It seems that for you ‘action’ is anything that happens, and you would say that a rock is an agent if it is rolling down a hill. This means that everything that happens is the result of the action of an agent. If this is what ‘action’ and ‘agent’ mean then I agree with what you say about them. But I associate agents with volition. This is why I’m able to agree with Balsekar that we are not agents when our ego is in charge of our actions, since our egos are at the mercy of causal forces. I need to rephrase this idea though, if we are to use your definition of the terms. But, yes, I can see that if we use your terminology then when you accidently knock over a wineglass you would be an agent. Everything would an agent. The wine glass would the agent that interrupted the action of your arm.

I’m okay with the idea that all determination is probabilistic. There’s many a slip between cup and lip etc. But I don’t see how this has any bearing on the reconciliation of freewill and determinism. I've never gone for the idea that quantum level uncertainty allows for the operation of volition in the causal chain.

> There is yet another issue. My discussion so far assumes "free" will, and yet what exactly does this word free mean? To be absolutely free of any determination, including my intentions, my wants, my tastes, seems to reduce freedom to randomness, and that won't due. Why not is a tricky issue, but basically it implies that the will is supernatural.

Yes! In this way Schroedinger concludes from an analysis of freewill that he is God. He found this the only way to reconcile freewill and determination. So do I, although I’m uncomfortable with the term ‘God’ and do not think that anything is supernatural. I prefer ‘supramundane’, for reasons discussed by Jim Stone in another thread here.

> If it is possible to think of the ego or self-consciousness as an emergent effect of thought and thought as an emergent effect of brain, then ego is not supernatural and being real and material can be a determination of action, albeit constrained by other determinations. I'm not sure where in all this we part ways, but it's probably important to pin down.

I’m okay with the idea that ego, self-consciousness and thought are emergent effects of brain, and if they are this would not affect my view of freewill etc. But I wouldn’t be okay with the idea that there is nothing more to consciousness than the emergent affect of brains. And I thing it likely that the ego is so contrained as to be incapable of being an intiator of action rather than just a responder to circumstances. 

> Here I'm a bit mystified. Knowledge is never social? I've no idea what you mean. I'm writing in the English language, but it was not my own invention (in which case you would have no idea what all these scribblings mean), but knowledge is part of culture, socially transmitted patterns of behavior and symbol systems.

Patterns of behaviour and symbol systems may be cultural, but the knowledge of them is surely in people’s heads. For me knowledge is not a sentence in a book but a sentence someone has read, understood and remembered. I know that the word is often used in other ways, so that ‘social knowledge’ is possible, but it’s sloppy terminology in my view. Society doesn’t know anything. (This is not the view that culture is only manifest in individuals).

> So I need an explication of your point that knowledge is never social…

Thanks for the story. The barrel seems like a forerunner of Skinner’s black box. The transmission of knowledge is not at issue, however, but where it resides. I agree that most (relative) knowledge is socially tranmsmitted. Libraries are social artefacts. But it’s the author or reader of a book that has the knowledge, not the book. I can make no sense of the idea that a society can know something.

> Suppose I had a quartz crystal on my shelf. It is an equilibrium system that will last indefinitely in practical terms, but definitely will not last in principle. All sorts of contingencies over the course of billions of years will deconstruct it and ultimately the (widely assumed) Heat Death of the universe. So in cosmic time, the crystal is a process. It is "stable" because the bonds forming its structure are probable; it is unstable in the long run because it structure, being structure, is improbable must eventually dissipate. So, my orginal point here is this: while we are surrounded by structures that are often relatively stable, in the long run no structure is ultimately stable, and so it is better to base an ontology (and epistemology) on this assumption. So, thermodynamics allows for apparent temporary rest states, but no state is really at rest, and ultimately thermodynamcs means all states dissipate. A lack of change is only approximate and temporary.

I would agree that strutures are emergent and subject to decay and dissolution. My ontology is not grounded on a structure, however, but on the unchanging reality proposed by Parmenides, Aristotle, Peirce, Schroedinger, Taoism, Buddhism et al. This is not a structure but maximally simple, Plotinus’ Simplex, and the origin of structure. This would be the only phenomenon that is truly in a rest state, while also the cause of all activity.

> Uncertain of your intent here. Are you disagreeing with me by suggesting that there _is_ an empirical relation of a base level and an emergent level, or more specically, of thought and the world it represents?

