Abolishing the target of practical reason ends up destroying all of reason. You can't knock out this leg and still expect theoretical reason (whose target is truth) to stand. Eliminating the good ruins reason as a whole. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem is that pragmatism spits out two answers in terms of what it means by "goodness".

On the one hand, you have some notion of functionality or reasonableness. Peirce's idea of the good was about living as a thinking community that was able to sustain its being in evolutionary fashion – the biosemiotic idea of goodness. Making life work for us as humans and part of a biosphere.

And he wanted to extend this human-centric definition to the Cosmos as a whole. The Universe is good in the sense it is a universalised growth of the quality of functional and self-organising reasonableness. Logic could apply to the structuring of a sustainable existence.

We could call this principle of the good, as applied to the Universe, pansemiosis. The reasonable universe inhabited by its reasonable creatures.

But the problem is that the Universe lacks actual semiotic mechanism. It is not being organised by an informational code. Life and mind have genes, neurons, words and numbers by which to model existence and so stand outside the Cosmos so as to take mechanical control of its entropic potentials.

It is "good" in a pragmatic sense that a human community can feed and house itself, grow its numbers, repair and reproduce in the fashion of an evolutionarily functional organism. That is the pragmatist good that is easy to recognise. The ability to take sunlight, fossil fuels, or whatever entropic gradient is on offer and turn it into a world in which we can live.

But the Cosmos lacks this level of organismic purpose. It just is what it is. A physical system self-organising to dissipate entropic gradients – the Big Bang being the foundational gradient upon which all the material complexity is being constructed.

So from the Universe's point of view – to the degree it has one – entropification is good as a general goal as it allows the negentropic complexity that functionally accelerates that grand enterprise. A star is doing a cosmic solid in rounding up a dust of matter particles and wasting them to background radiation. It is a self-organising furnace serving the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a way that is "good" from the true pansemiotic point of view.

So pragmatism – as analysed by its founder – ends up giving two senses of good. There is the functionality of constructive reason and the functionality of entropic acceleration.

From a human point of view, this is why we are conflicted. We both love a fast car and appalled by a fast car. A Maserati is equally a thing of beauty and a thing of waste. It is good as an example of human reason bending fossil fuel to our collective will. And it is also bad as we fill up our world with Maserati's and start to encounter the communal and environmental consequences of chasing that particular entropy accelerating goal.

So yes, pragmatism certainly delivers clear answers on what is "moral" in an objective and measurable sense. But we have to then be sensitive to the dichotomy that the answer provides.

In the end, the goodness of reason-constrained entropification has to be itself a dynamical balance. We have to burn through our world to exist, but also can't afford to burn through it too fast.

This dilemma is usually at the base of moral codes. We kind of always know that trading the short term thrill of freedom for the long term value of collective constraint is the wise way to go.

But humans are immature creatures – in the ecological sense. We haven't lived long enough in the world created since the industrial revolution to develop a collective code – one respected across the whole planet – that will indeed provide the pragmatically functional and good way of life.

The concept of "outside the universe" is null. It doesn't mean anything.

Your concept of "outside the universe" is part of the universe. It is inside the universe. — Treatid

My position is formally an internalist epistemology. I'm a Peircean pragmatist. So problem dealt with. :smile:

Language and mathematics don't have a secret backdoor access to an objective viewpoint independent of the universe. — Treatid

You seem to be arguing rather passionately employing what you consider to be "good logic". You talk as if this is giving you a secret backdoor access to truths others don't grasp. So a little contradictory right there.

Pragmatism deals with the essential subjectivity of reasoning. Structuralism is then the ontology which emerges from applying that reasoning to the world at large. As Peirce argued, the "best logic" is the one with which we would both think and the one that itself organises the world.

And it is that pragmatic logic – the holistic logic of Peircean semiosis – that would help you deal with the emergent and evolutionary nature of Being. In terms of mounting a physicalist inquiry into the nature of Nature, the structure of an expanding~cooling cosmos, it leads you to thermodynamics and dissipative structure theory.

Particle physics, for example, is all about how the Big Bang fell into inevitable gauge symmetry structures as it expanded and cooled.

Electrons don't exist. They are the irreducible residue of a process of "universal" constraint on possibility itself. In the beginning was everything. Then what survived were all the possibilities that didn't get cancelled away by their opposite possibilities. In quantum jargon, the wavefunction of the Universe is the sum over all its possibilities. It was so hot, everything was possible at the start. It will be so cold that almost nothing will become possible by the end.

Peircean holism – as a fully internalist perspective – gives you a very different way of thinking about the questions of existence.

What is the simplest possible building block? What is the simplest possible component of change we could apply to that building block? — Treatid

An electron is not composed of other particles. ... If an electron is 'composed' of position, momentum, spin, charge and mass; aren't these properties more fundamental than the electron? — Treatid

Well an electron is an emergent composite and not fundamentally simple in some reductionist/atomistic sense. It exists as the result of a chain of symmetry-breaking events that leave it as a particle that has indeed hit its lowest possible mass state, so exists"fundamentally" as it can't decay further, while also representing the specific world-building property of "a negative charge". It has a property that is cosmically meaningful because it can stand in relation with its partner-in-crime, the proton.

So to think about it in a holistic, structural, emergent, evolutionary, thermodynamic and systems sense, the Big Bang is a cosmic dissipative structure that organises itself to dispose of its entropy by expanding and cooling. It undergoes a whole series of phase changes – like steam to water to ice – as it globally restructures in ways that minimise its entropy. Like a cooling iron bar, it can suddenly lock in a global field that creates an emergent state which then has its own second-order excitations or "particles" doing their own second-order entropic thing.

An electron is what you get left with at this stage of the Universe when it has cooled and expanded to almost zero in energy density and almost unbound in effective distance scale. A baked-in defect like you find topologically trapped in a crystal.

