The nice thing about distinctions is they're easy to agree on. We might agree, for example, in our distinctions concerning god, even if I call Him Allah and you call Him Jehovah.

G Spencer Brown and Bertrand Russell published the deepest available work on distinctions in their seminal "Laws Of Form". But there are other ways to think about distinctions.

Ken describes a distinction this way:

A distinction is a statement that is true for all definitions and instances that fit inside it, and false for all that don't, even for those definitions and instances you haven't considered yet. In that everything within the distinction never crosses its boundary, or only crosses by losing the distinction, it's an attractor in a Phase Space. This is to say a distinction describes contractive, iterative process.

This description of distinctions as processes is very interesting - try http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/DistinctionDynamics.html. Such dynamics can be functionally distinguished with mathematics. For example, here's a fern leaf "distinction", as modeled by Michael Barnsley - there's a full explanation of this at www.swin.edu.au/astronomy/pbourke/fractals/fern.

Barnsley's fern process plainly has nothing in common with a biological fern process except for its shape, so why do we understand that these processes are similar? In fact the fern process is an iteration of 4 simple afine transformations; you can start it with any image, iterate, and you'll still wind up with something that looks like a fern.

We don't commonly think of predicting the world around us in terms of contractive, iterative process. Yet there are reasonable grounds for treating all human predictions so - Personal Construct Theory has delved deep here. When we consider the world in distinctions, we're faced with a fundamental question: are these merely our personal understanding, or are they universal, Platonic Ideals? Plainly my opinion is spoken for - laotse?25.

Atheism and most religious faiths prefer a Platonic view and cast their doctrines in those terms. Perhaps because of this we fight wars over which end of the egg to open first, or equally foolish disagreements. What makes them foolish is that, considered in terms of distinctions, they are wars between brothers over mere terminology. --Peter Merel

This is interesting. I could quibble that Barnsley's Fern only starts to resemble a biological fern at the gross level by the time that it has reached many, many more levels of self-similarity than the biological fern has, so the mathematical and biological processes have attractors that are only superficially similar. Fern cells look very little like ferns. But that is only a quibble, I sure there are better examples of what seems like it should be a very powerful idea. I might even go look for some. Thanks for bringing this to the party.

Do I correctly infer from reading laotse?25 that you and he think that these distinctions are not Ideals, but things imposed on the...the whatever by us? Could you gloss a little, please? -- Keith Braithwaite

Sure. Look at a beautiful painting, a perfect expression of the artist's vision. Now walk up real close to it. See how the forms disappear into brushstrokes, the smooth surfaces crack and blend, the clean lines wobble and diverge. At a finer resolution, the expression that was distinct has grown indistinct, and the vision that was consistent has become inconsistent.

Or look at a magnificent motorcar. See all the gorgeous splines and close-fit engineering, the grace and economy of artisanship. But now walk up and watch the tiny dings and rust and bird-poop mar the simplicity of finish, smell the oil burning in the exhaust and hear the engine mistiming, the entropic pull of time on all mechanical systems, that turns them inoperative.

Where did those clean distinctions go when you looked a little closer? Did the object's physics change, or did your mind change? Okay, then where were the distinctions in the first place? Lao saw a world of ceaseless decay and renewal, no more contained by human distinctions than water can be caught in a net. That our senses and actions are relevant to it is merely a matter of their harmonious construction, not their relation to some perfect dimension. --Peter Merel

You speak of "attractors at work in a chaotic reality" without explaining why there should be any chaotic reality in the first place for them to work in. The Anthropic Principle says that if there are many possible universes, then of course the universe that we find ourselves in is one which could support human life--but my question is how do you explain why the number of possible universes is not zero. -- Michael John Downes

If we can agree that all distinctions are personal (I think cucumber tastes dreadful, for example) rather than absolutes, it's fair to think that before birth and after death the number of possible universes is indeed zero.

How unsatisfying! Surely we're talking about objective external reality here, not this distinction flibbertygibbet. Well now you just tell me how I can perceive objective external reality without making distinctions and we'll have something fascinating to talk about ...

All distinctions are personal?? That is a nice theory but I wouldn't attempt to blindfold myself and then walk across a busy highway on the theory that since they are "outside the scope of my perceptions" the vehicles bearing down on me don't exist. -- Michael John Downes

Why wouldn't your personal distinctions suggest to you that the vehicles exist? Distinctions come from all kinds of places - memories, anticipations, dreams, stories ... not just perception.

OK, so here's a puzzler: how does there come to be so much consistency between different people's personal distinctions?