I was agreeing with you that all phenomena are related, and assuming that ‘empirically’ related means causally related. The relationship between thought and the world it represents would be inextricably and even existentially related, so that each would exist in dependence on the other. 

I can see that it would take me a long time to grasp the idea of processual superposition, but I don’t have any objections to anything you said about it at first reading. One question, which might just reveal my failure to understand, would be whether the assumption of modal realism is necessary to the rest of the idea. Cannot human cognition simply be part of the process?

> There are some counter-intuitive aspects in all this. One is that it implies things don't really have intrinsic properties, but only in relation to something else.

Doesn’t seem couterintuitive to me. This is the Buddhist idea of emptiness, or the vedic idea of the voidness of phenomenon. It is a solution for the problem of attributes.

> Are there things that don't stand in relation? I suppose elementary particles, but are they not probability distributions that acquire actual properties only when framed? Another such point is that here there is no temporal assymetrical "cause" and "effect," for each process is both; their relation is symmetrical in principle.

I joined this chat partly because I found your ideas very similar to those of mysticism. The symmetry of cause and effect would be another example of the similarity. A neutral metaphysical position does away with these distinctions.

> I don't know how seriously you mean this contentious word "model"? The word "model theory" is used in math, but it refers to properties of mathematics and does not imply anything about the relation of math and the physical world.

Yes, I agreed with you earlier on this. A model is not a proof.

> To what "experience" do you refer? Some examples might be helpful.

I always mean something simple but the words can get messy. I just meant that when I add one apple to another apple then I have two apples, just as I would if I modelled this event on paper. In this way experience seems to show that the world follows rules that can be modelled by a mathematical calculus. I thought physics more or less took this for grantedm but there are subtleties I might be missing. .

> If Spencer-Brown only shows how the world can be modelled and does not try to impose an ontology, then that seems to be my point. You then suggest that while ontological implications was not Spencer-Brown's concern, you mention a set of other philosophers that do have that concern.

That's not quite what I meant. Spencer Brown was very concerned with ontology, almost entirely in fact. But he did not try to prove that his model is ‘true,’ just show that it works, while Bradley and Nagarjuna present logical proofs of its correspondance to actuality without making the model.

> As for the Bradley, at some point, over half a century ago, I encountered him in some philosophy course, and I assume idealism is no longer viable. He no longer seems a significant thinker.

Alas, poor Francis. He gets a raw deal in my opinion. Appearance and Reality is out of print, and it took me months to find a good copy. Unbelievable. Why is absolute idealism no longer viable? Has something happened to descredit it? Bradley proves, or attempts to prove, that the universe is a unity. This view is as viable now as it was when Hegel proposed it, or, come to that, when it was first written down in the Hindu Upanishads. .

> As for Nagarjuna, he and Hegel are the ones for whom I have greater sympathy, although in the case of the former, much more the naturalistic teachings at the Nalanda University well after his time. I could make a link between Nagarjuna and my own position, although I'm not sure what would be gained by it.

Yes, that’s what I concluded from your earlier posts here.

> Kant is an idealist, and so basically concerned with the supernatural as far as I am concerned. Hegel, on the other hand, did anchor the ideal in matter, but it seems to me here the objective idea is a priori and matter merely its manifestation. The difference with my position is that I take matter as a priori in that it constrains possibilities as a probability distribution and is one pole of the probability gradient, the dissipation of which ultimately drives all change. All these folks (maybe except Nagarjuna) are idealists, not in the sense that there are aspects of reality that are unobservable yet real, but in the sense of an ontological dualism, and that way madness lies.

All forms of dualism would be madness for my view, and I agree that Kant never quite reached as far as Hegel and Nagarjuna. But he stopped only one step short, which is a lot closer than most do, so I count him as being on my team.

> I wonder: are you saying that concrete examples will not help because you are not taking about matter, ontological monism, but about a different ontological category?

As Bradley points out, monism is dualism in light disguise. The view that the universe is a unity is not monism. I’m talking about a category that is not an instance of a category, viz. Kant’s subject of rational psychology, Bradley’s and Hegel’s unity, Nagarjuna’s Nibbana etc.. I’ve argued elsewhere that this is the missing ingredient in our mind-matter theories identified by David Chalmers. 