To exist as the distinct and fundamental thing it is, an electron had to be produced by the Higgs symmetry breaking. Before the temperature of the Universe fell to the 160 GeV range, electrons were chirally broken, left and right, Weyl particles. Gaining mass from the Higgs field glued the two halves together to make a whole electron – turn it into a Dirac particle, along with creating electromagnetism with its photons as part of the whole reorganisation of the cosmic topological order.

This only got us as far as a hot soup of electrons and positrons though. A stew of matter and antimatter creation and annihilation which lacked any great particularity of the kind we would associate with "a particle". Location and momentum were just an averaged blur within the general thermal confusion of a charged plasma, not really anything individual.

But more symmetry breaking saw a slight excess of electrons (as the negatively charged matter particle) being left over and positrons (as the positively charged antimatter) being eliminated from the cosmic topological order (being wasted to hot photons that made up the fast-fading CMB radiation background).

So we have this fundamental kind of thing that we call "electron-ness" which only emerges as everything else gets more crisply and counterfactually suppressed. The Weyl left-right difference has to be welded together to create a Dirac particle which is now divided at the higher topological level of being a matter or antimatter particle. Then the electron must outlive the positron to create a general negative charge difference – the one that the proton on its own symmetry breaking story is heading towards to become the positively charged “fundamental particle” that is its counterpart in turning the Universe into a realm dominated by electromagnetic radiation as its most visible thermalising characteristic.

Even when we get to electrons as the negative charge stamped out as material form, we still have to have it decay through its three mass generations – taus, muons, then electrons – to arrive at the thermal bottom rung simplicity of a particle that can decay no further ... at least not until black holes eventually sweep up all mass particles and themselves evaporate to leave an empty Heat Death void.

So the holistic or structural take on this is that we have the general thing of a heat sink cosmos winding its way down its entropic gradient. That is the fundamental relation, the fundamental thermal context. Then as it cools, it also goes through major phase changes that each throw up the local topological features – the excitations that obey the symmetries – which characterise that stage of organisation.

The reason the rather mixed and complex brew of radiation, electrons and protons seems such a "fundamental" state of order is that these indeed proved to be a suitable ground for the nuclear chemistry of atoms, the atomic chemistry of materials science, the material chemistry of biological life, etc.

By comparison to the lifetimes of stars, planets, mountain ranges and haircuts, photons, electrons and protons do fit the ontological bill of "atomistic materials existing in an acausal, large and frigid, cosmic void".

But photons, electrons and protons are all topologically composite particles that happened to land in a place where they formed an electromagnetic level of entropic organisation. They are only fundamental to the degree they are Platonically inevitable mathematical structure – a place a cooling cosmos had to arrive at because thermodynamics can't avoid being self-organised by the maths of its own symmetry breaking.

A ton of other "particle stories" also condensed out of the Big Bang, but add so little further to the complexity and wonder of nature that even if they contribute much more actual entropification to the total dissipation budget, we don't think of them as being "fundamental" it the same way. They don't carve a history of individuated and counterfactual events. Stuff like the CMB, dark matter, dark energy, blackhole evaporation, are just background stuff to us, given our very human concerns when it comes to metaphysical story telling.

So in summary, our very notion of "fundamental" is rather screwed by our natural psychological prejudices. But physics does tell us about dissipative structure, topological order, gauge symmetry and all the stuff we need to be able to see through to what is really going on. The Universe is a heat sink rattling through a series of phase changes on the way to its eventual heat death. The present moment is an especially complexified mid-stage with its stars, planets and life.

But even that accounts for a few percent – a round-up error – in the matter budget of the Cosmos. And if we include all that exists, then black holes are already the dominant "particles of being" and themselves on the way to be shown the door as they are swept up and exported over the cosmic event horizon, leaving a pure void near absolute zero apart from the faintest rustle of dark energy blackbody radiation – the least interesting fluctuations possible in the most empty spacetime possible.

Given your interest in nodes and edges, or information-centric, accounts of all this, this is a way of telling the thermodynamic story using a topological mathematics. There is a reason to think this way for the practical purpose of modelling.

But then you have to dig into the logical atomism being built into the models to be able to step back to the larger metaphysics you might want to frame. Atomism succeeds by simplifying – by severing the immediate from its evolutionary history and self-organising tendencies.

Reality is a fabric of relations. But the simplicity of nodes and edges is the constructive simplicity that emerges from self-constraint. It is what you get – like photons, electrons and protons clattering about in an electromagnetic void – when a heck of a lot of other possibility has been cut away to leave only that as the material stuff you want explained.

The deeper question becomes how does causality and logical counterfactuality even arise as something so apparently simple and inevitable? That is the where systems thinking and other forms of holistic metaphysics comes in.

For those interested in the history of these kinds of political projects - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

You've got to be kidding. Reciprocal? — jgill

OK. Inverse if you prefer. And from there, the multiplicative inverse.

In a very rough sense of the word. Not mathematically. No coastline is patterned the same upon closer and closer examination. — jgill

Again you are talking about the absolutism built into the maths model and not the world of physical process that it then only roughly models.

Reality ain't a computation or a simulation. Coastlines aren't actually generated by an iterative algorithm.

No reason to assert that "dynamical balance" is not mathematical. — jgill

There you go again. Maths in its casual absolutism can provide pragmatic models of reality. But here you would need to start to think about how reality itself might be more deeply described.

The continuous is the limit of the discrete. The limit definition of the common integral does the job. — jgill

And how are you defining the discrete? What grounds claims of there being a difference? Why is differentiation reciprocal to integration?

I agree maths likes to sweep its metaphysics under the carpet. And here you are on a philosophy site, doing just that. :roll:

Don't need fractals. There is no intermediate case. — jgill

You are missing the point. The real world of natural processes is pretty fractal, ain't it? Mountains, coastlines, rivers, earthquakes. Anything described in the language of dissipative structure.

So mathematically, we have an interest in modelling the fact that nature is indeed organised by emergent dynamical balance. It is not one thing or the other, but some equilibrium fluctuation around its opposed tendencies.

The earth's crust is a balance between cooling crust formation and weathering erosion. A coastline is irregular over every scale of observation because it is a dynamical balance between smoothness and roughness. Or "integration and differentiation".

