I hesitated to reply to Peter's Jones' challenging remarks, for I'm not sure I understood his points. But since he addresses me, I suppose I am obliged to do so.

> To me it seems that Lily Chung's post speaks of non-action. This would not be the opposite of struggle but, rather, neither struggle nor non-struggle.

Jones may be right. If struggle and non-struggle imply agency, then another relation could be that of conformity or its opposite, non-conformity. The former is a dynamic relation of agents, while the latter is a knowledge that informs action, whether or not an action is rational in relation to a mental representation of circumstance. I suspect this latter is what I Ching has in mind, given that it is based on divination. But then Jones seems to imply that this is equivalent to the view that the world is more than the content of mind. Does Jones imply that knowledge (via divination or observation) of the world is the world framed by the observer and this implies there's more out there than meets the eye? But this does not seem to escape solipsism. On the other hand, action does necessitate a world beyond thought. An a priori condition of action is that the world has real possibilities and has a potency for change. These are unobservables that also are wider than the world that can be inferred from sensory data (the only possibilities you can observe are those that happen to have been actualized), but are also a priori conditions of action and directly experienced though action.

> The view that the world is more than mind cannot quite be illustrated, I think, by reference to St. Augustine's remark about time. The fact that our commonplace notion ... (expand) of time is demonstrably absurd suggests to me that it cannot exist independently of mind.

Jones looses me here. Does the first sentence mean one cannot prove the world is not an illusion? Well, yes, I suppose, if logic, divination or observation rather than action is the criterion of truth. What if instead action were foundational? That is, instead of focusing on acquisition of knowledge, which I Ching divination implies, changing the world is basic? The focus on knowledge acquisition seems natural for the elite, while an emphasis on action might be natural for the working masses. And, then, what does Augustine's comment on time have to do with it? I take Augustine's remark simply to mean that there are things which are intuitively true but can't be clearly expressed in words. This seems opposite to Jones' point that what is intuitive can be demonstrably false. Is Jones here saying that McTaggert B Time has no scientific justification? If so, I agree. If so, that would imply that the content of mind may not or does not have empirical correspondence with the world.  But if there's no empirical relation between emergent thought and the object of thought, are we left with a supernatural justification of ideas (divination)?  It is widely held today that an explanation of emergence, such as knowledge, requires definining the base level to include unobservables, and only when they are included can there be a determinant relation of thought and the object of thought. However, can we gain direct experience of these unobservables outside that of action? In passive observation, they are only inferred.

Now Jones brings up the issue of free will and determinism without making its relevance explicit. In what sense is compatibilism metaphysically neutral? Neutral in respect to what metaphysical positions? That things are essentially a unity of differences, transcending Self-Other? That a relation to the world is one either of non-action or of struggle? These are conceptually quite different matters, and if they are coherent, that coherence needs to be spelled out lest it remain only intuitive. Now added to the heap is mathematics. I'm no mathematician, and I had not even heard of Spencer-Brown until he was cited by Niklas Luhmann, and in my view, Luhmann's linguistic reductionism is unappealing, and so his recommendation makes Spencer-Brown suspect. Arguably, mathematics is a kind of divination like I Ching. Spencer-Brown's alternative mathematics can have no ontological implications. A given situation can in principle be modeled in a variety of mathematical ways; mathematics is underdetermined by the material world. Then Jones associates Spencer-Brown with Wei Wu Wei. Here again my ignorance is exposed, for I had no idea who he was until I looked him up: he is a theater artist, Daoist writer and artistocratic race horse owner. .

So what we end up with is an intuitive connection between divination, the questionable status of time, a weak determinism (which for the moment I'll assume is probabilistic determinism, in which ase I'd guess it is in conflict with Spencer-Brown's view---a mathematics based on a relation of differences) and finally a Daoist artistocratic perspective. I can see the possibility of some connection among these disparate things, but it is non-operational until these connections are explicit and justified, and there's the rub. For example, can one draw ontological inferences from mathematics? If you can, does divination (whether it be I Ching or mathematics)  do more than describe the world in which we live, without implications for action other than a post facto optimal choice? Is this why the coterie of ideas offered by Jones seem to focus on non-action (inaction) rather than non-struggle, as if non-action were a real option for any but a ruling class.

For the Chinese peasant, struggle in relation to nature was not an option, but the basis of survival, a precondition of life; for the Chinese gentry, on the other hand, the issue was political control or conformity, neither of which, in scientific terms, creates the new value through struggle; so for the gentry it is a question only of of action or inaction that accords with knowledge. My point here is not a sociological reductionism, but only that what seems intuitive from one social location will seem quite unintuitive from another. An obvious escape from this is a universal language, and that would seem to be natural science, since we all experience the natural world. My point is that these intuitive connections have to be represented in scientific terms, not those of mathematics or divination.

Jones has not forgotten that the original issue was the status of universal laws. So my concluding question must be this: if through passive observation, call it divination if you will, can we conclude anything more than that universal laws are merely inferential generalizations based on our limited experience? If so, then in what consists the coherence of the world upon which modern science depends? If that coherence is an artifact of mind that as an emergent phenomenon and therefore no empirical correspondence with the object of thought, how can there be a natural science? Foucault has a lot to say about this, and are we to conclude that Foucault represents a ruling-class perspective, but there others?

Haines Brown

Haines Brown