> True, relative knowledge is constrained by all sorts of things, but I have problem with this other kind of knowledge. You characterize it only by association, rather than define it (perhaps you would argue it is categorically undefinable). Apparently it is associated with, reduces to, or is simply self-knowledge. OK, then my question is, why is self-knowledge not constrained? To put it simply, my sense of self is likely quite other than what people think of me, and so who, if anyone, is right? If I'm an egoist, I have an inflated notion of self, but then is that notion not constrained by my psychic state? ...  I concede that knowledge of self may be "direct", but does that make it accurate or true? If so, why? But then you equate self-knowledge with knowledge of the world. This, as you surely must acknowledge is a stretch. What justification for it is there?

Sorry. My fault. ‘Self-knowledge’ was a misleading phrase. I didn’t mean knowledge of self for, as you say, the self would be a relative phenomenon. I meant knowledge of Self, where the upper case ‘S’ denotes something prior to the self to which you refer. Mysticism claims that any study of self will lead beyone self to this prior phenomenon, exactly as Kant proposes. At the limit it would lead to the realisation that the self does not exist. This knowledge would be available to everyone equally, in principle, and although individual circumstances may dictate the difficulty of acquiring it, it would not be a matter of whether we are rich or poor, free or imprisoned, etc. For a trivial example, a knowledge of pain is not social and is freely avaible to everyone.

For Aristotle true knowledge is identical with its object, and this would be my view also. For such knowledge there is no possibility of error since there is no calculation or interpretation required. I think Kantians call this ‘non-intuitive immediate knowledge,’ but not everyone uses this terminolgy in the same way so I won’t call it that.

I’m unable to justify the claim that such knowledge can be knowledge of the world but it is one of the central claim of mysticism, and it would be an ineluctable consequence of the unity of the world. I’d prefer to call it knowledge by identity. ‘The truth lies beyond is and is not,’ says Lao-tsu. ‘How do I know this? By looking inside myself.’ So the best I can do for justification is point to the world’s thriving wisdom traditions, where this claim is ubiquitous, and to our failure to show that their worldview is incorrect.

> For example if all knowledge is constructed (here not socially, but individually), it makes knowledge a function of self, but perhaps for that reason is one-sided or partial. But, vs. Peirce, you counter with an appeal to Kant and Hegel. Both assumed that the world is itself rational, and since the mind is rational, the world becomes intelligible. This seems opposite to the argument that because we know the mind and it constructs knowledge and is all about the world that is knowable.

Not sure what’s being got at here. I usually agree with Peirce about everything. I don’t think I’m making the argument referred to in the final sentence.

> I'm trying to figure out if this is a deep issue or only a matter of words. I may have clouded the issue above. I see everything as natural (and so the word ends meaning nothing), and by "artificial" I should have said that it refers to natural things constructed by natural man. I'm not sure that Hegel assumed his objective idealism referred to what is "unnatural", but only non-material. Materialism is easy: a) old meaning as battle flag against idealism was a postion of ontological monism; b) more current meaning is that all reality is compatible, related pontentially or in fact, coherent. I don't see much use for the word "naturalism" today beyond materialism, and you don't think much of it either, but apparently for the opposite reason that it precludes something true or real. Is this the "assumption" to which you object? It would be useful to know, in straightforward terms, just what do you think that assumption is.

Probably just words. By a certain definition ‘natural’ would preclude something true or real (in my view), but as you say we don’t have to use that definition. We could just say that whatever is true or real is natural and leave it at that. The trouble is that materialism (in your first sense) is often elided with naturalism, and to do this is to make a wild and utterly ad hoc assumption. So it seems we agree about naturalism. By your second definition of materialism I would be one, which makes me wonder how many materialists would be happy with this definition. Is the term often used in this way? I wasn’t aware of this.

> I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that there are situations involving contradictory categories that are can be transcended mystically. I did not mean to imply that all mystrical transcendence engages contradictory categories. For example, Sufi Islam. What I should have said is that when there are conceptual contradictions, such as the Christian Trinity or such as the modern West's set (inside-outside, whole-part, past-future, being-becoming, self-other, cause-effect), they are transcended by imaginative thought or by action. But your objection is less for this generalization than with categories per se, and the transcendence is a transcendence of thinking in terms of categories. Am I right here? You've implied as much all along, but I failed to rise to your challenge: must we think in terms of categories, or at least represent everything that way?