Fractal maths showed up in that link as the kind of bug that the patch of "absolute continuity" is designed to fix.

But maybe the Cosmos just ain't a computation as maths would like to demand, and instead dynamical balance – self-organised emergence from symmetry-breaking – is the logical core of its being?

So I'm asking, what is the point in describing anything as relative if that 'relative' aspect can be defined completely synonymously in a way that most people here seem to describe as an example of absolute? — Matt Thomas

But to be absolute is a relative thing. The absolute only exists in terms of reciprocal bounds that mark the limits on being. Thus no thing itself can be absolute. All things are relative to those bounding limits.

I know, not quite what you mean. :cool: — jgill

But note how fractals neatly express the intermediate case between the continuous and the discrete.

Dialectical reasoning covers this by making two opposing limits relative to each other. So you have pairs of absolute limits that are related by their reciprocality. Each is defined in terms of being as little like its other as possible, in dichotomous fashion.

A bunch of familiar metaphysical dichotomies have been organising Western thought since Ancient Greece.

Take for example the oppositions of stasis and flux, chance and necessity, matter and form, the one and the many, the discrete and the continuous, meaning and nonsense, atom and void, local and global, etc, etc.

Change can be measured in terms of a lack of stability. And stability as a lack of change. That is, applying the law of the excluded middle - the dichotomy defined as that which it is both mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive - stability = 1/change, and change = 1/stability. There is an inverse relation that defines its own absolute measurable limits. The measureable lack of one is the measurable degree of presence of its “other”.

So problem solved. We seek opposites that have metaphysical strength generality. And use them as our yardsticks to measure reality.

To be discrete is to be absolutely broken apart in some fashion. To be continuous is to absolutely lack that characteristic. We then can relate these two absolute ideals by the inverse operation which can tell us that how far or near we are from those bounding ideals in any particular case in question.

In reality, nothing could be absolutely continuous as it would indeed just break the yardstick. It would claim that the absolute simply existed in a way that made its opposite pole of being - the discrete - not even a remote possibility.

But we can still stay within the measurable bounds of possibility if the amount of discreteness being claimed as part of our continuous “whatever” is infinitesimal. That is, we are infinitely distant from a state which we would label as discrete.

So you get both the relative and the absolute out of a dichotomy for all practical purposes. Two poles are related in a mutually self-measuring fashion. And that relation is absolute to the degree it conforms to the constraints of the LEM.

Continuity and discreteness can have an absolute limit state description even if it is one based on the asymptotic approach to those limits via acts of relativistic discrimination.

Thanks. :up:

For instance, phenomenologically informed enactivist and autopoietic approaches in cognitive psychology are based on such a conceptual shift, and new materialism ( which is different than pomo) interprets the results of quantum field theory through a different metaphysics than older materialisms. — Joshs

Interesting. Do you have a handy link to this?

You mean you arent familiar with the philosophical history of structuralism — Joshs

I meant that I don't do gibberish. And I certainly don't regard the PoMo version of "structuralism" as a solid foundation for a proper structuralist metaphysics.

I'm a systems scientist/holist/Aristotelean when it comes to a structuralist causality. Kant and Hegel, along with Schelling and whoever, were the heirs to that tradition.

And where I depart is in recognising that organisms have their root in the physics of dissipative structure, but their intentionality in the mechanics of semiosis.

So nature wants to self-organise entropically. And life and mind can arise as further informational structure that lives off that dynamics.

The philosophical history of structuralism continues to be written. By science now.

We could argue the toss about who was informed by the mechanistic holism of Kant, who by the idealistic holism of Hegel. But it is still the same thing of taking the developmental perspective seriously. Perception as an embodied habit rather than a disembodied display.

As Derrida writes: — Joshs

I don’t speak gibberish. Perhaps you could translate into plain language?

One example is the eventual embrace of the ideas of American Pragmatists and Phenomenology within psychology. — Joshs

But wasn’t the pragmatism a reflection of early psychological research - the work of Helmholtz, Wundt, Donders, Fechner and the rest? Psychology started off enactive and embodied with its emphasis on habits, psychophysics, anticipation, etc - the practical how of modelling a world - and then got lost in the wilderness of Freudianism, Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Personality testing, etc, for a long time.

In my reading of the history, you have Cartesian representationalism and British empiricism creating the familiar disembodied notion of mind as a clutter of sense impressions and ideas. The justification of phenomenology as the method of inquiry.

You then have pragmatism arising out of the new scientific spirit of inquiry where the mind is all about modelling, habits and judgements - constrained by the fact of being in the world rather than being remarkable for standing apart from that world.

After that, psychology swings back to a confusion of approaches that speak to the old Dualistic concerns with representation and sense data. The “problem” for psychology becomes again the contents of the private individual head rather than the more general one of how organisms relate to worlds in meaning constructing fashion.

See this quick intro to Peirce’s theory of object recognition as a shift from the representationalism of sense data to the enaction of perceptual judgements.

https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/9037/NZAP%28Dec2014%29.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y

So enactivism was alive and well in 19th C experimental psychology. And Pragmatism arose in that context. Both were informed by the holism of German naturphilosophie.

But then the reductionist Anglo world came crashing in and claimed psychology as its science of the mind. The story of a container with its private content. The whole field got metaphysically screwed for another century.

Perhaps it could be argued that consciousness is 'the capacity for experience' in an allegorical manner to energy as 'the capacity for work'// and that physical matter, in the absence of consciousness, lacks the capacity for experience. So that the emergence of organisms is also the emergence of the capacity for experience, which is absent in the non-organic domain. — Wayfarer

So what is it about organisms that is so special? What characterises them beyond what the bare physics of matter can tell us?

The scientific view is that organisms display intelligence and behavioural autonomy because they use semiotic codes to construct a “selfish” or enactive modelling relation with their worlds. That is what can be seen plainly written into the structure of their nervous systems. It is not a mystery.

