "long time" to become fixed in a way that then determines the actual shape of the wavefunction. It is only in retrospect that we can see all that went into its formation.

So again, rather than time/causality being either absolute in a uni-directional classical sense, or instead absolute in a quantum non-local or "both ways" sense, the real world dangles somewhere between these two perfect limits. It emerges as the equilbrated bulk behaviour.

. Its enough to make Zeno's head spin, but its a more Asian metaphoric take on the issue. — wuliheron

The trouble with Asian metaphors is that culturally they lack mathematical development. So they are inherently fuzzy in being verbal descriptions. At best, using proto-logical arguments, they are proto-mathematical.

So yes, it is my own argument that all early civilisations shared a fairly organic, symmetry-breaking, perspective on metaphysics. There are strong parallels between Anaximander and Tao.

But you can't claim quantum physics to be the triumph of the Eastern way over the Western way. It was Zeno who crystalise the mathematical paradoxes of a way of thinking, and thus made possible their equally sharp counter-reaction. You couldn't develop calculus unless you knew there was some sharp problem when it came to differentiating a curve. And you couldn't develop quantum mechanics if Lagrangian mechanics wasn't already a result of being able to do such differentiation.

So Zeno sparked something usefully concrete in Western thought. It allowed us to speak mathematically about the opposing limits on being. Asian philosophy just spoke about the fact that Yin and Yang gave you the I Ching - a proto-maths that was too fuzzy to ever go anywhere after that.

So I don't undervalue Eastern metaphysics. But there are reasons why Western metaphysics - in its built-in capacity to be "utterly wrong" via axiomatic mathematical claims - became the actually productive intellectual tradition.

Zeno made everyone's head spin for the next 2300 years. Asian metaphysics has since gone down the nearest toilet/rabbit hole even in Asia. Universities over there don't teach quantum theory any differently.

You do realise that that makes you a super-strength pragmatist? :)

You aren't thinking of yourself as a CI proponent in the "consciousness causes collapse" sense? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_interpretation

The branching is an artifact of quantum mechanics still being formulated using classical mathematics when all the evidence, including macroscopic evidence, indicates nature is fundamentally analog and what is required, at the very least, is some sort of fuzzy logic variation on the excluded middle. That includes modern quantum mechanics which are formulated as wave mechanics according to the Schrodinger Equation. — wuliheron

Yep. But then MWI seems to be an example of applying fuzzy logic interpretations to those successful mathematical formalisms. Which would be ironic.

So the maths can't provide an actual (ie: real) wavefunction collapse. Your interpretive choice then is whether (1) to affirm that there must be a collapse to one-world classicality that so far has escaped out mathematical models, or (2) argue for a no-collapse reality and ride that to wherever it logically leads, like MWI, or (3) argue for strong agnosticism about the true nature of reality as with an instrumentalist version of Copenhagen.

And we are seeing MWI being defended in very fuzzy terms with talk of interactions, correlations, interferences, branches, and other such stuff happening causally across world lines. So concrete sounding mechanisms are being invoked, while at the same time the latest decoherence versions of MWI seem to get squirrely about what any of this talk means in a definite physical sense. The other worlds "don't really exist", just as the collapse "doesn't really happen".

So the charitable view is that MWI is part of the exercise of giving up fairly completely on our classical expectations about how reality works. In some way, the whole of existence is a thermal ensemble of evolving possibility with an emergently classical character. But nothing can be completely pinned down or localised.

So in some sense the very notion of "to exist" has to reflect that reality is fundamentally contextual and can feel the shadowy presence of all its alternatives - all its possible worlds - even as it hovers fitfully around some general emergent equilbrium balance of that ocean of possibility.

In that light, both hard and definite collapse scenarios, and hard and definite no-collapse/many real worlds scenarios, are too strong as interpretations. Existence is to be found somewhere between the bounds of the one and the many.

An approach to MWI I find appealing is Chad Orzel's - http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/11/20/manyworlds-and-decoherence/

He emphasises that in a twin slit experiment, every photon has a slightly different thermal history or context as it passes through the array.

What you get depends on exactly what went on when you sent a particular photon in. A little gust of wind might result in a slightly higher air density, leading to a bigger phase shift. Another gust might lower the density, leading to a smaller phase shift. Every time you run the experiment, the shift will be slightly different.

