ON THE AMBIVALENCE OF NATURE It seems to me I once observed someone’s work by this title. It sparked interest. Then, it sparked disappointment. For the theme of the writing according to the other author was something like suicide and human purpose, or existential nausea and the question of natural kinds. Something like that. In any case, it is not that the title itself deserves to be disregarded. The title is an excellent departure point, if someone is willing to reject emotional malaise. It seems a propo to introduce some ideas which came to me while considering the contrast between free will and determinism, and the many categories that can be produced by the comparison. The theme is a potential critical lemma in the general field of dimensional philosophy, a highly notable position which we would do well to take note of. The first point of this lemma is, once free will and determinism have been expanded to four categories, including two combinatorial neutrals, and two combinatorial doubles, why stop there? In fact, I had already reached the point of expanding the categories unconsciously to include five neutral territories---the middle one consisting of a concept similar to ‘freely arbitrated determinism’, and four of the others bearing similar names to that, with added or subtracted parts, and additional doubling of some part of the remainder. The nine categories were, in some respects equivalent to the original four, which were in turn equivalent to the original duality, or else the trinity with compatibilism. But, if I could make nine categories, I might also be capable of making sixteen, or sixty-four for that matter. The underlying argument is something we can ignore in this paper. But it is worth mentioning, because it is important in its own right. While libertarianism is more difficult to defeat when it embodies multiple categories, determinism on the other hand becomes weaker. But there is an exception to this: what if pluralism consists always of increasingly neutral categories? One solution I had found very quickly was that if we take just about any context, especially a context representing judgment, or the state of nature or society, or ‘all the facts’, we can often find an outside perspective (This perspective, however, I consider to be neutral on the subject of free will and determinism, and thus effectually arguing against strong theories for either domain). And the relation to the outside perspective is almost always an ‘extra-dimension’ (a play on the word ‘extradition’), which comes to express simply a level of greater dimensionality, or greater imagination on the original subject. Under this view, neutral categories are not more meaningless as one might expect, but instead express dimension which were not latent in the original substrate so to speak. If neutral categories are in fact meaningless, this points towards a dimensional process of abbreviation which favors opposites. To a large degree I had already taken account of this in the method of categorical deduction. But if the neutral categories were not meaningless, there were several other options. For example, perhaps meaning would be found only through correspondence, leading to a nihilism of veracity, or un-reconcilable gulf between qua functions such as opposites and qua significance, such as Boolean operators. On the other hand, I had already found a solution to the perceived gulf between functions and significance by seeing no separation between the use of significances and the use of functions specifically in terms of systems. Since systems in my definition were themselves neutrals, it was not surprising to use neutrals to join categories of function such as qualities and permutations. Although this was one solution, someone might propose that systems themselves were meaningless. To this I would reply that systems have an ‘applied function’: they are applications, and their significance concerns how they are concerned with signifiicance. Specifically, it can be cited that the formulation of a system is not a coincidence. It can be assessed whether a system is metaphorical for math, whether it relates with a coherent body of qualities, whether it considers alternatives, whether it is dynamic, whether it has a purpose in language, whether it is compatible with visualization, etc. Rejecting a system is not always a critical statement. Therefore, it may be considered that some relative systems may be absolute, if by relative what is meant is coherence about the properties of any given thing, whether it exists or not. Relativity in this sense is a correspondence principle situated within a ‘world’. The world is defined by the exhaustion of axes of possibility within descriptive statements. So, there are two small corollaries to the possibilities raised in regards to the possibility of infinite neutrals. One of these is that systems are neutral. Another is that neutrality is significant. Therefore, the theory of infinite neutrals, whether or not it is realized, concerns the theory of significant neutrals. One obvious conclusion at this point is that neutrals could confer directly the concept of infinity. However, in my assessment this dead-ends in the concept of entity science, which is not easily elaborated. It might easily be a case of specifics, which in turn depend on a system, or worse, a theory, to be elaborated. If neutral means ‘infinite’ in an entity sense, individual words might abbreviate and take the place of systems, destroying the possibility of logical results, or perhaps instead delaying the process of simply realizing logic which has a specific definition. The major alternative to a concept of infinite neutrality is clearly the concept of an infinite system. In exceptional logic, the first exception here would be if infinite neutrality in an entic sense and infinite systems expressed the same concept. Again, this is anticipated by the methods of categorical deduction. Finally, we can consider whether perhaps neutrality is not meant in an entic sense. This is a more difficult problem. One solution leads to the earlier assessment, that systems are neutrals, which is not problematic. Another view leads to another earlier assessment, that neutrals are significant. In a broader view of these concepts in which the entic view is avoided, we can then assess that the remainder of views which are not amenable to categorical deduction involve passive systems (significances expressed as neutrals), and alternate systems (neutrals which are asymmetric in their application). The exceptions to this are then the true expressions of infinite neutrality. Under a formal view, it is safe to reject the existence of such formulations. But under a formal view, there are several options for reducing infinities, such as by adopting a fixed number of categories, or by expressing a diagram in terms of a fixed definition of coherence, that is, the territory expressed between two opposite terms. But to a large degree, this assumes the exclusion of neutrals. At this point it is tempting to say that what we mean by ‘infinite neutrals’ refers to nothing other than the system. In some ways that is a sagacious solution, in itself. Prevaricating the point runs the risk of ridicule. However, in a truly exceptional system, infinite neutrals must exist, or else categories would not be infinitely extensible. Thus, the construction of a perfect language (the ’perfect language problem’) depends on the existence of infinite neutrals, or else a higher concept of design space accepting categories which are more avant-garde (that is, prospectively ‘variablistic’ but non-mathematical organizations of qualities). The clearest problem with neutrals at this point is that they are homogeneous, or else form a singularity or ‘hyperbole’. Assessing once more based on the terms, we are left with concepts like the improbability of opposites (‘infinite singularity’), significant hyperbole (‘extra-dimension’), infinite hyperbole (‘purposivism’), and significant singularity (‘paradigmatics’). Since paradigmatics is an ethical view according to applied functionalism (Hume‘s Guillotine puts ethics in doubt), and purposiveness simply confirms the entic view which is not operating here, the only cases in which infinite neutrals evidently appear has largely already been covered by our examples favoring categorical deduction. If there is an exception remaining now, it has to do with the first of these final categories, the case of the improbability of opposites, a case in which it is argued that everything is a neutral. However, this view can be opposed very simply by stating that sentences cannot be evaluated when they have no value. Relative absoluteness trumps arbitrations of ambiguity. It may be further affirmed that the neutral argument says nothing about the invalidity of neutral systems. Instead, it merely threatens to make systems universal, which as it turns out is unnecessary, for under an irrationalist view systems could easily explain everything without composing everything, if the neutrality of the system does not require other neutrals, and thus, irrational systems. It can be said that sentences cannot be evaluated to have no value, because such a lack of value would not even qualify as an evaluation. Like the existence of matter, or the importance of consciousness, the importance of a system must remain qualified by its parts, whether or not these parts qualify as rational. Categorical deduction is a system with qualified parts, and thus satisfies the requirement for a formal system. ----Nathan Coppedge, New Haven, 1/25/2015 Nathan Coppedge, SCSU 1/25/2015, p.