So what is the alternative you are trying to float here? That a by-product of starting down that path is that living bodies somehow … tune into a karmic plane of being, or something?

They are like fleshy receivers of cosmic signal? Having a metabolism not only allows organisms to do work but also download, glimpse, incorporate, something or other, a kind of “experiential energy” that radiates from some source beyond the physical realm?

Be specific as you like in answering. What ontology do you wish to commit to here?

I dismiss Chalmers by reducing his claimed concern to the general epistemic issue that science can only proceed by way of testable counterfactuals.

That applies to anything science might investigate. It is not special to “consciousness”. It is why science has special contempt for “theories that are not even wrong”.

Which is the class of theory popular with crackpots who like the idea that the Hard Problem gives them licence for their furious speculations.

The refrain of “no one knows” is being heard often. And yet the neuroscience exists.

The unification and stabilisation of perception is what falls out of the Bayesian Brain and its predictive modelling. Learning to ignore the world as much as possible by learning to anticipate the world as much as possible is what both solves this “binding problem” and also produces the sense of the still self at the centre of its coherently unfolding world.

Before you turn your head, you have already sent out the “reafference” pattern as the motor command to be subtracted from the resulting perceptual experience. You will know it is you that turns and not the world that suddenly lurches as that is the uncertainty which you just cancelled out in advance.

A lot of BS is being cited here about what “neuroscience doesn’t know”. Chalmers and Koch are perpetuating a giant public con. You are falling for it.

And as I’ve also said, that is not something which can be framed in scientific terms, because there’s no ‘epistemic cut’ here. We’re never outside of it or apart from it. — Wayfarer

You don't yet understand the epistemic cut. Perhaps I should rename it the epistemic bridge for your benefit.

The cut is the mechanics of a sign, a switch, a ratchet, that gets inserted so as to make the modelling a reality. Brains do that at their level. Societies do that at the next level up.

You are being too psychology-centric. You think only of the minds of "individuals". But organisms can become entrained to social levels of reality modelling. Ants and humans are the "ultrasocial" extremes of this development, as they could insert the further systems of sign in the form of pheromone signals and verbal signals.

There is the presumption that their findings are observer-independent i.e. replicable by anyone, They’re ‘third person’ in that sense. It’s an implicit assumption. — Wayfarer

It seems the explicit part of science as epistemic method that this "independence" is what is being socially-constructed. It is the realist position on indirect realism. :grin:

All the defenders of the Hard Problem and "what it is like to be a first person point of view" make the mistake of not understanding that selves arise within neurobiology as "other" to their perceptual/cognitive realities. The Bayesian Brain and psychology's "enactive turn" summarises the "how" of this. This is the concrete advance since Chalmers and Koch had their little self-aggrandising bet.

So the first person POV is "subjective" in relation to its neurobiological Umwelt. It objectifies the world as the "other" of its ability to forward model it environment. The self is that part of the brain activity which stands as a goal-organised predictive model of the world. The world then becomes for the organism that part of its wider reality which is the recalcitrant or unpredicted. By further processing that updates the running Bayesian model, the world gets assimilated to this "selfish" first person point of view and so woven in as a stable "consciousness" of "how everything is" in terms of a self~world relation.

Science comes along as humans eventually realise the modelling game being played and say we can do better. Through language, but better yet maths, we can implement a model of the modelling relation in such a way it would be like experiencing the world from a God-like view from nowhere. A transcendent third person point of view.

This is made concrete by a process of theory and measurement.

We can state publicly in formal terms a structure of thought that encodes predictions about states of the world. We can share a model with every other mind within our cultural orbit such that we can be sure we are thinking the same – because the rules of this thinking are captured in a rigid mechanical fashion.

And then the predictions are cashed out by reading numbers off dials. We become third person observers by making measurements – measurements that codify degrees of surprise or prediction error.

So whether we talk about "consciousness" as neurobiological awareness or socially-constructed knowing, it is the same epistemic process in action. Cognition as predictive modelling aimed at creating a self in control of its world.

The first person self becomes contrasted with the third person self only as the feature, rather than the bug, of the advances of human epistemology. We took nature's modelling relation to its next semiotic level. We found that we were embodied in our "private" worlds and so found the ladder that could get us out into a public space of theories and measurements.

At the deep metaphysical level – the one that speaks to the ontology of fundamental structure – the structure is the same. A self constructing itself as the prediction maker within what becomes its predictable world – its semiotic Umwelt.

So sure, one can bang on about ineffable feels and homuncular mind's eyes. That reflects an older technical point of view. It reflects the social technology required to impose stable order on the "world model" of cultures based on agrarian empire building. It produced the level of self-regulation that organised the world as a hierarchy of peasants, bureaucrats, priests and kings.

But now we live in industrialised societies where science is the new social technology. We can aim to regulate our lives in ways that have an impersonal rationality. We become ruled not by some transcending sense of God or generalised notion of the divine, but by something even more Platonic and impersonal than that. Laws of nature. And what a clock and ruler can tell us about that in terms of mechanical acts of measurement.

And sure, one may think this impersonalised form of mindfulness is a bit much. It's not real in the sense you might think your neurobiology of the "self and its world" is. The first person view stands clearly opposed to the third person view as the first person view is "the place which you actually inhabit".

But facts are facts. The first person view is just as much a modelling relation as the third person one. It is only that we find ourselves developmentally rooted in the first and making a conscious choice about the second.

And if we are going to be debating things "philosophically", we need to remember that between the neurobiology of the the organismic self and the social construction of the scientific self comes that middle period of being the peasants within an agrarian era with its organised religion and useful ways of having its folk think. There are good historical reasons for why the Hard Problem resonates with a theistic point of view – why Cartesianism still reigns with its crisp dualism of mind and body.

The objective point of view doesn't take the subject into consideration - it is only concerned with what is amenable to quantitative analysis from a third person point of view. — Wayfarer

That would be a grave misunderstanding of Peircean semiotics. Or indeed, post-Kantian epistemology in general.