So at a deep level, every photon has a spooky "completely entangled' connection. Yet at the emergent quasi-classical level, the world is varying enough to wash away the effect of these entanglements. Although you can arrange your experiment to also stop the entanglements being washed away and - now tilting the statistical ensemble the other way - present an accumulation of photon events that have the spooky connected pattern.

So the warring interpretations want to have it clean cut as being one or the other. Either there is one world spun of definite collapses, or many worlds spawned because of no-collapse. But a thermal realism says no world is perfect for any actual photon. It is always either relatively strongly entangled or relatively weakly entangled, depending on the amount of "perfect control" there is over the identicality of real world conditions.

That is, the context itself is varying or fuzzy at all times. Only an impossibly perfect and regular context could "manufacture" the kind of pure spookiness that hard-line approaches to MWI would demand. The "world" is itself never certain enough to justify the ontic demands of the no-collapse camp, just as much as an actual collapse view yielding a single classical world is also out of the question.

A parallel in thermodynamics might be the opposing notions of absolute thermal order that would be represented by the two possible minimum entropy organisations of a perfect gas. A highest state of order would be all the particles collected in the one corner of the jar - from where they would spread out randomly. But then the opposite perfect bound would be to start with every particle having an exact grid-like spacing - spread out as regularly as possible. Again, as soon as released, randomness would scramble that initial state very quickly (and much more quickly in fact that if the gas has to diffuse from one corner).

So that is an example of how real thermodynamics is about equilibrium states that are some thermal balance which is measured relative to two opposing perfect bounds. And with MWI, the collapse vs the no-collapse positions on quantum maths represent the single perfectly classical world and the unlimited perfectly entangled quantum world-lines of which our own world is the messy actual reality that exists between two impossible states of perfection.

There is huge uncertainty/contextuality at the local particle event level. But also that context has an always present residual uncertainty itself.

So as Orzel argues, we have to both accept spookiness as fundamental, but then not jump to treating it as itself something that has absolutely definite existence. Even the spookiness is relative to what emergently exists. The world in effect exists by suppressing the spookiness. It is not the spookiness that rules in a way that produces some unlimited number of actually branching world-lines, with their then fundamentally mysterious multiple "observers" experiencing different "collapses".

Orzel again...

Why do we talk about decoherence as if it produced “separate universes?” It’s really a matter of mathematical convenience. If you really wanted to be perverse, and keep track of absolutely everything, the proper description is a really huge wavefunction including that includes pieces for both photon paths, and also pieces for all of the possible outcomes of all of the possible interactions for each piece of the photon wavefunction as it travels along the path. You’d run out of ink and paper pretty quickly if you tried to write all of that down.

Since the end result is indistinguishable from a situation in which you have particles that took one of two definite paths, it’s much easier to think of it that way. And since those two paths no longer seem to exert any influence on one another– the probability is 50% for each detector, no matter what you do to the relative lengths– it’s as if those two possibilities exist in “separate universes,” with no communication between them.

In reality, though, there are no separate universes. There’s a single wavefunction, in a superposition of many states, with the number of states involved increasing exponentially all the time. The sheer complexity of it prevents us from seeing the clean and obvious interference effects that are the signature of quantum behavior, but that’s really only a practical limitation.

Questions of the form “At what point does such-and-so situation cause the creation of a new universe?” are thus really asking “At what point does such-and-so situation stop leading to detectable interference between branches of the wavefunction?” The answer is, pretty much, “Whenever the random phase shifts between those branches build up to the point where they’re large enough to obscure the interference.” Which is both kind of circular and highly dependent on the specifics of the situation in question, but it’s the best I can do.

I think it can be seen as triadic but it need not be seen so. The belief in a world beyond your experiences can be seen as ultimately the same belief as the belief that there is a self. Each (the world beyond your experience and the self “inside” your experience) is merely a different version of the Noumenon. The belief in a world beyond your experience is simultaneously the belief that your experience has the character of “I-ness” about it — Dominic Osborn

That's still a triadic move. My point was that to speak about "pure experience" is already to have leapt from the monadic position of "just experiencing" to talking triadically about the I-ness of being a self having experience of a world.