As I understand it, mysticism claims that the world as whole is a unity and as such transcends all categories. That is to say, ‘enlightenment’ would involve the realisation that no categories are primitive. Or, equivalently, as Kant put it, that what is primitive is not categorizeable. All positive metaphysical position would be logically absurd because they are not correct. Carnap would be wrong. 

It seems to me that thought requires categories. Certainly language does. These would not be transcended in imaginative thought for all thought would be imaginative. The idea would be to see what’s left when the thoughts, feelings, concepts etc are taken away. What’s left, according to mysticism, is what’s real. This is what I interpret Kant as implying and Hegel as proposing,

> ….much of my thought is not in terms of categories however simple they may be. Let me give you an example, my writing the previous paragraph was interrupted by a telephone call from my neice, whom I've only met once before and she is about to visit. If I were to tell you about my neice, such as her being strikingly beautiful, lives in Switzerland, etc., I would naturally employ categories to do so. But when she called, flooding my mind were an emotion (joy of hearing from her) and an image, and as we spoke she was present, not as the Other, but as a unity.

I think the response to this may be to say that all your thoughts depend on categories, and that your sense of identity is an intuition of the fundamental truth that all categories are illusory, emergent or epihenomenal. This intuition would occur because at some level you already know that you and your daughter are identical (at a primitve level) but are suffering from a Socratic memory loss. Hence non-intuitive knowledge would be remembered knowledge, knowledge we will always have access to by retracing our steps through the study of our own psychology and ontology. Nobody can show that this is our situation, but the practices of the wisdom traditions are designed to help us to verify that it is. Perhaps a key observation here would be that for mysticism nothing really exists, so that the distinction betyween ‘you’ and ‘your daughter’ (when it is reified) would be a category error. 

> My impression is that while these are thoughts, they are not obviously defined by categories, although I need categories to tell you about them. So not all thought is in terms of categories, …

Surely there is a distinction to be made between what is and is-not a thought? For mysticism thoughts would be unreal, so even this would not be a primitive distinction. I don’t think you’ve given an example of a thought that is not dependent on categories, so will stick to my guns.

> This leaves certain troubling questions. Is this mental content that escapes categorization only a narcistic self-absorption? No, for the feelings I had when speaking with my neice were authentic, true, and important, and did not serve just me, but were part of my social being.

For me society does not have intuitions. It would be your consciousness, awareness, being or whatever that had this intuition, and it was pre-thought. Only later did you think, ‘I have this intuition.’ I have no doubt whatsoever that the feelings you had were authentic, true and important, and bear considerable reflection.

>Yes, we should get back to it because mysticism or idle speculation is not particularly appropriate in this forum (I just assume that no one else is reading this long thread and so doesn't realize how far it has strayed).

Well, I don’t think it has strayed at all. Only if we arbitrarily dismiss the mystic view on natural law has it strayed.

> If mysticism refers to a non-contingent psychic state, it can have nothing to do with any laws of nature as they are usually understood, but with rationality, which is quite else.

That’s a big ‘if.’ From my perspective you’re making an illigitimate distinction betrween a physic state and a physical state. I’m referring to a state that is neither. Mysticism trumps psychology.

> The issue of laws and conceptual categories is the special and picky concern of scientists and philosophers who are in the business of inventing problems in order to make a living. Most people assume that the world is a priori to thought about it and that consciousness arises from experience. Is this what you are saying? If so, how is it relevant?

Definitely not. My entire view rests on the falsity of the idea that the world is prior to thought. But not just human thought.

> I know a lot of religious fundamentalists who are very certain about things, far more than scientists. I used to think that a measure of the progress of science is the growth of ignorance (growing awareness of how much we don't know), but the mark of progress in religion is the growth of certainty. So I conclude with a perhaps nasty question: what distinguishes the mysticism you have been trying to define from religious faith?

That’s a very fair question and not at all nasty one. It’s the one I set out to answer a few years ago with a literature review. The trouble is that although I now have an answer I don’t know how to give it briefly enough for this thread. I could point to an essay in the archive here if you’re interested, and would love it if someone started a thread to challenge or explore it. By the house standards it’s poorly written but I can’t do any better for an answer to your question. No pressure, life’s too short to read everything.

I’ve very much enjoyed discussing these things with you and have learnt much, but I improperly hijacked the discussion and will now start easing out of it if that’s okay with you. These things need a thread of their own. My apologies to the OP.

Peter