Nolan goes on to explain that “the color scenes are subjective” and “the black-and-white scenes are objective. — Wayfarer

The difference between being there “for real” and being there as if watching the displaced historical newsreel record of events.

A simple but effective narrative trick by the sound of it. Not sure it supports your idealism very well though.

The grammatical differences among first, second and third person sentences present some interesting quirks, — Srap Tasmaner

Yep, a useful trick of grammar inflated to become an epistemic no go theorem and from there, the greatest mystery of all metaphysics. :up:

Oh, yea. There was also this. — javra

My celebration was premature. My name keeps being brought up. And suddenly you all seem to be reading papers on biosemiosis. I am curious about the gyrations that will be performed to sustain this Hard Problem charade for the next 26 years too.

But I am quite tiered of this interplay. Enjoy. — javra

You waved goodbye. But I keep getting tagged.

Now that you are talking of this mystical thing of “the mind’s eye”, is that something a philosophical zombie also has? Or are you simply pulling the rhetorical stunt of claiming something “exists”, but you define it so as to be beyond any possible empirical reach … because epistemic devilry of whatever needed form.

Does “the mind’s eye” come with a definition? We never got one for “consciousness” out of your mouth.

It’s all part of the game of course. Demand explanations for any term you decide to toss into the discussion, but refuse to give definitions for those terms in ways that would commit to an empirical test.

One can always keep claiming that no empirical evidence has been presented when one has refused to even agree as to what the nature of that empirical evidence might be.

All we have here is you playing the game of “look at me. I can say that I doubt”. But those words ring hollow. You never set out a position that you were prepared to believe.

For instance, were philosophical zombies to be real — javra

So you in fact believe they are not real? And therefore irrelevant in the reality in which scientific accounts unfold?

If Descartes’ demon was also real, then we would be epistemically screwed in every way. But you don’t think that is the case? Or even that if it could be the case, you would act any different in the world?

To claim zombies are conceivable is to assert that one can always doubt. And Descartes’ demon does a much more sweeping job of that for you.

But science is applied pragmatism. It begins with the epistemic willingness to hazard a belief. It advances a hypothesis and checks it out.

So your epistemology is as bad as your ontology on this score. It is meaningless carping as the science rolls on.

Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do

All fine up until the conclusion. Why won’t our theoretical frames do if they can do work in terms of our enactive interests?

Barad to me is saying nothing further than we indeed form Umwelts as “models of our world with our selves also to found in them”. This self-world modelling might just be Bayesian technology. But it’s what we’ve got and so the question is how do we proceed from there having realised there is this technology … and it can always be improved.

Is that what you mean by constructive alternativism? The difference of course may be that I would see that as a Darwinian competition for best model - according to some optimising metric that would be the debatable bit - and alternativism is philosophical cover for anything goes pluralism?

(I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him) — Wayfarer

It is much more prosaic than that. Barbieri wanted to be the big cheese with his ribosome theory. Pattee was over-shadowing him and the rest by arriving late, and endorsing Peirce over Saussure.

So he left in a dramatic huff to re-establish his own code biology brand. As it happens, he backed the right horse in the ribosome. That has indeed moved centre stage of abiogenesis in my view. And the ribosome is a very “Peircean” structure, a very convincing tale of how the epistemic cut could have first arisen in practice.

Arran Gare did a social history of the Barbieri affair - https://philarchive.org/rec/GARBAC-4

...should hold more weight than faith in the god-like mechanics of entropy. — Joshs

In the same spirit of making ontic commitments explicit so they can be debated rather than derided, I would point out that I follow the biosemiotic hierarchy on the material cause half of the hylomorphic systems science dichotomy.

So the material half of the equation would run from the most general to the least specified subsumptive order of....

"quantum indeterminacy" > dissipative structure > thermodynamics > mechanics > matter

That is, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order.

You can then restrict this larger view to that of regular "gone to equilibrium" thermodynamics – where the flows can encounter their final heat death. And then restrict the ontology even further to extract the regular classical view of dead matter following Platonic trajectories. And still further to arrive at simple matter imagined as a substance we could rub between our fingers or fling across the room.

So you can appreciate that to say physics really starts with the openness and self-organisation of dissipative structure theory is still a bold metaphysical move even today. But particle physics is there with topological order, QFT, condensed matter physics, etc.

And biosemiosis also now argues this is the "right kind" of material cause to use in its models as it is matter at its most dynamic and lifelike already. That leaves the semiosis so much less to have to do to then play its own causal part in whipping up organisms that exhibit the structure we call life and mind.

This covers with how the material half of the Aristotelean equation is dealt with. But what about the form in hylomorphic form, I hear you ask? :wink:

Well dissipative structure is a triadic ontology. It is the hierarchical story of global constraints shaping local degrees of freedom. What exists is then the dynamical balance that results. So it already includes global form and purpose to quite a large degree.

Again that is the feature not the bug. It leaves feeble life and mind less to have to organise as dissipative structure is "order out of chaos". It provides so much order just for free. But it is confusing as every move towards a suitably complex view of reality always winds up in trichotomies. It can seem – as Peirce was accused – that one just suffers from some trichotomania.

Anyway, form. From the biosemiotic point of view, there is a hierarchy of increasingly more general sign or code that runs... genes < neurons < words < numbers

Now there is clearly something different here. Genes are pretty arbitrary seeming. The whole of biology seems rather accidental more than metaphysically fundamental.

Well in fact there are new arguments for how the Comos couldn't have used anything else but carbon backbones, proton pumps or redox reactions. The space of possibility was far more restricted than might be thought. Yet also, the Cosmos wasn't too fussed seeming about their being any biology. And genes look to have a large dose of contingency about them until we get a proper autopsy on those aliens they found.

Neurons are likewise a perhaps contingent bit of semiotic kit. Words - as puffs of air – again could have been something else. But puffs of air are very low cost, and a vocal tract forces the symbols into serial order. There is the general thing of being cheap to produce and also dimensionally constrained in ways that build in the necessity of articulate choice. Word order is inevitable and so grammar is also inevitable.