The belief in a self beyond your experience (or, as I suppose we all imagine it: the belief in a self inside experience or on this side of experience) is simultaneously the belief that your experience has the character of “world-ness” about it. (Apologies for these awkward expressions.) There are two versions of duality here, not three things. — Dominic Osborn

Yes, speaking about experience as itself a "thing" is to claim - triadically - that the experience has world-ness along with the I-ness. The whole point is that we are now thinking about experience in this meta-fashion where it is something distinctive - a state of mind, a field of qualia, a mental representation - that mediates between a witnessing self and a material world.

So in reality we jump straight from one to three in talking about "just experience". It has this complex structure that involves both I-ness and world-ness as its basic division - and hence, potential relation.

What I think I am saying is that Reality is Indeterminacy, Vagueness. Or, what I am saying, to put it another way, is: you can’t say anything about Reality. I then go on to say that all you can say is what Reality is not. So I then say, Reality is not many things, Reality is not one thing; Reality is not the Physical World; Reality is not the Mind; Reality is not this, Reality is not that, etc.. — Dominic Osborn

I'm not sure on what basis you are claiming to say these things. It doesn't seem to be on the basis of either rational argument or probable evidence. It involves the awkward epistemic manoeuvre of first believing we are in a triadic modelling relation with reality - recognising qualia as a mediating level of sign - and then dropping the modelling part to then claim that the mediating signs might be all that exist.

My approach is the consistent one. It accepts that we are in a modelling relation with reality and, from there, draws the practical conclusion that dreams of absolute knowledge are an epistemic pipedream. We can only hope to minimise our uncertainty in regard to the noumenal.

So you want to doubt the world. I only want to doubt our knowledge of the world.

I think being “lost in the flow of events or actions in unselfconscious fashion” is knowledge (of those events or actions). I don’t consider Knowledge and Being to be separate. I think your definition of Knowledge mirrors your (dualistic) conception of existence: an existence essentially consisting of a knower and a known, a self and its experience (with the possibility of a third thing too, the Noumenon). I think Knowledge is non-dual and Being is non-dual. — Dominic Osborn

If they are so non-dual, why do you call Knowledge and Being by different names? (Yes, I realise you will now call them two aspects of experience - and so we circle back to the necessarily triadic structure that betrays the discursive nature of idealism.)

I think you, and Kant, and Peirce have swallowed an absurdity, an absurdity however that is so widely and deeply felt and held that it almost passed into the realm of fact. — Dominic Osborn

For an absurdity, it is unreasonably effective wouldn't you say. Science is founded on it for a start.

The positing of a Noumenon is an absurdity: something that exists but is not felt. If whether something is perceived or not has no bearing on whether or not it exists, why are there not not spooks and pixies dancing on my desk here? The positing of the Noumenon is the conceiving of Ignorance. But the conceiving of two realms, the Known and the Unknown simply proposes Duality again. Why do you accept the notion of "Ignorance" uncritically? — Dominic Osborn

There might be spooks and pixies dancing on your desk. All you can know is that you have minimised your uncertainty about that to the extent that that seems possible.

So the positing of the noumenal is simply the rational acceptance that perceptual experience has its limits. One shouldn't claim absolute knowledge about reality even if we seem to have a pretty damn useful handle on this thing we call reality.

The conceiving of the Definite and the Possible simply proposes Duality again. Why do you accept the notion of "Possibility" uncritically? — Dominic Osborn

But my point was that all categorisation has to proceed dichotomously. You have to have an intelligible division into a this vs a that to play the game.

So it is not dualism - a division lacking a bridge. It is a dichotomy - a division that is self-defining in that each half defines its "other".

Knowledge is a lack of ignorance - a minimisation of uncertainty, as I say. And ignorance it the opposite - a maximisation of uncertainty or a lack of knowledge. Likewise, the definite is that which lacks indeterminancy, and vice versa.

So it is hardly uncritical. A dichotomy is the definition of critical thinking - the sharp division that renders the world generally intelligible.

It can’t be the case that there are two different things, an existence in which the world is real and an existence in which the world is idealistic illusion, but each looks the same to me. — Dominic Osborn

But that is the possibility which your idealism requires.

My pragmatism can see the bent stick in the water as a straight stick that only looks bent because of the water. I accept that there is a phenomenal vs noumenal distinction which is a difference that can make a difference.

But you are arguing that a stick that looks bent is always a bent stick. Appearances are all there are to reality.

Either the two parts (Phenomenon and Noumenon) are in some way joined, in which case they are not really two after all, or they are not joined, in which case there must be a thing, nothingness, between them, which is at once an existing thing, and must be, in order to hold the two things apart, and also a non-existing thing because, were it to exist, it would join the two things up. But there cannot be a thing that both exists and does not exist. — Dominic Osborn

Again, my ontology is based on things needing to be first separated in order that they then can interact. So it is irreducibly triadic and doesn't fall into the paradoxes inherent in dualism.

There can't be an interaction without a difference. Thus you need at least two different things. And furthermore, for such a state of being to persist (and thus be said to "exist"), the interaction must serve to maintain the difference that is the basis of the interaction. The interaction can't be a passing fluke. It must develop into a systematic habit.

Triadic semiosis in a nutshell.

Matter to what?
And to what degree have you enquired?
Are you sure you can see through the mist? — Punshhh

Sorry. which of those questions is about pragmatism rather than being an expression of pragmatism?

Yes I see that but, we are blind to what we are in some sense. — Punshhh

But if that is so, then we are only dealing with a known unknown. And if my epistemology accepts that there can be unknown unknowns, then it is reacting to that very known unknown. It builds in the fact that we could be blind - and explains the degree to which it could then matter.

I am concerned with other or unconventional ways of knowing and other means of seeing and witnessing and the development of wisdom — Punshhh

Fine. But you are not showing that they have a demonstrable advantage - except as a way to block open minded, publicly conducted, ontological inquiry.

Nothing much one could say to that gibberish.

Superheroes spell out the American Dream - transcendent individualism. So it is the logical endpoint of the romantic mythologising of the "self-made self".

The contrast with, say, Japanese culture and the films of Miyazaki, is pretty stark.

Another strikingly US trope is the smartarse kid. There is always the child that says the cute and clever things to show up the adult characters. Again it is obvious how this plays up something core to US values.

The adult superhero is the guy with the concealed physical powers. The child hero is the kid with the exhibited social dominance. Both spell out the same message. The individual can always transcend the mundane constraints of the collective norm. One can aspire not merely to succeed, but to exceed.

And from there, the failure to exceed becomes the new failure.

How is the actual experience experienced by the experiencer "framed"? — schopenhauer1

The clue is in the fact you have to mention the experiencer.

What this boils down to is we don't know if we are actually doing metaphysics, or just playing at it. — Punshhh

You are just repeating what I've already dealt with. Of course beyond the known knowns, and the known unknowns, there could be the unknown unknowns. Pragmatism takes that for granted.

But the point then is twofold.

First, if there really are unknown unknowns, they still remain open to being discovered if they make a difference.

Then second, they would have to be unknown unknowns about which we could care. Pragmatism is also about truth in terms of the purposes that can define being a self, being an observer. So it is a Janus faced epistemology in defining both observer and observables in a fully consistent fashion.

Thus there could be differences that don't make a difference - to us. In fact, to now switch to the ontological view relevant to the OP and its confusions about selections and hinges, the world is presumed to be full of potential difference. Variety begins unconstrained - the definition of vague. And then "self-interested" constraints or habits develop to regulate variety, turning it into a crisp contrast between signal and noise, meaning and irrelevance.

So again, pragmatism has no interest in denying the unlimited possibilities of difference. And that is because it speaks to the regulatory possibility that is the separation of that kind of vague potential into differences that make a difference, and the differences that don't.

Yeah, but as soon as your private experience is framed by yourself as an argument, it is social, even if never in fact articulated publicly. So to be mapped is already crossing the line that is the epistemic cut upon which human introspective "self consciousness" is constructed. It invokes the "self" as the interpreter of a sign, the sign being now the observable, the claimed phenomenon.

You seem to imagine that naive experiencing of experiences is possible. But to talk about the self that stands apart from his/her experiences is already to invoke a pragmatist's sign relation.

Why would I dispute the very problem pragmatism sets out to resolve?

Perhaps you don't understand what it means when I say I am defending a pragmatist epistemology? If you believe instead in private revelation, go for it.

I think this notion that if there are no counterfactuals, it has no value or useful understanding is skipping over a large amount of phenomena. — schopenhauer1

It is illogical to claim that there could be phenomena that aren't distinct and therefore counterfactual in the fact that, given different conditions yet to be discovered, they wouldn't be there.

You forget that I am arguing the pragmatist view and so Occam's razor applies. You can pretend to worry about invisible powers that rule existence in ways that make no difference all you like. You are welcome to your scepticism and all its inconsistencies. But as I say, if whatever secret machinery you posit makes no difference, then who could care?

Like Von Neumann's measuring tools, the model is both map and territory. But it's kind of this unstable thing, right? like it's both - but it can't be both at the same time. — csalisbury

I don't understand your objection. The model describes a territory that is itself being viewed as a modelling relation. Seems simple enough.

that recursive explosion - where one would need a new tool, M', to measure M+S, and so forth - requires an indefinite expanse which would allow one to keep 'zooming-out'. — csalisbury

But that is the argument for the epistemic cut or semiotic sign relation. It is because the measurement function - the observer - can't be understood as "just physics" (because recursion ensues) that the observer/measurement has to be understood in terms of a symbolic level of action.

So the passage you cite identifies the fundamental problem of physicalist explanation. And that homuncular regress is what semiosis fixes.

well, yes, that which constrains has to be atemporal, but it's a weird kind of atemporality isn't it? It's out of time, yet of time - precipitated from temporal dynamic material processes (tho always implicit within them), yet able to turn around, as it were, and regulate them. — csalisbury

Again, there seems no problem at all. That is how a memory functions. You have all these regulative habits you've learnt - like perhaps the rules of cribbage. Then along comes a cribbage playing situation and all your dormant skill gets a chance to do its thing.

But a model qua TOE isn't merely constraining and controlling a local set of dynamic processes - it envelops everything - both the dynamic processes and the atemporal. It is somehow outside of the dialectic, touching the absolute**, and invites the very idea of the transcendent mind you rightfully decry. It's a fixed thing - a holy trinity of sorts - which explains the fixity/nonfixity/relation-between-the-two which characterizes everything. — csalisbury

A TOE would be maximally general. And it would then encompass all the more constrained physical models.

A model of quantum gravity unifies quantum field theory and general relativity. General relativity unifies special relativity and Newtonian gravity. So physics already is organised in this nested hierarchical fashion.

And it is definitional of a TOE that spacetime becomes an emergent feature, not a fundamental ingredient. That is the point.

So being "outside" of time, and space, and matter, are all desirable properties.

And that in turn is the argument for pansemiosis. The fundamental problems of physics can't be fixed with just "more physics". That risks the recursion that can only be "solved" by the appeal to mystic transcendent causes.

And so the trick that worked for human self consciousness and biological autonomy - semiosis/the epistemic cut - would be the way to fix physics as well.

Physics is at an impasse with quantum theory because it cannot offer a formal model of the observer that collapses the wavefunction. And semiotics is precisely that - a formal model of observers.

Has the symmetry always existed? — darthbarracuda

Silly question. You already know that my position isn't tied to a mechanical notion of time.

But you are ignoring the known distinction between dimensionless and dimensionfull physical constants.

So at the singularity, we are talking about the Planck triad of constants. And these are pure ratios that thus encode a naked reciprocal or dichotomous relation.

The singularity is thus not singular. It is not a dimensionless point. The very first moment of existence is already divided, even if that division is yet to be expresed. The symmetry is broken, even if it hasn't yet moved off from its own absolute symmetry.

So the basic dichotomy the Planck triad captures is that between spacetime extent and quantum action - the size of the container versus the density or temperature of its contents. At the Big Bang, these two aspects of physical being were "symmetric" - both at their material limit in terms of compactness. And the difference was pure, not something that could be measured in terms of some numbers that would speak of transcendent reference frames.

The stuff Rees was talking about was mostly the after the fact constants that emerged against the fundamental Plankian backdrop. And modern physics hope is to account for these also as pure mathematical constants that reflect further structurally inevitable symmetry breakings.

Is it a brute fact that the third category of vagueness is the land of no brute fact? — darthbarracuda

Don't be silly. It is a deduced fact. Just like the complementary notion of there being instead a first cause. Both derive from the axiom of sufficient reason. One just puts reasons in the past, the other puts them in the future.

So the mechanical view says there is some thing that exists. Therefore it must have a further thing sufficient to cause its existence.

My organicism instead acts from the observation that existence is always dichotomised. Therefore there must be a prior state in which such dichotomisation is dissolved. Symmetry breaking implies the symmetry that got broke. And so, following that logic through, we arrive at the ontic definition of a vagueness or Apeiron.

In actual fact, speculation about a purported first cause is still alive and well in the form of arguments about the fine-tuned universe.h — Wayfarer

Yep. The cosmology that captures the public's attention is exactly that which taps straight into the mechanical thinking that has become endemic via technology in modern society.

So of course multiverses, string landscapes, eternal recurrence, and so forth are what everyone talks about. It seems like the sort of thing science ought to be saying. Existence is utterly contingent. Structure can only be a cosmic accident.

So all you are pointing out is how far my organicism is from the populist mainstream that would find it easier to believe we all exist inside a Matrix simulation.

↪apokrisis But surely if something must be stopped, it must have begun before. Unless it is just a brute fact that something is the case, which sounds suspiciously like a — darthbarracuda

Hence the third category of vagueness - the land of no brute fact which can give rise to the yin and yang of mutually co-arising brute facts such as stasis and change.

So if there is a God present, it is the God of semiosis. Although I agree you would be quite justified to ignore it as existing. — Punshhh

Sorry. Gods that exist in ways that don't make a difference don't exist according to my definition of existence. So all you are doing is trotting out the modern theistic formula which seeks to avoid the cold hard facts of science by pretending cold hard facts can be both true and yet not really matter.

Which is why the only consistent position I could hold is that if God does in fact exist in ways that don't make a difference, then my metaphysics is holed below the waterline. No lame excuses.

If I don't accept lame excuses from theists, I can hardly accept them from myself.

How does one go about balancing the needs of the individual vs. the collective? — Nick Sousa

It starts by recognising that there are two complementary needs that both ought to be maximised. So the balance is about doing justice to both sides - both sides being inherently positives, and so that makes the calculation more complex than if one side is the positive, the other the negative.

So the two positive values - as recognised by standard social science - is the balancing of individual competition, or creative freedom, and global co-operation, or collective constraints. A flourishing system is rich both in integration and differentiation.

So the dynamic is easy to describe. It is what normal moral codes seek to achieve. And complexity theory would allow you to model it. It would be the basis of modern theories of community resilience or "third way" political reforms for example.

Yet Aristotle posited the Prime Mover... — darthbarracuda

And that didn't work out so well, did it? Modern physics finds itself dealing with the inverse issue of how to regulate the inherent dynamism (or indeterminacy!) of existence.

The problem is not starting "movement". It is stopping it. Regulating it. Structuring it.

If gods exists nothing would change, or be any different. — Punshhh

So could God have made circles simpler. Or even more complex?

And remember that in semiotic metaphysics, that which does not make a difference does not exist. So either your God has to make a difference or talk about him is meaningless noise.

Do you accept the necessity of a first cause? — darthbarracuda

For fuck's sake. Why would I accept the very thing that shows a mechanical model of causality is fatally flawed?

(And God-talk is of course all about pretending to have fixed the problem with incoherent hand waving and incantation.)

how does the existence of God disqualify your system? — darthbarracuda

My system - being all about material self-organisation - says there is no God. So His existence would be a terminal fact.

That's one of the advantages of my semiotic physicalism. It's not wishy washy on such matters like conventional physicalism.

If the territory the map covers is everything, then the map has to include itself - the map become a part of the territory. That's what makes me a little wary of all theories of everything, this kind of recursive implosion. — csalisbury

You will first note of course that Pattee is saying the map is an atemporal truth. It is the rate independent information or model used to constrain the rate dependent dynamics, ie: the world of material possibility.

