Oh look, I mentioned the words 'mirror neurons' so I'm an arch-reductionist who must disagree with everything you just said. — StreetlightX

How do you live in the real world with such thin skin? But yes, you are being neuro-reductionist in your OP by going along with the idea that the evolution of the critical differences concerning the human mind are all biological mechanism rather than sociocultural, language-enabled, habits.

You might of course in fact agree with me on that further point. But it would be up to you say. Put your man pants on and give it a go.

No discussion of .... mirror neurons, etc. — StreetlightX

Speaking of shit sandwiches, that's a doozy from neuro-reductionism.

Sure, "mirror neurons" tell us something about embodied consciousness - the active construction of a self/world distinction. But introspective or self-conscious level awareness is a learnt cultural habit based on having the language skills to direct attention in a third person fashion.

Instead of simply being plugged in the world like an animal, we can distance ourselves from ourselves by forming an intervening habit of self-representation. "This is me in here having my thoughts, feelings and perceptions."

Putting a cherry on MU's shit sandwich isn't going to make it any more edible. — Baden

But I would have thought you would agree that TGW has been peddling the shit sandwich here.

The Vygotskian view is that it is indeed correct that introspective awareness is not a natural biological feature of brains/minds, but instead a socially and language scaffolded reflexive habit.

So we don't simply observe our pangs of hunger, we have to construct such an attentional state by way of learnt cultural concepts.

Of course there is something "in there" to be found. I've just checked in with my stomach and it tells me that although another part of me knows its lunchtime, it could take it or leave it another few hours. Yet I know from experience that as soon as I find something tasty leftover in the fridge, the gastric juices will start to flow and hunger pangs - being exactly that preparatory autonomic response - will appear.

So in a real sense, introspective awareness or self-consciousness does take the long way round to get there. It is a culturally evolved habit of thought that I need to master, a set of exterior concepts that I need to learn to apply in the right socially-approved way.

And in Philosophy of Mind, we all have to learn to introspect in a way that makes "qualia" seem a true thing. It's part of the induction process to be part of the club. People will laugh at you if you claim not to get the ineffability of the colour red, the smell of a rose, a pang of hunger, or the taste of a shit sandwich dressed with a cherry.

Indeed, I don't have sex out of sexual hunger, I do it out of habit. My sexual hunger only kicks in when that mechanism that compels me to have sex fails. Of course, the only problem with this is that my lack of sexual hunger means I can never perform, so I never actually end up having sex. Weird. — Baden

Maybe what's weird is these kinds of mechanical accounts of mentality - hunger or whatever as bare qualia.

If you are forever constructing local observables in this fashion, you will forever be failing to deal with the phantasmal thing that is the "self" - the supposed observer.

That is why if you are going to talk about a construct like "hunger", it would have to break with the notion of it being just "the pangs I experience right here and now". What is hunger when it is stretched out over the kind of temporal span of a habit? Is it a concept rather than a percept now? Is it some very dilute version of the much more occasionally intense thing?

What TGW actually wants to argue is as usual quite opaque. He evades close questioning. But the problems with any kind of qualia-based account of mentality are pretty self-evident. It simply shows how strong a grip a mechanical notion of causality has on the popular imagination.

So, as a philosophical axiom, we cannot just pick any axiom, it must be self-evident. We have evidence that objects are bounded, and "object" may be defined in such a way that an object is necessarily bounded, so we could pick an axiom such as "objects are bounded".

With respect to continuity though, as I stated earlier in the thread, that some aspect of reality is continuous, is implied through observations of reality, and inductive reason. Since it is implied, that some aspect of reality is continuous, this is not self-evident, we cannot pick continuity as an axiom. The assumption of continuity must be justified. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well self-evident is always going to be a suspect claim.

But anyway, are bounds not self-evidently continuous? So if there are (discrete) objects, then continuity is also an aspect of your axiom of object boundedness?

This is insane. — The Great Whatever

In fact MU points to problems for the position you want to promote.

Do we eat because we are hungry, because it is a habit, or because eating is pleasurable? Clearly if you want to promote some simplistic position here, you need to be able to show how you deal with this complexity of the issue.

I don't think material things are 'made of thought' whatever that might mean, they are by definition materially constituted. There is no-thing there, though, that is not in conceptual form; but that does not mean there is nothing, or even that there is a 'great unrepresented' there. — John

This is an issue which doesn't get enough attention.

Science has searched pretty hard for the material basis of being and what has it found? Matter is really energy. Energy is really a field. If you believe in inflation, that field is scalar and doesn't even start with direction or difference.

Form or structure we can get our head around. Materiality dissolves into bare action and then even ceases to have particular action according to science.

But "thinking like a crank" is just a subjective characterization. What does thinking like a crank consist in when it comes to psi researchers? You're not saying that thinking like a crank here means being open to the idea that psi might be a genuine phenomenon are you? — John

No. That's why I said sceptics could also be insincere about their apparent objectivity. So what I am talking about is the difficult thing of what it would mean to be open-minded yet common-sensical.

It is like Bayesian reasoning (or it is Bayesian reasoning). Given the laboratory results (or the general lack of them), how do you then quantify your state of belief. Can you live as though it is 99.9% unlikely there is such a thing as psi, yet not then jump to 100% certainty in your heart, if the literature supports a psi effect of 0.1%?

A sensible person is always seeking falsification of his strong beliefs in some sense. A crank does everything to avoid a confrontation with falsification.

There are other standard good habits of thought like Occam's razor - valuing the theories with the fewest moving parts. Not data-mining for significant results. And so on.

It is not that hard to say something objective about the difference in mental habits of cranks and sensible investigators as it turns out. Philosophy of science is rather focused on the issue.

And as I say, that is why I found parapsychology a good living example of rational inquiry in practice. It both showed what scientific rigour looks like (psi research being far tighter in its protocols than practically anything else - like for instance, pharmaceutical research) and also the social limits of that rigour (how far can you go in supporting a hypothesis that a positive result is the product of experimental fraud?).

the point that hunger doesn't tell us anything about any objects at all, not even our own bodies, — The Great Whatever

What if I feel hungry for something - like something sweet rather than savoury? We can be satiated on steak and yet still discover an appetite for chocolate mousse.

Your apparent suggestion that appetites lack objects doesn't square with experience. it seems classic reification in support of some dualistic or panpsychic conception of qualia.

The AC is often stated as the existence of a choice function. Are you sure you don't have another axiom in mind? I think the logical use of equality keeps things distinct in math generally, not just in set theory. — Hoo

What I have in mind is the assumption that you can just pick out individuals and throw them into different contexts freely. But what if that identity was contextual? It's like imagining being able to scoop a whorl of turbulence out a river with your bucket. So the AC shows that kind of assumption at work. But then all of maths pretty much assumes that.

How would it be established? Our most predictive/manipulative theory based on the real numbers? Or on geometric intuition of flow? — Hoo

Geometry always beats algebra for me. But note Michael Atiyah's view that the two are dichotomous and reciprocal. Geometry is manipulation in space and algebra in time. And anything describable in the one reference frame can usually be flipped over into the other, as with symmetry groups or Cartesian curves. So dialectics or duality applies right at the heart of mathematical development.

See:

https://web.math.rochester.edu/people/faculty/cmlr/Advice-Files/Atiyah-Mathematics.pdf

Still, I don't mean to be rude, just in case that's not clear. — Hoo

No worries on that score. I didn't take it that way because you are a very positive guy. Also, rudeness is part of the fun. It's all a game in the end. With ideas the winner hopefully.

I like the idea of the subject and object being disentangled (starting with neither in its purity), but who is this "we" that must talk about observers being themselves individuated? It's as if we always already "believe" in the "we" and the "I." — Hoo

Obviously the Pragmatic "we" - the community of minds that is the limit to rational inquiry (see Peirce).

So yes, I already believe in that "we" and also say that is the thought it should have here. In doing so, I am urging an opinion on you which I am claiming would the inevitable destination of clear thinking. And that method of thinking is also defined in the same fashion.

In the end, everything is recursive - the view we establish from inside the problem we want to describe as if we stood outside it. But that entails no paradox if it is measurably true we are achieving the purpose we had in mind.

If you, for instance, are locked into an identification with scientificity or investment in objectivity as the measure of a man, then, sure, this won't have much appeal. But this investment is optional. Imagine Beethoven at his piano. Was that objectivity? — Hoo

I get the need to caricature me as the dry-as-dust reductionist scientist to legitimate the otherness that would be your heroic and liberated, yet still dreadfully suffering, poet of nature. It is the quickest way for you to win the argument here. But it doesn't accord with the facts of how I live and think.

If I were to offer you a theory of the measure of a man, it would be all about a balanced life - so a fruitful mix of science and poetry, the objective and the subjective, if those are indeed the dichotomy to be balanced here.

Spiritual practices, drugs, music, fasting, etc., are usually aimed at value insights. — Hoo

Well I think those things might be fun but also bogus when it comes to insight about values.

If you want real insight like that, go help out at a homeless shelter or do some eco-system restoration. Seriously. Actually being involved with the world is the way to discover its values. The other stuff you mention is largely self-indulgence.

I'n not going to reply to this, because I don't think it matters — The Great Whatever

Is that you don't think, or you don't feel? Or that you don't think you should feel? :)

Sensible psychonauts, mystics, religious thinkers, and perhaps even sensible crackpots (although "sensible crackpots" sounds a bit odd) and sensible drunks in the gutter (are there any such?), don't make such kinds of claims; and that is precisely the point I have been trying to make. — John

I know what you mean. But the rub is in how you now define "sensible" in a fashion that is not how I'm defining it.

If there is no empirical way of telling the difference between the sensible mystics and the cranky mystics - as in listening to the way they talk as an example of "sensible" - then it becomes a distinction that makes no difference.

I used to spend a lot of time with psi researchers - because of the way the field is a living example of the edges of the scientific method. And really, in a formal setting with even its written accord between believers and sceptics, everyone could talk the sensible talk ... for a while. But eventually you learnt by their behaviour who was more honestly sensible, who was secretly still thinking like a crank.

And the sceptics could be the secret cranks at times too.

OK, then I guess I'm asking whether you think there is any biochemical system you could mess with in order to remove the capacity to have that "actual choice". I don't know, perhaps I'm missing some crucial point here? — John

It's up to TGW to make sense of that claim. My point is that in talking about "chemistry", he is misdirecting us from the formal cause to the material cause when dealing with the issue of "mind".

But why is it only so-called 'outer' observations, which may be collectively observed and confirmed, that are taken into account when it comes to inter-subjectively motivated, conducted and judged discussions about the nature of things, and not the 'inner' observations of meditators, or the intuitions of imagination? I think the answer is obvious; because the latter are not subject to easy corroboration, or even any of the kind of more or less universal corroboration, which is possible and demanded when it comes to empirical observations. — John

It is one thing to get involved in a social practice in a way that produces an experiential state of social value. It is another to then analyse that as phenomenology. At that point you must be able to justify a further epistemic method of inquiry. It is no longer good enough to "just experience it" because that experiencing itself involves the conceptualistion which is the social practice's culturally constructed frame.

Naked phenomenology is a pipe dream. Introspective states come already culturally legitimated. People think all kinds of wrong things about the way that they dream because that is the way they are told dreams are in stories about dreams, or movie recreations of dream states. You have to strip away such expectations and - scaffolded by other theories now - see those phenomenal states "for real" ... as much as they will ever be seen so nakedly.

But the very fact that we can have those kinds of experiences (and who that has not enjoyed many, and/ or temporally sustained, such experiences can know just how comprehensive and utterly convincing they may be?) might lead some to believe that, since they are not satisfactorily explainable in physicalistic causal terms, they 'come from somewhere else'. — John

People think they know the deep secrets of the universe when they are on drugs, in church, psychotic, crackpot, drunk in the gutter. Indeed, the psychotic and the crackpot are the most strongly convinced.

So you are being very defensive about meditation. But I'm not attacking it as something that is not good to do - anymore than I would say art has no value in life. And it is plainly better than drugs or psychosis as an altered state - for reasons that I would give based on a neuropsychological justification.

And you would probably too? Just as you would point to the pragmatic utility of LSD as a creative aid if push came to shove in a social setting - where the meaning of such trips is having to be culturally framed.

Now OK. You might in fact say that meditation connects you transcendentally with a spiritual plane beyond our material one. And now we are off the charts when it comes to empirically defensible mechanism.

Yet still, I would be left with the neuropsychological story about why meditation feels like it does and might do you good. And you would be left unable to demonstrate that it was in fact anything more.

It is like psi. If it exists, then produce it in the lab. Otherwise we can put coincidence down to coincidence. And you can continue to lose money at the casino while listening to your dreams or using your lucky numbers.

Are you saying that the "system of interpretance" is not underpinned by any biochemical system that you could mess with in order to disrupt it? — John

If an organism has the actual choice to overeat or starve itself, then the materiality, the chemistry, is not really the issue, is it?

As I see it, math is machine-like. "Here are formal definitions. Here are rules of inference. See how these definitions are related in terms of those rules of inference." The formal definitions tend to have intuitive appeal of course, but we're aren't allowed to use intuition directly. The ghost of intuition must be incarnated in the symbolism. — Hoo

That's right. Once you have axioms, you are good to go with the deductions. It all unfolds mechanically in a predestined fashion.

But what is the meta-theory about forming axioms - the semantic residue animating the unfolding syntax?

I would argue that it is dialectic or dichotomistic metaphysics. That is what presents us with our "binary" choices. We can posit the axiom of continuity - having identified it as one of two choices. Reality could be fundamentally discrete or continuous. Well, let's pick continuous for the sake of argument and run with that, see where it leads.

As I see it, the formal definition of "set" tries to capture the intuition of "gathering up into a unity." All things as things are unities. The tail and the nose and the fur and so on have been gathered up as the dog, for instance. It's as there is always already a logical circle drawn around any particular thing, perhaps giving it its thing-hood, cutting it out from the background automatically. But then sets are also (intuitively) the extension of properties, which surely inspired the axiom of extensionality. — Hoo

Well the relevant axiom is the axiom of choice. It starts by presuming individuated (crisp and not vague) things, events, properties, whatever. And given that is the case, forming collections becomes trivial in being trivially additive and subtractive. One can construct any unity (or deconstruct it to leave behind "nothing").

I think we get this from writing R as (-inf, inf). — Hoo

Or I would prefer to think of it in terms of the reciprocal limits defined by the notions of the infinite vs the infinitesimal. This is the strictest way of defining each limit on possibility in terms of its other.

Positive and negative infinity are hardly marking bounds in claiming to point in either direction in terms of the unlimited.

I'd stress feeling and imagination when it comes to Romanticism. — Hoo

Yep. Ghostly spirits. The essences that Newtonian mechanicalism so clearly leaves out.

Now of course Romanticism was also a retreat into vagueness about what exactly it might mean in this regard.

Theology had a perfectly substantial notion of souls and Gods. The Enlightenment undermined that concreteness in radical fashion. And so Romanticism was the retreat to talk about the ineffable, the sublime, the aesthetic, the personal, the existential, the ideal.

It all became fuzzy in a way that made it un-attackable by the reductionists. There was no longer any definite thesis to come under examination. A firm position on the realm of spirit was turned into a metaphysical waffle that evaded its pursuers.

Then there's irony and pluralism. Hegel griped about "The Irony" in his day, presumably in the name of the rigor of the concept. — Hoo

I think that is different - and more like Peirce's abduction. We can indeed retreat into vaguer states of conception with the self-conscious purpose of then making some new creative jump that might land in a better place.

So Romanticism I see as a refuge - a cloak of obscurity, an asking just to be left alone with a "mystery" that is more fun, more real, more whatever it takes to get serious questioning off its back.

But scientific reasoners use vagueness as a productive tool. An ironic stance to your own professed beliefs is a pre-condition for being able to start all over again in another direction. You have to be able to step back from your own current certainty to make another leap towards possibly more convincing certainty.

You can't be right unless you are prepared to be wrong. So the question for Romanticism is in what sense is it putting itself in a position that it could be shown wrong? In claiming the transcendent authenticity of personal feelings and imaginings, it just puts itself in a place where that becomes a social impossibility.

Although I'm not completely unromantic. As John argues, one can learn this social practice called meditation and find what that feels like. One can go to art galleries or watch the sun set. Culturally and psychologically, there is stuff that is important which is very human and a long distance from any cosmological-level discussion. So Romanticism as a movement makes great cultural experience. It speaks to that part of our lives.

But does it make great philosophy? I say no. It just isn't designed for that task. Although of course being a professional mystifyer in the form of a Continental academic is probably a quite gratifying kind of career if one is not really serious about cosmological issues. :)

I don't know if you're using math metaphorically here, but the compliment of S is going to be relative to some set X. If X = S, then, yeah, the empty set is its complement. To say that the empty set is both inside and outside of S is a bit of cheat. It's a subset of S but not an element of S (in general). I don't doubt that your getting at something interesting about rules for distinction, though. — Hoo

Set theory probably has the problem that it builds in the distinction SX hopes to derive. It's weakness is that its brackets that bound possibility are themselves so definite and unexplained as features of the world.

But there would be two ways of looking at this.

Either the brackets - {....} - exist in deus ex machina fashion as if someone outside constructed boundaries large enough to contain anything, and thus both everything and nothing (as the crisp complementary limits on vague anythingness!).

Or instead the brackets in fact just represent the simpler thing of being the emergent complementary limits on such a naked state of possibility. The brackets stand for the fact that possibility has its own inherent limits. In saying something is possible, everything and nothing, infinity and zero, already also exist in negative recursive fashion as now the places where everythingness and nothingness put a stop to somethingness.

So - and here is the difficult bit - the limits on being are precisely that which doesn't itself exist. A boundary is where reality stops. And so the boundary itself is unreal or non-existent - even if it seems to have brute causal presence in being "a limit".

This is why I objected to SX's idea of boundaries as something like a 1D line drawn across nature - a single dimensionless feature that somehow bisects reality to make it binary.

Instead - organically - the metaphysical-level logic is that of the dichotomy. The self-organisation that results in a system arising within its own opposing boundaries or limits. The crisp brackets of the set are formed as a result of the action arising within them. The contents are producing their own container - so as to be now definitely "the contents" rather than just vaguely that.

This would be why folk feel that category theory is a better foundation for maths than set theory. It has that embedded dichotomistic view in the mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive formulation of "structure and morphism". Instead of the container and contents metaphor, we have a organic distinction of constraints and freedoms, organisation and change.

So set theory could be naturalised by recognising the opposed brackets as standing for complementary poles of being - the opposed limits you need to arrive at to have the third thing of the individuated something that can now stand between.

It is then a further thing to give a name to these limits - to call them out as it were, even though they are by definition precisely what does not exist (even as possibility!). So we can speak about infinity, we can speak about zero, as concrete real things. Just as we can talk about all the metaphysical-strength limit states like the discrete~continuous, vague~crisp, stasis~flux, matter~symbol, chance~necessity, part~whole, atom~void, etc, as being real in their limit state unreality.

And that is very powerful from a modelling or reality-mapping point of view. Just look at 2500 years of Western intellectual history. But it also makes us prone to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness that the process view warns us of.

One last point on SX's idea of boundaries as just lines, he would do better to consider Spencer-Brown's diagramatic use of circles as the simplest shapes to form an inside vs an outside - a canonical act of digital symmetry-breaking. Or even better still, go further back to the source of those laws of form in Peirce's own diagramatic re-formulation of logic.

http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/papers/2002peirce.pdf

http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Peirce.pdf

The problem is of course that we don't just see external things at all to begin with: they are formed only as a coagulation of feelings, and we only come to individuate them insofar as we understand how that affect us, and so other people arise from a common pathetic source, and not as things that we must first see as rocks and then imbue with life force as we notice that they move like another kind of rock (our body, which we look at from the outside out, rather than the inside out). — The Great Whatever

The problem here would be that you simply set up an alternative dualism - the one of self and qualia instead of that of self and world. And so the problem is not dissolved. You are still talking about the observers of observables in a way that makes the observation as a process mysterious.

So solutions to this problem have to understand the self and its objects - ideal or real - in terms of a semiotic relation. The observer side of the equation must also be generalised (so that it no longer seems so mysteriously and ineffably particular). We must be able to talk about observers as something themselves individuated, rather than starting with them as some brute fact individuation.

You can starve or overfeed-to-death an organism by messing with the biochemical processes that make it feel appropriate hunger and satiation. — The Great Whatever

You mean biosemiotic, not biochemical. You have to mess with the signalling, the system of interpretance, not the material state that is the subject of some interpretation.

it seems to me our differences come down to whether or not one accepts or rejects pansemiosis. — StreetlightX

If you could demonstrate that you understood it, your rejection would be a lot more convincing.

Don't forget that I've always said biosemiosis is definitely something new in nature - the development of full-blown digital-strength symbolism to allow for autonomous systems within the Universe.

Physiosemiosis would be vaguer in just being analogic or iconic. And it would be even these in a vaguer sense as the interpreter is "the Universe" as a system - a material system without yet any symbol systems operating within it in their autonomous (not-A) fashion.

So pansemiosis - as Salthe works to define it - is simply the assertion that the Universe is self-organising and comes into existence as a global regulative habit. It is a view rooted in dissipative structure theory and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. Natural law is like the self-closure that is the eruption of constraining convection currents in a Benard Cell. Semiosis speaks to the formation of the negentropy or memory by which a Universe becomes its own vehicle for a generalised production of entropy.

Thus it seems in all these ways precisely a thesis that you would agree with. You would have to explain to me how it says something different in your view.

Remember also that the new thing is that the biophysics of the nanoscale has now empirically identified the physical point where a transition from physiosemiosis to biosemiosis can happen - or indeed, is inevitable. I wrote that up in this thread - http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/the-biophysics-of-substance-70736.html

So now we have identified a convergence point where material being has a critical instability - an edge of chaos cusp of order~disorder - that allows "digitality" in a physically real sense.

A problem with your highly abstracted exposition is that you make a huge mystery of how the digital cut can be imposed on the analog world - the slice that cuts the cake. Somehow the cake breaks apart as intended without your knife physically doing anything - waving it wishfully or threateningly suffices.

Your use of Wilden's computer analogy encourages this. A computer has just this kind of symbolic disconnection from the world. The software is granted the security of utterly stable hardware and so doesn't have to think anything about its operation. Whereas with life, and semiosis generally, the situation is the precise opposite. It is all about the regulation of a fundamental instability, a fundamental vagueness. And the more on the cusp of the edge of chaos things are, the greater also the semiotic range of regulative possibilities. (Have you ever read Scott Kelso for example? - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/dynamic-patterns)

So despite the fact you normally claim to be an enactivist, in this thread you have argued from the basis of representationalism - analog and digital computation both being ways to represent the world. And so any digital cut remains virtual rather than actual. The computer can click and whir away doing its digital or analog thing and it makes no bloody difference to the world unless somebody - usually a human - takes notice of its syntactical mapping and treats it as a sign of something about the world.

Semiosis - like enactivism - says that is ridiculous. The digital cut has to be a real cut out in the world. The cake must be sliced - or at least nudged just enough for it to reorganise itself into two parts because it was on the cusp of just such an entropic bifurcation.

So this is the mystery that semiosis solves.

The regular mechanical way of looking at the world presumes that the ground of any hierarchical complexity must be rock solid stable. You have to have something crisp and definite - like atoms - to begin any construction work. The cake is there and is never going to cut itself because cakes have had any such dynamism or self-organisation baked out of them. And all that makes it a real material mystery how any amount of symbolic activity - analog or digital computation - is going to make a difference. The cutting can be imagined, yet where is the power to execute?

But the self-organising semiotic view of the world says instead that you get these major transition zones due to criticality. Now reality is as unstable as it can be - suspended between two states. And the slightest nudge can tip it in either direction. So there is a digitality inherent in the material state (it can distinctly go in either direction just due to spontaneous fluctuations). And then that digitality can be made extrinisic by a symbol system which retains only the slightest physical presence in that world. A system of signs can compute where and when cake self-cutting should happen. Then deliver the almost infinitesimal physical nudge that tips the balance.

So first the physical world does its bit by presenting the potential - some point of absolutely poised instability. And then a minimal bit of physical machinery - a nudging mechanism controlled by as much background symbolic computation as you like - can exploit that eminently controllable situation.

Thus the digital cut imposed in recursive fashion via a negative mark (a pointing towards whatever state a biifurcation happens not to be in) is no longer the kind of virtual phantom act it must be in your framing of things, it now has an actual physicality. It has a size. Indeed it has the particular universal scale now discovered by biophysics.

So I know you think you reject pansemiosis, Salthe, vagueness, and indeed anything that I might mention that you are not already familiar with. But really you are just in the process of getting there.

And one of the presumptions you might not realise you have been making is that existence must be founded in the stable, when the whole point of any view founded on process thinking - such as enactivism - is that it is instability which makes the very idea of regulation possible in the world.

I think that is just what people have been doing for centuries; I'm just not convinced that subsequent scientific advances bestow any improved ability to do it, in fact they may well get in the way. — John

We weren't exactly expecting quantum indeterminism, but science found that. Just like science found Newtonian determinism and Boylean atoms 500 years ago and metaphysics spent a very long time being shook up by what that seemed to imply for everything.

Is there any fundamental conceptual advance that science hasn't delivered - even if it is in the guise of an antithetical reaction provoked by that very conceptual advance?

The only problem for your view seems to be that whatever philosophical implications we might think are inherent in the maths cased science cannot themselves be expressed in mathematical language. — John

Why do you say "cannot" as if a no-go theorem applied. ;)

But I'm not really saying that the truths of maths or logic can only be articulated in an absolutely general syntax of operators and variables. We can use ordinary (technical) language to talk through the equations with more semantic background. We can translate to a certain extent back downwards, just as we can abstract from ordinary speech towards a mathematical expression.

So some kind of translatability is presumed. All scientists, metaphysicians and mathematicians have a native language through which they were introduced steadily to some domain of high abstraction.

But then something important still usually feels lost in translation when they have to go from abstractions back to words. And what is lost is the clarity gained by abstracting from words to abstractions.

I think it is just here where have nothing more than intuition to rely on. Anything we might believe regarding "prime matter, pure potential, unformed possibility, uninterpreted existence" will be the result of a groundless (in the empirical or logical sense) leap of faith. — John

Why can't we apply rational argument in the way that I have done to arrive at some image of the unsayable and unthinkable?

I agree following that path is what is difficult - the most extreme abstraction. But also its seems obvious that intuition doesn't even make a start because whoever has spontaneously intuited the notion of vagueness in your experience?

When talking about things, like the creation of existence or prime matter, normal folk only apply "intuitions" like something can't come from nothing, everything has a reason, causes precede effects, etc.

In other words, normal folk are only going to continue to think about foundational issues using the same mechanistic habits of logic that have been drummed into them by Western enlightenment culture - a culture evolved to build machines. Or else they are going to default to the antithesis to that - Romanticism and its idealist causality, a world moved by ghostly spirits.

I would instead say that maths is a branch of logic. It's a specialized form of logic, and that's what makes it so precise. But the same thing which makes it so precise, its speciality, also limits its scope, or range of applicability. — Metaphysician Undercover

Either way, the point is that they are the development of a more abstracted level of language. And increased precision doesn't have to mean a lesser scope. Quite the opposite in fact. Greater generality and greater particularity go together here.

So if you carry out a scientific method of empirical observation which deals only with measurements, quantities, then the qualities which cannot be measured are neglected. — Metaphysician Undercover

More nonsense. Science talks about qualities in a maximally abstract fashion - notions like time, space, energy, information, entropy. And it is that clarity about qualities that engenders clarity about quantification.

Again, I beg to differ. I am not calling for a more primitive mode of reasoning, I am calling for a less narrow minded form of observation. — Metaphysician Undercover

...and ignoring Occam's razor. There is a good reason for wanting to quantify reality using the least number of qualitative concepts.

But if you consider, as I suggested, that there are qualities within the world that we haven't got the capacity to measure as quantities, then to understand those qualities, we need to proceed with observations which are not measurements. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you have a list of these unmeasurables in mind? I guess it consists of the usual things like poetry and spirit; the mind, the divine, the meaningful, the aesthetic; beauty, good and truth.

You see I reach a different conclusion when we arrive at such abstractions without apparent ways to quanitify them - except by socio-cultural appeals to "look inwards and experience their phenomenological reality". To me, this shows we just don't have a philosophical-strength understanding of what we want to talk about.

That form and material are distinct was all the point I was making to Terrapin. — Mongrel

Perhaps you could restate what exactly it might be that you are keen to discuss. Seems like you are channeling Banno at the moment. :)

What I am getting is that there is the usual hylomorphic issue when it comes to thinking of substantial being. We only know being when it is formed into some thing. And thus the notion of unformed being becomes deeply "other".

Somehow the stuff that accepts the form must be some kind of already formed material itself, and yet we just said that can't be. And so the "prime matter" becomes something itself immaterial - lacking the very definiteness we require of materiality. The material part of the substantial equation turns into something more akin to becoming - a potential to be.

So when talking about wax, we can try to talk about the matter that endures or is conserved as a kind of proper material stuff by saying its all still just a bunch of atoms. The arrangement is different - a candle stick vs a wax puddle. Or we could enlarge the view and talk about the entropy change that makes a (less materialistic) material difference. In some sense, a potential has been spent. Some part of what was an orderly candle with its waxy energy bonds has been dissipated in the light and heat that helped melt the rest of it into the more entropic form of a waxy puddle.

Yet still, atoms are a formed kind of stuff. Even energy is a formed kind of stuff - electromagnetic radiation or some other such thing. We still haven't drilled down far enough to hit bottom and discover what matter is once its formal clothing has been stripped away to leave it standing bare.

As we were discussing earlier, even randomness is only conceivable in the guise of already formed material patterns - possibility not naked, but corralled by boundary conditions to give it statistical regularity.

Sorry to be boringly repetitive, but it is precisely these considerations that lead me eventually mentioning vagueness as the primary material principle here.

In some way - some way that we would have to make metaphysically good on - the deepest level of materiality would be unbound action. Unlimited fluctuation. Energy unrestrained by dimension. Chaos without boundaries.

Talking about the world in terms of constrained form is easy. Imposing further rational pattern on found substantial actuality of the physical world is something that has become second nature to Homo mechanicus.

But conceiving of prime matter, pure potential, unformed possibility, uninterpreted existence, is at the opposite end of metaphysics - the hardest and last thing we would do.

I explained the alternative, it involves first, the recognition that our measurement techniques are inadequate for measuring some aspects of the world, in particular, the aspects associated with the assumed continuum. So we need to go back to a method of focusing on description rather than measuring. — Metaphysician Undercover

In the act of describing, the digital method (rules of logic) is applied to the tool of description, language. In the act of measuring, we tend to believe that the digital method is applied directly to the thing being measured, but this is an illusion. In reality, the limitations of the digital method have been incorporated into the language of measurement. The result is that any observations that are measurements, are necessarily theory-laden, due to the restrictions which are inherent within the measurement system. That is the position to which science has progressed today. — Metaphysician Undercover

So basically you want to use words not maths. And my point is that there is a reason why maths is where we arrive. Logic is itself a branch of maths in its highest state of development you realise?

So first you are not talking about a different method of reasoning and measurement, just advocating for a less crisply developed level of reasoning and measurement.

And then it is not as though I am saying there are no dangers in a more abstract level of discourse about nature. We are in some sense starting to work blind - allowing our formal tools to take over the job of explaining nature.

But this is the way things have gone because pragmatically they have worked. Maths is unreasonably effective as they say. Reality is surprisingly intelligible.

So your call to a more verbal and "picture in the head" level of metaphysical exploration is not actually an alternative method, just a return to a more primitive mode of scientific reasoning.

Now there is no harm in doing some of that too. That is the way we would expect to start to develop some actually fresh insight which - if it works out - could be properly mathematised. But in being a preliminary activity, it wouldn't replace the higher level of abstraction that mathematical discourse can attain. It is not an "alternative" in that sense.

So which is it - do vague and crisp map on to analog and digital or do they not? If they do, in what sense can you claim that the analog/digital distinction is derivative from vagueness (circularity). If they don't, you're back to mythology. — StreetlightX

The answer is the same as before. When we are talking about the ontology of a modelling system, we have two realms in play - the material and the symbolic. And the vague~crisp can apply as a developmental distinction in either. And indeed to the modelling relation as a whole. The vague~crisp is about a hierarchy of symmetry-breakings, a succession of increasingly specified dichotomies.

So in the symbolic realm, a vague state of symbolism is indexical. A still vaguer state is iconic.

If you say "look, a cat", that 's pretty definite. If you point at a cat, I might be a little uncertain as to exactly what your finger indicates. If you make mewing and purring noises, I would have to make an even greater guess about the meaning you might intend.

So as I argued using the example of the wax cylinder, informational symmetry breaking can be weak because it is easily reversible - still strongly entangled in the physics of the situation - or it can be strongly broken in being at the digital end of the spectrum and thus as physics-free as possible.

If I were to say "look, the universe", then physically the words involve no more effort that talking about a cat. But pointing gets harder, and pantomiming might really work up a sweat.

But then any form of communication or representation has already crossed the epistemic cut Rubicon in creating a memory trace of the world and so made the step to being physics-free. So even vague iconicity is already crisp in that sense. And thus there is another whole discussion about how the matter~symbol dichotomy arose in nature. And a further whole discussion about whether the abiotic world - with its dissipative organisation - has pansemiotic structure, and so this notion of "digitality" as negatively-self reflexive demarcation (or the constraint of freedom) has general metaphysical import there.

We can see that discrete~continuous is just such a general metaphysical dichotomy - the two crisp counter-matched possibilities that would do the most to divide our uncertainty about the nature of existence. And I would remind you of your opening statement where you said this was all about a generic metaphysical dichotomy that applied to all "systems"....

Broadly speaking, one can speak of two types of systems in nature: analog and digital. — StreetlightX

So that sweeping claim is what I have been addressing. And my argument is that when it comes to reality as a system, it is just the one system - formed by dividing against itself perhaps.

This is why I find your exposition confused - although also on the right track. So I tried to show that to resolve the dualism implicit in your framing here, we have to ascend to Peircean triadic semiosis to recover the holism of a systems' monism. We have to add a dimension of development - the vague~crisp - so as to be able to explain how the crisply divided could arise from some common source.

Your opening statement would be accurate if it made it clear that you are talking about symbolic systems or representational systems - systems that are already the other side of the epistemic cut in being sufficiently physics-free to form their own memory traces and so transcendently can have something to say about the material state of the world.

But instead you just made a direct analogy between analog~digital signal encoding in epistemic systems and continuous~discrete phenomena in ontic systems.

Now again, there is something important in this move. It has to be done in a sense because the very idea of a physical world - as normally understood in its materialistic sense - just cannot see the further possibility of semiotic regulation, the new thing that is physics-free memory or syntax-based constraints. So you can't extract symbols from matter just by having a full knowledge of physical law. As you/Wilden say, the digital, the logical, the syntactical, appears to reach into the material world from another place to draw its lines, make its demarcations, point to the sharp divisions that make for a biinary "this and a that".

So saying in a general metaphysical way that the material world is analog, and the digital is sprung on this material world from "outside itself" as a further crisply negating/open-endedly recursive surprise, is a really important ontological distinction.

But then confusion ensues if one only talks about the source of crispness and the fact of its imposition, and neglects to fit in its "other", the vagueness which somehow is the "material ground" that takes the "formal mark" of the binary bit. Or even the analog trace.

So to talk generically about reality as a system - which indeed is a step up from process philosophy in talking about symbol as well as matter, hierarchy as well as flow - is where we probably agree in a basic way. Structuralism was all about that. Deconstructionism was also about that - in the negative sense of trying to unravel all symbolic distinctions. Deleuze was about that I accept.

But again, the metaphysics of systems is always going to be muddy without being able to speak about the ontically vague - Peircean Firstness, Anaximander's Apeiron, the modern quantum roil. Sure we can talk about grades of crispness - iconic vs indexical vs symbolic. But to achieve metaphysical generality, we have to be able to define crispness (computational digitality, or material substantiality/particularity/actuality) in terms of what crispness itself is not.

And to return to your OP.....

A few quite important things follow from this, but I want to focus on one: it is clear that if the above is the case, the very notion of identity is a digital notion which is parasitic on the introduction of negation into an analog continuum. To the degree that analog systems do not admit negation, it follows that nothing in an analog system has an identity as such. Although analog systems are composed of differences, these differences are not yet differences between identities; they are simply differences of the 'more or less', or relative degrees, rather than 'either/or' differences. — StreetlightX

...this is where your keenness to just dichotomise, and not ground your dichotomy as itself a developmental act, starts to become a real blinkering issue.

Analog signals are still signals (as Mongrel points out). They are differences to "us" as systems of interpretance. An analog computer outputs an answer which may be inherently vaguer than a digital device, but did use to have the advantage of being quicker. And also even more accurate in that early digital devices were 8 bit rather than 16 bit or 64 bit - or however many decimal places one needs to encode a continuous world in floating point arithmetic and actually draw a digitally sharp line close enough to the materially correct place (if such a correct place even exists in a non-linear and quantumly uncertain world).

So whether variation or difference is encoded analogically or digitally, it already is an encoding of a signal (and involves thus a negation, a bounding, of noise). Then while the digital seems inherently crisp in being a physics-free way to draw lines to mark boundaries - digital lines having no physical width - in practice there still remains a physical trade-off.

The fat fuzzy lines of analog computing can be more accurate at least in the early stages of technical development. The digital lines are always perfectly crisply defined whether they use 8-bit precision or 64-bit precision - this is so because a continuous value is just arbitrarily truncated (negated) at that number of decimal places. But that opens up the new issue of whether the lines are actually being dropped in the right precise place when it comes to representing nature. Being digital also magnifies the measurement problem - raises it now to the level of an "epistemic crisis". Ie: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

So it just isn't good enough to say analog signals can be signals without the need for negative demarcation and the open-ended recursion that allows. A bell rings a note - produces a sine wave - because vibrations are bounded by a metal dome and so are forced to conform to a harmonic whole number. Identity or individuation does arise in analog processes - in virtue of them being proto-digital in their vaguer way.

Yes, this is a complication of the simpler starting point you made. It is several steps further down the chain of argument when it comes to a systems ontology. And as I say, you/Wilden are starting with a correct essential distinction. We have to pull apart the realms of matter and symbol to start to understand reality in general as a semiotic modelling relation with the power to self-organise its regular habits.

But for some reason you always get snarky when I move on to the complexities that then ensue - the complexities that systems ontologists find fruitful to discuss. The vague~crisp axis of development being a primary one.

In other words, you can't have your cake and eat it too: if you insist that the analog/digital distinction is made at the level of digital mapping to begin with, the projection of a more primordial ground of vagueness is simply that: a mythological projection that doesn't abide by the very epistemological constraints you ought to be beholden too. — StreetlightX

Weird. The definition of vagueness is that it is the "not yet digitised". Vagueness is that state of affairs to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. And thus it stands orthogonal to crispness, the state where A/not-A are busy doing their logically definite thing.

So in a set theoretic sense, the vague~crisp is the superset here. As I said earlier, it is Peircean thirdness in incorporating the whole of the sign relation - the three levels of logic that would be vagueness, particularity and generality. A/not-A is just the digital crispness which is secondness, or the logic of the particular.

I was talking about representation. How do you see that being related to randomness? — Mongrel

I still don't get you. All I said was that we can surely have representations of randomness. When I look at TV snow, my interpretation is that I'm staring at "white noise". I see it positively as a characteristic natural pattern, a form, and so it is not uninterpreted or unrepresented.

I don't think uninterpreted means random. — Mongrel

No idea how that is a response to anything I said.

It is a mistake to think that the world must fit within our systems of measurement, the "bounds" which we imposed. We must adapt our systems of measurement, shape them to the world. But even this requires a preliminary understanding, which cannot be given by measurement because the system for measurement will be created based on this understanding. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well if all this is a mistake, what is your alternative? Can you even define your epistemic method here?

The Peircean model of scientific reason says yes, we have to begin with just a guess, a stab at an answer. And a good stab at an answer is one that tries rationally to imagine the limits that must bound that answer. That is what gives us a reference frame from which to start making actual empirical measurements. And from measurement, we can construct some history of conformity between the thing-in-itself and the way we think about the thing-in-itself. So retrospectively, any founding assumptions, any rational stabs in the dark which got things started, are either going to justified or rejected by their own empirical consequences. If they were in fact bad guesses, experience will tell us so. And contrariwise.

Importantly (and something that goes to the analog~digital distinction as SX, channelling Wilden, has defined it), this also means that the model doesn't have to end up looking anything like what it is suppose to "represent".

I think what troubles you is this apparent loss of veridicality. You want the kind of knowledge of the world that is literally analogic - an intuitive picture in the head. If someone is talking about atoms, you want to see a reality composed of billiard balls rattling around a table. If someone talks about development, you want to see a point moving along a drawn timeline, the future steadily moving backwards to become the past as intervals of the present get consumed.

But higher order understanding of the world is different in being digital. It throws away the material variation to leave only the digital distinctions - the description of the boundaries or constraints, the description of the rate independent information in the shape of eternal or timeless laws and constants.

So semiotic modelling is this curious thing of not being a re-presentation of what actually exists in all its messy glory. Instead, it is a boiling down of reality into the sparseness of abstraction entrained to particularity - the semiotic mechanism of theory and measurement.

Sure, it is still nice to picture billiard balls, waves, timelines, and all kinds of other analogic representations of the thing-in-itself. But the digital thing is all about giving that kind of re-presentation up. In the extreme it becomes the kind of instrumentalism that SX would find disemboddied and "un-aesthetic". One may find oneself left simply with a syntax to be followed - a mathematical habit - which works (it makes predictions about future measureables) and yet for the life of us, we can't picture the "how". That's pretty much where the Copenhagen Interpretation ended up with quantum mechanics.

So the Peircean/digital/semiotic approach to modelling the thing-in-itself is both cleanly justified in terms of epistemology, and also never going to deliver quite what you probably think it should. This is why whenever I talk about vagueness, you always just keep saying tell me about it again in a way that is not purely rational but instead gives me a picture I can believe inside my head.

But sorry, that is what it means for modelling to be embodied, or meaning to be use. We have to head in the direction of extreme mathematical-strength abstraction so as to be able in turn to make the most precise and telling acts of measurement - to also digitise experience itself as acts of countiing, a harvesting of a field of symbols.

You equate intelligible with measurable. But measurable is restricted by our capacity to measure. A thing is only measurable in so far as we have developed a way to measure it. However, a thing is intelligible to the extent that we have the capacity to describe it, and description does not require measurement. — Metaphysician Undercover

So just as I say, you yearn for analog iconicity - a concrete picture in your head that you can stand back and describe ... as if such a representation were the thing-in-itself floating veridically before your eyes.

Pragmatism says that is a Kantian pipedream. A picture in your head is just going to be a picture. What actually matters - the only thing that in the end you can cling onto - is the functional relationship you can build between your model of existence, and the control that appears to give you over that existence. And the digital is stronger than the analog in that regard because it decisively erases unnecessary details. It can negate the real in a way that makes for the most useful map of the real.

And we all know how a map bears bugger all material resemblance to the physical reality of the territory-in-itself. But who complains about a map of a country having "unreal" properties like being small and flat enough to fold up in your back pocket?

Where there is the perception of noise, is there necessarily an accompanying idea of the uninterpreted... the unrepresented? IOW... is that the form associated with noise... the formless? — Mongrel

This is a fascinating issue. Can we conceive of "pure randomness"? Even white noise has a structure. — Hoo

Hoo is right. Even noise has form. Any model of randomness still depends on identifiable boundary conditions. So noise comes in many colours - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise

So in an ontological sense, randomness comes in different varieties that speak to different states of global constraint. Randomness is an actual pattern. And "pure randomness" would be something "actually patternless" - what I would define as a vagueness (which is pretty unpicturable).

But then there is a further question of how good are we are psychologically at distinguishing the various shades of randomness in the world? And of course mostly we are quite bad because we are untrained in this level of pattern recognition. Or to put it another way, mostly in life it doesn't really matter.

Also our perceptual equipment has its own signal processing biases - like an increased sensitivity to noises in the range of spoken speech which "distorts" the bare physical pattern of energies the world might be producing. So to see types of randomness in their "wild state", we would have to somehow cancel out that kind of inbuilt perceptual bias.

Thus in a general way, we are seeing patterns that are really there in nature when we dismiss something as just "random noise". But as patterns, they are also patterns with the least possible meaning or message. In paying attention to randomness as itself "a perceptual thing" - a field of activity like the crackling sound of white noise, or the restless firing of static on an old vacuum tube TV screen - we are thinking about precisely that which we are normally set-up to filter out. We are representing as present what we would normally want to suppress and render absent. We are making meaningful what is usually interpreted in terms of a generalised lack of significance - a collection of differences that precisely don't make a difference.

As I've said quite a few times now, the distinction between the digital and the analog is quite precisely defined by the presence of negation and self-reflexivity. — StreetlightX

You are merely choosing to highlight the bit I already agree with in general fashion. From a biosemiotic viewpoint, that states the obvious.

But what I have been pointing out is that your framing of the issues lacks the further dimensionality that would allow it to be actually developmental in the way a process view needs to be. Your way of talking about the continuum or the analog is fuzzy over the issue of fuzziness. You talk about the analog/continuum as being itself crisply existent (a realm of actualised material being), and then at other times you talk about it as a ground for further development - the less specified basis for the discrete/digital machinery that transcends it so as to have a view of it.

Of course in your confusion, that becomes the confusion you accuse me of. I'm just patiently taking you back to the source of symmetry-breaking to show how both continuity and discreteness co-arise from pure vagueness. And analog~discrete would have arisen as modes of communication or representation in the same fashion.

As I have said, it is important that the analog or iconic representation already exists on the other side of the epistemic cut - on the side of the symbolic or "rate independent informatiion". It is a distinction made at the level of the mapping, even if it means to be talking about a distinction in the (computational!!) world.

And because you set off in the OP to say something logically concrete about metaphysics, you can't just gaily presume that what is true of the map is true of the territory. That further part of the argument must be properly supported.

Either you don't understand that or you simply want to avoid the issue.

So it is fruitless to keep trying to return me back to Wilden's perfectly acceptable 1970s analysis of the distinction between analog and digital computation. You know I agree with that.

The interesting question is then the ontological or metaphysically-general one of how does that fact about representative modes change our conception of nature itself? What new vantage point does it give us for dealing with the central questions of process philosophy, like the mechanics of development and individuation.

A difference that makes a difference can be described analogically or digitally, represented in terms of what it is, or what it is not. But that does not yet get at the deeper question of how representation itself arises (via an epistemic cut), nor how bare difference arises (as an ontic symmetry breaking).

This is a very real issue, especially with terms of ontological or metaphysical significance. We have a conception of future and past for example. This conception models these two as pure opposition. Take a point, on one side of that point is past, the other side is future. We could build a massive epistemic structure on a conception like this. The problem is, that in the real world, and common understanding of future and past, there is an implied necessary temporal priority, past has gone by, and future is yet to come. The conception, of pure opposition, two sides of a point, fails to take this into account. Therefore any conceptual structure built on this concept is completely illusory, it fails to take into account what we are really referring to when we use the words "future" and "past". — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not sure what you think I'm arguing here. It has been my point that we impose our frameworks of intelligibility on the world.

But then a dialectic or dichotomous logic ensures that this process is rigorous. In being able to name the complementary limits on possibility, we have our best shot at talking about the actuality of the world, as it must lie within those (now measurable) bounds.

So if you want to talk about "time", then it is only going to be an intelligible notion that we can project onto reality in a measurable fashion to the degree we have formed a crisply dichotomous model of it.

For example, the classical conception of time and change developed by the dividing off of stasis and flux, being and becoming. Then space and time became a division of dimensions - if you imagine existence in terms of straight lines, then you can imagine points travelling along the lines so that first they were here, later they were there.

Both relativity and quantum theory have since shown space and time are not so distinct and we are back to having to include energy - as the thermal source of any change - in the spatiotemporal picture. The rate of time can be relativistically bent by energy density. Time and energy form a dichotomistic uncertainty relation in quantum theory. Both even challenge the notion of before and after. Relativity permits wormholes in time. Quantum theory appears to demand some form of retrocausaliity to explain quantum eraser experiments.

So we have a variety of ways of thinking about time - all of them models that try to impose some kind of fundamental dichotomy that would make time an intelligible, and thus measurable, concept of the thing-in-itself.

A logic of vagueness is a further such modelling exercise. And while I might employ familiar (causal) notions like before and after, or earlier and later, to talk about semiotic development, clearly I do so in a new context - one in which any more traditional notion of temporal co-ordinates is itself going to be emergent.

And as I say, this is not wild metaphysical hand-waving. It is where Big Bang cosmology has led. The Planck scale encodes a dichotomous or reciprocal relation between spacetime and energy density now. Planck spacetime is h x G/c, while Planck energy density is h x c/G.

So a quanta of existence - the fundamental unity that the triadic Planck relation expresses - encodes a dichotomously matched pair of limits.

If we think of it geometrically, spacetime is extremitised by being flat. It becomes changeless, featureless and energyless by becoming maximally stretched out in Euclidean fashion. And then energy density or change is extremitised by being hyperbolically curved or maximally fluctuating. Instead of spacetime lying flat and even with itself, now every point is pointing away from such a dimensionally regular state. It all wants to break apart in every possible "direction" as quick as it can.

So now that view of things is thermal and allows us to understand "time" as a (dichotomous) contrast between a backdrop flatness (a Universe that has developed to become generally large and cold) and a localised curvature (the patchy clumps of energy density represented by spacetime-bending "stuff" like nebulae gas clouds, stars, planets, atoms, blackholes).

And matter is now the source of a further temporal dichotomy (one born of the symmetry breakings of particle physics) because it introduces the new possibility of an energy density that moves about at less than lightspeed. It now "takes time" to move about because action no longer has the vanilla rate of c, the vanilla rate of radiation. Mass is instead operating within the new symmetry-breaking, the new dialectical limits, of absolute rest and lightspeed.

So the whole notion of time - in its familiar Newtonian sense - is something that has to develop via a succession of symmetry-breakings. The kind of time you are talking about did have a prior history in which it was a different (less differentiated, and thus more vague) kind of time for quite a long time. :)

Then we might be inclined to say something ridiculous like neither one of these is prior to the other, they are co-dependent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why would it be ridiculous? Is it because the present seems necessarily prior to either the past or the future in your definition of time here?

It's 2016. — MrAntigone

Hmm. Why am I getting the impression this is about as good as it is going to get regarding your grasp of the facts? :)

Agamben seems to me to think the capacity for violence has something to do with political sovereignty. And I said: The United States seemingly has a lot of capacity for violence bound up with its "superpower" status. — MrAntigone

The critical issue here seems not about having a capacity for violence but creating collective ownership of that capacity. And the right framework for analysis would be the usual social science one of a social system having to balance the fruitful tensions of competition and cooperation.

So the cornerstone assumption is that a healthy system is one in which local competition flourishes, yet the whole is regulated in long term fashion by institutionalised constraints. People should have as much individual freedom as possible, but be ruled by collectively sensible laws.

A capacity for violence/sovereignty would be judged against that general dynamic. Should individuals at their whim have ownership of violent actions? Well we let people slash away at their gardens mostly as they please. Or blow up the world on their computer games. Or get acceptable rough in the realms of competitive sport or the competitive market place.

But then there is ultimately a need to collectively regulate violence - naked competition - at the cooperative level of being. We have to create rules to govern marketplace or sports field behaviour.

The cooperative top-level of social order used to span just tribes, then races and faiths. Now we have nations and ideologies claiming this level of sovereignty - a top down control over its people, but together with now a competitive attitude, a willingness to use violence, against rival nations or ideological groupings.

So the logic is that as the world become connected at this level, the job is not done. We need something like a United Nations to take ownershIp of the capacity for collectivised violence in the name of all the folk of the planet.

When someone like the US wants to go off an invade some oil fields, impose a little home-spun ideology on the heathen natives, it ought to be licenced by a higher form of sovereignty.

Of course achieving this level of social integration seems a long way off - although the theory of it is completely accepted by many. So having the US as the global military superpower, the self-appointed world cop, is better than every other available alternative.

It is because the US is on the whole is likely to act for the general good that it is safest to put the ownership of international violence largely in its hands. We can see that the self interests of the US align with our general democratic theory of how to run any flourishing society.

So the capacity for violence is really a local competive freedom - potential of individual actors. What should emerge at the global collective scale of social organisation is the capacity for regulation of violence - a state level capacity for setting its acceptable boundaries. Unfortunately that regulatory action itself can be pretty violent - a symptom of weak democracy. And also notions of sovereignty can see a national capacity for violence being directed against competing stakes.

So theory would say a well balanced society was one in which the level of roughness felt generally appropriate. Violence is always going to be part of the equation as competition is basic to the social dynamic. But cooperation is the other half of the story. So that aims to be a force for smoothness, without wanting to tip things over the other way in the direction of stagnation, blind habit and blandness.