Then we get to number. Would any kind of alien have to count? Arguably yes if they get around in flying saucers and generally do engineering. And as the Ancient Greeks felt they discovered, maths speaks with Platonic necessity. You can't just pick and choose the structures that follow rules. Form at that level is more discovered than invented. So we seem to arrive at some kind of matching metaphysical limit, even if it remains a highly debated one.

As you can see, I defend a fairly elaborate but systematic metaphysics. Laugh if you like. Or engage.

A principle of constructive alternativism — Joshs

Sounds grand. What does it actually mean in practice - metaphysical or scientific practice?

It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebrated — plaque flag

Yep. The shift to real people rather than social tokens. Less moralising and more nuance. All part of the social construction of the modern citizen upon which the next chapter of social and economic development was based.

My key commitment is basically that we have actual bodies in an actual world. — plaque flag

And I speak to the homuncular incoherence of leaving out the social construction of the “we” that has an “actual body”.

Probably you want to leave that way framing things behind. I believe I have provided as many pointers as I can to what I view as the right path.

'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason. — plaque flag

I’m OK with that. Time binding is actually a semiotic concept in my book.

individual living brains are necessary for this social game. — plaque flag

But which comes first? A biologist could reasonably argue that “ultrasociality” first arose in ants and termites speaking the language of pheromones to act like a distributed brain.

The individual ant is more like an individual neuron than an individual brain in this story of chemical messages jumping synapses.

So if we are to generalise successfully to the wider biological frame, of course there must be the suitable parts. But it is the collective whole which defines what could be meant as suitable.

Is human evolution a story of individual hominid genius or collective hominid habit. Paleoanthropology points firmly to the later.

That Og invented the wheel is a modern joke - the first entrepreneur. The history of isolated small human populations - like the Tasmanian aboriginal people - show how the quickly forget much that they once knew. Basic skills like fishing or stitching clothing can just disappear. You need a critical mass to allow the specialisation that keeps innovation alive and developing.

The genius is standing on the shoulders of countless others. Some genius once said that.

Tell me something I didn't know and haven't said. We discussed Kelly at length, remember? And I think why Mead, Cooley and Dewey showed something was also stirring at the turn of the century in the wake of pragmatism, but failed to flower for reasons of wisespread Anglo-world disinterest.

Vygotsky and Luria are more interesting to me. They combined the psychology and the neurobiology. They experimented. They seemed to have a receptive audience as social constructionism ought to be "on brand" following a Marxist revolution. But then shit happened. Along came Stalin. The suppression of the books. The academic seizing on Jewishness and Vygotsky's failure to actually adhere literally to Marxist theology. And tuberculosis.

As a stirring that again failed, it was bigger and thus more tragic.

There is a social history here that goes back to Aristotle at least. And it doesn't feel as if there has been a true paradigm shift yet.

I mean you don't seem impressed with Bayesian mechanics as the vision of where enactivism is all headed. I haven't heard enthusiasm from you for the semiotic turn in the life sciences. PoMo may have turned towards metaphysics in its search for fresh discursive meat, but not serious engagement with Peircean semiotics. The carcasses of Saussure and Marx are still stinking up the place.

Meaning is 'dormant' (a 'spore' or 'virus') in/as a script without a reader. — plaque flag

That is how a computationist would look at it. Biology and neuroscience show that computationalism is simply wrong. Life and mind start from the first meaningful action. The first shifting of an atom for a reason.

Scripts don't write themselves. And they need to be being read from the start of their writing.

I think that maybe you don't sufficiently address the importance of the subject. — plaque flag

Or you are not following what I've been saying.

So let's get focused on what you say your are here to discuss despite it being a wandering of the thread. You want to be able to quantify the "genius personality" in terms of some individualistic paradigm of the human mind and spirit?

I am saying this would simply be a bad question arising from a bad metaphysics. And I've made that reply accordingly.

I've tried to argue using concrete examples which you brush away in your haste to just keep moving on in aimless-feeling fashion.

So again, focus. If we have Shakespeare and Newton as our candidate for intellectual hero of the English millennial, how do we decide who wins, who is runner up?

A metric I might toss into the mix is what we are willing to ignore about their personalities – if personalities is indeed key to your putative model.

So Newton was a historical genius in turning physics into maths. He was brave or reckless enough to use dramatically lossy data compression. He even was willing to chuck out the very materialistic metaphysics he just had substantiated with his Laws of Motion to take the opposite tack "action at a distance" in his Law of Gravitation.

We all applaud that kind of relentless genius that can use and abuse metaphysics as he willed. The maths is what mattered. The metaphysics got backfilled to fit. A project going on for both his mathematical triumphs. And even the maths was of foundational importance and is keeping folk busy trying to back fill its metaphysics too. The ghost of departed quantities, and all that.

No wonder Newton is a turning point just in terms of social attitude. He personified something that really did change intellectual history. Where would Kant and the rest be without Newton as that central challenge? The guy had strut.

But what does polite intellectual society then say about his religiosity? Well, it seems excusable for a person of his time if not his genius.

What about his difficult personality? Again, excusable to be impatient with dullards and jealous of those claiming any part of his personal glory. That's just people being people. Maybe he was neurodiverse and so really can't be blamed.

Did did you know he was made Master of the Royal Mint? And he was twice an MP? Oh yeah. A man of the world, a man of action too. That adds to his genius personality index. But wait. That was about social influence and good money. Erm, it seems he was trading up to be a big cog in the Imperial British enterprise. He lost a good chunk of change plunging into a slave-trading venture. Um, move on.

Now let's socially evaluate his career as an alchemist, his occult studies. Oh no. Let's not. Erase that from the collective memory and fix on the bit of the scientist that was the mathematical genius. We don't have to judge the genius personality in terms of his personality after all perhaps.

Now run the same ruler over Shakespeare. Could his peccadilloes even detract from his reputation? Wouldn't he be judged more leniently on that social score because the social realm was itself the one he was addressing where Newton was addressing something intellectually more demanding than that?