And then why does the map have to include itself? Semiotics is expressedly about a modelling relation. It is irreducibly triadic in that regard. That is its major distinction from other more simplistic and familiar metaphysical frameworks.

So what semiotics talks about is the functional wholeness of a relation between map and territory.

You also have to respect the shift from epistemology to ontology. So if we are talking about ontic strength semiosis - as biosemiosis and pansemiosis do - then the map is actually in a relation that is adaptively making the world. It is not just a description (to be interpreted by a transcendent mind) but the act of interpretance itself by which a world is achieving crisp and stable existence.

You could think of the map more as a blueprint - an encoding of formal and final cause along the lines of a genome. It describes the landscape as it is meant to be.

So selfhood becomes the entire production - just as it is in standard biology. Selfhood is immanent in the modelling relation. And selfhood is only even possible due to there being the kind of semiotic epistemic cut that Pattee, following von Neumann, describes.

A scientific or metaphysical theory of everything would then - in the semiotic view - have that same character. It would be a "map" of the modelling relation, or sign relation, itself. It would be a representation of the fundamental algorithm of self-organisation if you like. So it would be speaking about physical existence in terms of emergent selfhood or universal individuation.

You fear the recursive implosion after I have advertised the advantages of what is in fact a recursive explosion - the open ended generativeness of a fundamental relation. But perhaps you can see that is not an issue now. Simplicity can beget complexity, but simplicity can't get simpler if it is already as simple as it is possible to get.

To use another analogy, a circle can be distorted in all sorts of ways to make more complicated shapes. But you can't get simpler than a perfect circle. So a circle doesn't suffer a recursive implosion. It instead emerges as the crisp asymptotic limit on any implosion.

Pleasure has a twisted way of tricking us into existential continuation. — darthbarracuda

That makes it the worst harm of all in my book. At least the others are honest harms. Pleasure is positively malicious. And without pleasure, how could we truly suffer?

Damn you to Hell happiness.

Either list some real harms or move on. — schopenhauer1

Laughter, children, orgasms, contentment, reaching the top of the mountain - these are all harms because they are all clever illusions and distractions momentarily interrupting our cultivation of a habit of pessimism, our proper philosophical appreciation that the root of all being is suffering.

Not necessarily — Punshhh

You're being kind. But of course it would mean that my position was complete nonsense. And worse still, according to your pet-keeping God metaphysics, I've been actively fooled about the nature of existence for the old fool's twisted pleasure.

So is this particular one now also on your list?

So pessimism isn't a harm? But what if being surrounded by it is one of life's great unpleasantnesses?

Did you mention pessimism?

Perhaps we will at some point start to pay some heed to what may be behind our veils and start to ponder the bigger picture. — Punshhh

Yep. If God exists, my metaphysics is utterly screwed.

Often what people want is not answers, but the illusion of solution to problems or fears... — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yep. Pomo in a nutshell.

It's a complexity which the lovers of structure cannot stand. — TheWillowOfDarkness

As usual, you are talking about someone else and not me.

My brand of structuralism is about accounting for the emergence of complex structure. So it is triadic in that it involves the hierarchical process of possibility encountering necessity and resulting in actuality. The messy real world in fact is an expression of simple needs that explain "everything".

What could be more chaotic than chaos? And yet what do we now know that has simpler generative rules?

So the wheel has turned again (while philosophy hasn't been watching) and the time reads "post-post-structuralism".

But I am extremely wary of Craig Venter and his ilk. — Wayfarer

And the biosemiotic crowd were the loud critics of Venter and genecentrism.

I mean that's why folk like Salthe and Pattee are practically invisible. Society is not set up to fund and honour those who explain why its most grandiose technological dreams are doomed to ecological failure.

Whereas the kind of approach I'm pursuing, is not actually trying to create an alternative or competing model, but to cultivate a different cognitve mode, or way-of-being. — Wayfarer

It would be great if we could all be happy and just get along. But as you know, my pan-semiotic view is that humans are secretly driven by the desire of fossil fuel to entropify. And you can't fix what you can't properly diagnose.

You live in Australia. Which country has better education? Which country is worse at greening its politics? So how the hell do you plan to cultivate a better collective mindset when it is coal-mining putting most of the dollars in your pocket?