For example, blindfolded Michael can distinguish the 40-footer laden with tractor parts locking its brakes as he steps out in front of it, and so can the driver of the rig. Their distinctions are very different, of course, but they mesh together seamlessly (or apparently as closely as makes no difference) with each other, and with the distinctions drawn by the onlooker screaming at the side of the road.

Of course, we know that eyewitnesses tend to be very unreliable, but not usually to the extent that they will fundamentally contradict each other. It would be very unlikely, modulo drugs, deliberate dishonesty or mental imbalance, for Michael, the driver and the passer-by to dissagree about whether or not Michael got smeared all over the tarmacadam (nothing personal here Michael), although they might dissagree later in court about the sequence of events, for instance.

So, how comes this very convenient agreement on so many distinctions to recognise?

It's learned. When Michael was a child, he couldn't distinguish a truck from a cloud. He'd point up in the sky and laugh, "truck!". And he'd run out in front of traffic even without a blindfold if his mother didn't keep a tight grip on his little hand.

All our distinctions depend on many years of training and experiment. When the behaviour under observation isn't included in these years, there's no necessary consistency.

For example my grandfather told a story about the first electric trams in Austria. Apparently several peasants visiting town from an isolated village saw these and were thunderstruck. They went around the front of the trams and looked closely. Then they went around the back, and inspected minutely. Then they entered into heated debate, which my grandfather reported was terminated when a particularly long-bearded elder declaimed fiercely, "Nothing is pushing it! Nothing is pulling it! This must be Devil's Work!!!"

Nice story, but no banana. Who is able to identify the source of motive power in an electric vehicle just by looking at it while it's stationary (and without knowing already how it works)? Damn few people, I'd suggest. But that's beside the point.

Is it? I thought it was the point. Every day millions of people ride cable cars and trains. Do they know how an electric motor works? No, of course not. But they can distinguish between an electric tram and the devil's work.

The consistency in distinctions that's more interesting is the consistency that led the yokels to be able to find the "surface" of the tram at all. Or the surface of any object.

Training and experiment at a still younger age. Here's Michael's fingers. How many fingers do you see, Michael? Peekaboo! I've got your nose!

You might like to read Piaget for a lot more on the rate at which children learn these physical distinctions. Worth noting that animals are more limited in the distinctions they can make. Pigeons, for example, can distinguish between Dali, Picasso, and Magritte paintings. But they can't tell an ascending sequence from a descending sequence. Aren't we clever?

A thought experiment: we get a bunch of people in a room who've never met before, and have a wide range of backgrounds. Then we present then with an object that none of them have seen the like of before. While they might very well speculate wildly, and divergently, about what it does and how it works, the observers (us) would likely find it very very suprising indeed if they didn't agree quite closely about the object's shape, texture, resilience, weight, to a lesser extent colour and so forth. It's this kind of consistency that makes one wonder. Any thoughts?

I can easily show you a negative on that one. A very simple surface, compared with those diffeomorphisms we're usually trained to recognize, is the distinction between white and black groups on a Go board. Yet beginning players make mistakes about this all the time. As players get better, their distinctions about these shapes improve. But there's always a dramatic disagreement - because that disagreement is what the game is all about.

That's somewhat slippery. Nascent Go players are often confused about which of their own stones share liberties, because they want diagonal adjacency to be as strong a connection as adjacency alnog a line. That's just not having learned the very rules of the game yet. But then there's shape, which is about a lot more than this strong sharing of liberties, and recognising shape (and potential shape) is a learned skill, for sure.

However, we humans don't have sense organs for shape, we only have sense organs for the position of the stones on the board, from which we have to use pure thinking to form hypotheses about shape. But the folks in the thought experiment above do have sense organs for shape, texture, resilience, weight, colour and so forth.

Now, the nature of shape in Go seems to me a emergent property of a human construct: the rules of Go. As such, to present the difficulty of Go as a counterexample to the apparent easyness of sharing sense organ enabled distinctions looks mighty like using your conclusion as a premise.

To make that counterexample work, the thought experiment would seem to need an object with, lets say, a texture that no one has ever experienced before. At which point I'd expect dramatic differences in the people's ideas about what they were feeling, yes, for want of shared experience to base a description upon. But then the experiment falls down anyway.

What is there to say about the consistency in these distinctions, like the location of a surface, mediated by sense organs, and not arrived at through cogitation?

See by contrast The Very Most Obvious Metaphysics. Or perhaps more practically see what Lord Hutton considers Not A Distinction Recognised By The Law.