Shakespeare stands accused of the literary sin of plagiarism – turning the prose of others into poetry. But no one minds that as he just told the stories better.

I'm just illustrating here the reality that it is audiences that rate genius. And they do so in regard to their institutionalised interests. It might then take certain personality traits to succeed in this competitive game. But it is still the audience that takes the view on what it might treat as the proper measure, even just on the "type of person" the genius was.

If you are a mathematician, for instance, there are almost no standards of social grace that obtain. :naughty:

I'm a holist focused on the (human) lifeworld that can't really be broken up except in terms of useful lies. — plaque flag

The problem with the subjective stance is that even the self as a first person viewpoint is socially constructed.

Well it is first neurobiologically constructed. Pragmatic modelling means I can chomp my food with out chewing off my tongue.

But the kind of self that exists the social world where individuals can be acclaimed as "genius personalities" is a social construction. And needs to understood as such. Otherwise you are building your philosophical cities on foundations of sand.

Language is tribal software. — plaque flag

Computationalism works as very rough metaphor. But it is another foundation of sand.

Life and mind science need to be built on the foundation of dissipative physics. As I argued, even the modern industrial world with its particular economic and political structures are comprehensible as "metabolism".

Once again a code is putting itself in charge of the physics needed to give itself existence as a structure that can grow and evolve.

And you can't say that about a computer. Well, not until they start telling ChatGTP to go find its own wall socket to plug itself into after the power company cancels over the mounting unpaid bills. Hey computer, go figure it out for yourself. If you are so smart, provide your own metabolic foundation.

let's imagined a shipwrecked composer with a harpsichord and plenty of coconuts. He soars to new musical heights on that island, — plaque flag

Better yet, let’s imagine the infinity of randomly typing monkeys banging away until the end of time.

We agree that they “must” produce every possible work of genius of any kind? And hence this proves something about genius?

Meaning has to be smuggled in somewhere to give life to the syntax. You want to claim it starts with the individual and so artfully arrange your thought experiment to achieve that illusion. I say go back and start again. Deal with Borges’ Library of Babel.

What I'm getting at is (roughy) personality is the yardstick. — plaque flag

A certain kind of inquiring intelligence?

I was talking about the human tendency to dogmatize theories like Darwin's and the BB, according them the status of facts, of orthodoxy, and how that can make it difficult for competing theories to get heard. — Janus

But you were claiming that inside the institutions as well as outside. And I replied that the institutions institutionalise the competitive space in which the different theories are heard. It would be a problem if they were bad at serving this function. We would know they were bad as nothing was ever allowed to change. They would be museums and not places of quite frantic intellectual competition.

What in fact makes it difficult to be heard is everyone is shouting at once these days. Anyone can shove a pet Theory of Everything on Arxiv. Then belly-ache if everyone else doesn’t immediately drop their own pet theory.

Academia used to be so much smaller. You could immediately ignore anything said by a polytech, or which came out of the colonies.

I’m not recognising the intellectual world you are quoiting Hands as describing.

Exceptions to this include the later Wittgenstein, enactivism and social constructionist approaches in psychology. — Joshs

Sure. Belatedly the Anglo world started to show up. So I don’t see these as exceptions but stragglers. Folk like Vygotsky and Luria already had the party well started in the 1920s. Social constructionist approaches to psychology arose out of that as the Russian texts finally got translated.

Yet right when Vygotsky/social constructionism was finally filling two shelves at UCL’s Waterstones, along comes the genecentric/cognitive module bandwagon of evolutionary psychology and rolls right over it. Back to the future we go.

Enactivism really took its time showing up too. I had long given up waiting. The Cartesian grip on the Anglo imagination is strong. The enactivists came in swinging as if they were offering the world something unthunk and brand new.

Does language serve a role in fusing habit and what is attended to in such a way as to transform the habit in the very act of engaging it? — Joshs

Not sure that this question coheres well enough for me to give a matchingly snappy answer.

But I’m inclined to “sure”. It is all a pliable and fused kind of story once social construction and neurodevelopment have been co-habiting a brain for 20 or 30 years.

Sure, and I think there are deconstruction-adjacent forms of literary criticism that dissolve the creative personality into a mere thermostat of their time -- ignoring that their own criticism becomes equally 'irrational' --a mere blinking light on the history machine -- thereby. — plaque flag

Still not sure what goal you are reaching for here. You seem to be arguing that these things are mutually exclusive rather than necessarily complementary. That one most win and thus the other lose - the zero sum game - instead of there being the win-win that comes with a useful division of labour.

The game is to differentiate AND integrate. Go in both directions with the vigour that can arrive at a high state of dynamical contrast.

And isn’t that why you would celebrate a historical figure like Shakespeare. He was singular and different because of the generality or universality of what he had to say. We can focus on him to understand what we all ought to think.

The tightness of listening to a single lonely voice, heard and agreed to by the largest imagined crowd, indeed echoing on down the ages, is the kind of high contrast state that eliminates the most ambiguity. We have even the artefact - the canonical work of a play - to cement the lonely utterance in the collective memory. We can refer back at any moment to a spoken truth and interpret it afresh - stage Macbeth in the setting of a modern corporate office or whatever.

So your acts of solitary genius are meaningless until they are understood as having been matched by an equal amount of intelligent response.

The question then is who moved more people down the ages. Is Newton greater than Shakespeare? At least in theory we could quantify this in terms of how much movement - cultural or physical - was created by a bunch of plays vs the Principia.

You seem to want to ask how to measure genius, I say the yardstick is obvious. Action and reaction. The push and its effect. A simple reciprocal equation, or Newton’s third law of motion. And then less clearly, the kind of thing l’m sure Shakespeare also gestured at in all his words I never actually bothered to read. :smile:

Still, it seems to me like meaning is in some ways constructed too. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My systems science view expects upward acting construction as the “other” to downward acting constraint. So construction comes as part of the holistic equation in some form.

t seems like different, quite independent systems get used for processing different aspects of language. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Your brain is an accumulation of processing habits that will simply emit the right response when constrained by some general act of attention.

So if your focus is on interpreting an utterance, that suppresses activity across the brain so that all your many perceptual habits - visual, gustatory, object recognition, spatial orientation, whatever - are turned to the task of responding in their learnt habitual way. The words will be decoded in terms of their suitable associations and anticipatory imagery will form.

Stick a person’s head in a scanner and the word “hammer” will light up the motor cortex areas which know what it feels like to initiate the physical act to banging down a nail. Say “wombat” and the visual recognition paths will light up with a suitable state of expectancy for what you might indeed turn your head and see within your visual field.

So understanding is the brain being holistically constrained by attentional focusing to have some narrowed state of sensory and motor priming that “puts you in mind” of the right kind of anticipatory imagery and readiness to act accordingly.

The call of “Kentucky Fried” or “pizza” might even get you drooling in preparation for what you expect is about to arrive on the diner table. Responses that would be more appropriate to “hammer” and “wombat” will also now be equally much suppressed.

Those constructive habits of action are still part of the fabric of your brain, but they will be inhibited rather than excited. The meaning of words is understood in what you now don’t expect or prepare for as much in what you do.

That is why we wouldn’t describe interpretation as simply representational or constructive. It needs a holistic act of focusing that fruitfully limits the brain by suppressing the vast number of inappropriate reactions as much as it appears to stimulate the few right ones.

You can see this happening in real-time with EEG recordings. There is a characteristic P300 positive wave of inhibition that sweeps across the brain 300 milliseconds after some surprise stimulus to narrow focus to the task of interpreting just whatever it is. Then a N400 negative swing of excitation as the suitable pattern-match gets made and the right state of sensory and motor priming is evoked.

So, it seems like the recipient "brings something to the table." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. The brain isn’t a computer. It is very flexible and organic. It can cut short the time it spends letting a state of deep understanding emerge. Or it can linger until you really start to feel what it would be like to really have a wombat rummaging about at your feet, probably stinking like a wombat and grunting how you might imagine a wombat would, That level of vividness takes about 500ms to conjure up, and so occupies your brain that it “blinds” you to everything else for half a second too.

Or you can do the quicker thing of just responding “subconsciously”. Almost as you hear the word, you have made enough of a connection - “OK, that Australian marsupial thing” - to just skip on and keep going with the sentence. You can get the gist and always come back to let the word expand in your consciousness if you need to double check that “wombat” could really make sense in the context of what was said after that.

Think about thinking. That is our learnt habit of using speech on ourselves - the inner voice. But we often believe we think wordlessly because we can cut short the full act of uttering in our heads - waiting long enough for the full auditory image to arrive - as it is enough to begin shaping the motor intent to the point we could have actually said the words to ourselves, then skip on. We short-circuit to save time as the attention constraining effect of narrowing our state of thought has already been achieved by our getting ready to verbalise some point of view.

The effect is compounded by the fact that we are mostly always going to say the kinds of things we usually would say to ourselves anyway. There is even less need to linger. We can even think on automatic pilot. Just let the routines run.

Language is an evolved capacity that itself evolves. It is used to do many different types of things — Count Timothy von Icarus

And what is missed is that language is used as the trick that structures our own thoughts as much as it communicates our state of mind to another. To be able to speak its to have the ability to self-constrain in ways that are like being “spoken to” by your society, your culture, your peers, your tribe.

We did not evolve as thinking selves that then needed to tack on speech to express a headful of clever private thoughts. We evolved as animals whose behaviour could be organised from an emergent higher level of socially constructed meaning. We evolved to be listener’s of what we were meant to be doing so as to function in a communal fashion. Once we got into that habit of constantly reminding ourselves through a “self-regulating” inner voice, then we started to find ourselves with a headful of clever private thinking.

Any time there was some socially approved course of action, that would automatically bring to mind it’s “other” of what we thus shouldn’t be doing, or even thinking as a possibility. But of course, that then raises the very possibility of going against the group mind and doing something for selfish and private reasons.

The “voice of conscience” will be ringing in your guilty head. Very loudly if you have a strict upbringing where you were always being told by parents, teachers and priests. Yet the very fact of being socialised as a general constraint on your thought and behaviour will shape up matching degrees of freedom in your thought and behaviour. In being strongly focused on what not to do, you become strongly focused on what you might indeed do. And so the private self emerges as other to the public self.

Language leads to the co-construction of our private and public realms. Society needs language to shape us, and we need language to shape our societies.

That two-way focusing effect of speech acts is what Anglo thought in particular tends to miss. It is absent from mainstream cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and evolutionary psychology even.

The sciences that think they study the human mind think they need to study the human individual. You have to get into sociology, anthropology and child development to hear about how the human mind is in fact linguistically constructed.

Would you say though that this is very different than what Shakespeare was doing ? — plaque flag

You could make a case that he spoke to the metabolism - the economic and political order - of his time. He may well have crystallised views of history and customs from an English perspective that informed the notion of what it was to be a member of that society. He was an influencer pushing the zeitgeist to its sharper focus. And that sense of identity was important as Europe was changing from feudalism to nation states. Larger identities were needed to bind the local fiefdoms into mobilised kingdoms.

So at the level of words, he was helping the reorganisation of a nation as it made a major upgrade to its metabolic basis by becoming centralised in its politics and moving towards the trade that which would alllow it to grow its population with imported food by beginning to export manufactured goods.

Did Shakespeare understand this or did he just pocket the proceeds from being nifty with a quill and rhyme? Was he brilliant at capturing the currents of his time, but didn’t actually claim to be standing right outside of the system to see it as indeed a system?

We can tell Anaximander and Aristotle were doing that. Metaphysics is different. It isn’t holding up a mirror to a time and place in the way that is of everyday human interest. It is to step back as far as possible by having a method that systematically abstracts such historical contingencies until only the pure structure of “being” is being contemplated.

But I am quite tiered of this interplay. Enjoy. — javra

So this is goodbye. :party: