So I imagine the big bang as not being located "ago". But rather being a "speed" or rate. One we are seoarated from by virtue of the fact that we are precipitant energy - ie matter. The tape slowed down, energy buled out into substance and spacetime stretched out into "billions of years and billions of astronomical units of distance". — Benj96

Pretty much. I would argue time is best measured logarithmically to reflect that rapid slowdown. Everything was happening everywhere all at once, but even after half a second, it was quite transformed.

In those terms, time is telescoped so that it makes more sense. It takes about 40 magnitudes of scale expansion to reach even the "first second" of existence. And the next 50 magnitudes cover the consequent 10^107 seconds to the heat death or practical end of time.

M0 to M7 - Planck scale cohesion forms
M7 to M11 - Inflation epoch
M11 to M31 (with crossover at M21) - Electroweak era
M31 to M38 - Quark-gluon soup era
M38 to M43 - Hadron epoch kicks in
..and the first second has passed...
M43 to M44 - Lepton soup epoch
M44 to M46 - Nucleosynthesis is the next quick step
M46 to M55 - Photon dominated expansion era
M55 to M60 - Switch to matter dominated expansion
M60 to M90 – Dark energy takes over until the Heat Death
...and now the end has arrived after about 1 to the power of 100 years...

So the first second did feel like it moved at light speed. The rest after that has become the longest and slowest crawl.

Yet if you admit deliberation than deliberating the ethics of creating another POVs dealing with entropy is an example of this. — schopenhauer1

But I simply don't accept your one-sided view of existing as a human. If it is a reason for you not to breed then that's fine.

I have often enough expressed my concerns about the way civilisation is going. But that is quite different from your claims that life can't be fun and feel the opposite of a burden.

Apokrisis has just now written about this notion of an impersonal balance of the system, implying necessity despite the fact that humans can deliberate about things like suffering and understand the very fact of suffering. — schopenhauer1

That's just misreading. What isn't constrained is what is free. The Second Law absolute forbids perpetual motion machines. But humans can build any kind of motion machine for which they can stack up the entropic budget.

What's your preference? Roller skates or a Lamborghini? Pink or gold? Leather seats or vinyl? The customer is king.

I am not *comfortable* allowing logic itself to be something like a fact of our universe -- maybe it is something more like a necessity for any universe, or at least for any intelligible universe. — Srap Tasmaner

It ought to help to strip "logic" down to its ultimate simplicities. We do grant it too much psychological status, even though we don't then want to eliminate it as the thread of "cosmic intelligibility" that runs through life and mind too.

The metaphysics of the systems view goes back to Anaximander's apeiron and the general Greek enthusiasm for understanding nature as a dialectic, a unity of opposites.

What it boils down to is the logical principle that whatever doesn't self-contradict is free to be the case. Peirce encoded this in his dichotomy of tychism~synechism – freedoms and the habits of constraint that must emerge once everything starts happening and discovers how that mass of interacting results in its own restricting limits.

If you have to argue against any principle, this would seem the hardest to refute.

Something popping out of nothing doesn't compute. There is no logic in that. But somethingness being whatever is left after a great clash of clashing contrarieties does compute. It is an undeniable conclusion. Everythingness is its own filter as all that is simply symmetric will eliminate itself, leaving whatever is uncancellably asymmetric as a possibility.

If you step one metre left and one metre right, nothing has effectively changed. But if you step one metre left and it is over the edge of a cliff, now you have an event that can't so easily be cancelled out.

This is exactly the logic of the path integral that extracts a concrete world from the probabilities of particle fields. The calculation takes all possible particle events and then discovers the degree to which all the many options cancel each other out.

The vast weight of the possibilities are symmetric – virtual particle pairs that create and annihilate without leaving any trace. But this self-winnowing eventually leaves some "collapsed" actual particle event making its mark on the world.

So both in our earliest metaphysics and our best current physical models, the same deep logical trick is at work. Something emerges out of a self-cancelling sum over everything. We have a foundational truth that we can rely on. Or at least pragmatism tells us no other principle has better survived the test.

I should add that dichotomies encode asymmetries, or hierarchical order.

If everything simply self-cancelled, then that would indeed leave nothing. So what can survive all the cancellation is the dichotomous order that gives reality two complementary directions in which to be forever moving apart from itself.

Again, that is the metaphysics of the quantum view. The Universe is eternally cooling and spreading – spreading because it cools, and cooling because it spreads.

In any instant, from the level of individual quantum vacuum fluctuations, the world has grown both larger and cooler. This in itself is enough to promote some of the self-cancelling virtual pairs to long-term reality.

At the event horizon of a black hole or the edge of the visible universe, you have even the briefest-lived self-annihilating pairs being separated for just long enough to find themselves existing in different lightcones or world lines.

Back during the hot dense fury of the Big Bang, inflation itself was separating virtual fluctuations with enough vigour to keep even a lot of very short-lived particles going. There was a lot of crud to spill into a rapidly cooled void and reheat it with the matter we are familiar with as the lucky survivors.

So the objection to maths and logic is largely to do with the way these fields have wandered off as their own research subjects, remote from the concerns of natural philosophy - the tradition that connects ancient metaphysics to modern physics.

Maths is hell of an arbitrary exercise in the freedoms from physical reality that it grants itself. The logic choppers likewise have strayed from the constraints of pragmatics.

But what we mean by an intelligible cosmos is in fact so simple in terms of its logic and maths that this isn't a great problem. The Darwinian principle of cosmic self-selection tells us somethingness is the product of a symmetry-breaking so rigorous that it left behind only uncancellable asymmetry. The dichotomy that results in the hierarchy.

In the end, the cooling~expanding Universe will end in its Heat Death. All the crud will get broken down into the faintest rustle of a quantum vacuum and exported across cosmic horizons. It will still be something of course, but as near to absolute nothingness as we can intelligibly conjecture.

What W. doesn't reject is the notion that language can reach beyond the world, into the world of metaphysics. — Sam26

The step from real worlds to possible worlds. But then that also requires the same inherent criteria of being worlds from a point of view. Worlds dichotomised in terms of their “objective vs subjective” poles.

You can find all this within language as a semiotic tool. The motif repeats at the lower level of neurobiology and higher level of scientific inquiry.

The secrets of existence - the answer to “why anything?” - is to be found in the immanence of semiosis, not some transcendent manoeuvre, whether this be the transcendence of the lumpen realist or deluded idealist.

Semiosis is what Peirce could see as the immanent wellspring of reality whether we talk epistemology or ontology.

This makes a tool like language neither arbitrary nor necessary, neither PoMo subjective nor AP objective, but just an expression of the pragmatic dynamic that organises a state of persisting being.

Language does not need external grounding. Worlds and selves co-arise as complementary poles of being. Or initial conditions and boundary conditions if we are drilling down (and up) in terms of pansemiotic cosmic generality.

We want to see others fight the entropy. — schopenhauer1

I talk of play and mastery. You turn it into fight and misery.

Why not ask a surfer or procreator and discover what actual metric seems more accurate of their experience.

Pessimism is projection. As bad as the pollyannarism it welcomes as its congenital “other”. A systems view speaks to the balance of flow states and habits that integrate selves and their worlds.

Neural networks? — schopenhauer1

Semiotic networks now. Bayesian mechanics has been generalised to include life and mind.

Indeed, but your systems view discounts that procreation is a choice. Ascetics exist. Birth control exists. Abstinence exists. Pessimism exists. Realism (informal) exists. — schopenhauer1

The “other” must always exist. The systems view adds the constraint that the fundamental dynamic must express a win-win dichotomy. That is how nature works. That is how we could measure the degree of pathology in the current stage of the human story.

You want to deal in absolutes. If things ain’t perfect, then they are a disaster. But that isn’t how systems thinking would set up its metric. The spectrum would have to be instead based on complementary limits on being.

With a society for example, it would be how well does it maximise both local differentiation and global integration? You want a relation where each is reinforcing its other rather than negating its other.

There is an agenda behind every human point of view. The "agenda" of entropy barreling towards a heat death does not necessitate humans shooting out another POV into the world. — schopenhauer1

We are entrained to the telos of the Cosmos. But that doesn’t prevent us showing our mastery over entropy gradients by surfing, dancing, gardening, cooking, procreating, and all the other ways of just having a little fun.

You can choose the misery of not having hobbies or activities. You can dismiss these as worthless diversions. But don’t expect me to agree that this is a sensible point of view to have just because I’m human.

Energy is energy is energy until it has a point of view. — schopenhauer1

If you want to talk in terms of psychic energy, then Bayesian information is as close as you could get I guess.

But it sounds now like you are falling back into the incoherence of substance dualism. And even physics, let alone the sciences of life and mind, has been doing its best to move on from the substance ontology that talk of “energy” once implied.

Science now takes the systems view where gradients must be constructed down which outcomes flow. Teleology is built in to animate the Cosmos.

Your complaint is that intelligence has been dropped into the heat bath that is the Universe and is being required to do work. A planet was orbiting a star. The laws of entropy demanded that life and mind arise to accelerate the dissipation of the resulting thermal gradient.

All this effort we humans are putting in to burn all that accumulated fossil fuel. My god, what is it all for? Etc.

Exergy would likely be the better term for what you want then. Biology prefers it because it is the useful work that can be extracted by a system coming to equilbrium with its environment.

This speaks to the particular energy potential being dissipated. It might be chemical bonds, solar radiation, whatever.

Or even better are still more specific measures like ascendency. This deal directly with the material closure that sets ecosystems and societies up as dissipative structures which can repair the living fabric that is metabolising it’s environment.

Ascendency is derived using mathematical tools from information theory. It is intended to capture in a single index the ability of an ecosystem to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size.

One way of depicting ascendency is to regard it as "organized power", because the index represents the magnitude of the power that is flowing within the system towards particular ends, as distinct from power that is dissipated naturally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendency .

That is the fun of thermodynamics. From the super abstracted notion of entropy (and information), you can derive all sorts of metrics based on the same fundamental maths.

Out of the ground of a “heat death”, we can conjure up all we hold dear. Including vibrant rain forests or the throb of daily city life.

What is enthalpy's relationship to entropy? — schopenhauer1

A simple answer is the two talk about things at different levels of generality. So enthalpy is a measure of useable heat. Entropy is a measure useable information. One focused on the primary interests of the steam age. The other on those of the current information era.

So two different, yet related, ways of reducing reality to mathematical quantities that make sense from their respective embodied points of view.

Pessimism could surely pull the same trick and quantify the notion of burden as yet another thermo-metric? The level of disappointment that could be generated by some amount of simply being alive and so generating the steady metabolic heat equivalent of running a 100 watt bulb?

The higher the initial expectation of a life of effortless joy, the greater the “work” to be extracted in terms of generating a sense of crashing disillusionment. Is that the ethical equation you had in mind? :smile:

Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair (see Rorty, and, I guess, most analytic philosophers). To see a truth IS an aesthetic experience. — Astrophel

Following Peirce, I would argue any notion of truth is semiotic. And science now tells us that humans engage in semiosis at four levels of encoding or sign relations.

We engage with the world via genes, neurons, words and numbers. Or more broadly, we are neurobiological creatures first, but have become also sociocultural creatures as well.

And so I say you are confusing the levels at which we “exist in the flow of nature”. Neurobiology sets us up as affective selves. We respond to the world as we find it in “emotional” ways. We read our surroundings in ways that deal with our basic survival. Our responses are the physiological states and behavioural habits appropriate to that level of world modelling.

Then philosophy comes in at a very different level. It is based on the abstracted notion of universalised reason and the specific of measurement. It is based on the third person absolute detachment that we imagine as the God’s eye objective point of view that it dialectically opposed to our embodied, affective, subjective, first person point of view.

So in reality, as living breathing human beings also carving out space in social communities, we of course feel as well as reason. We see as well as measure. It can seem impossible to split off the neurobiological aspects of our semiotic organisation from our socialcultural ones.

Yet the sensible definition of philosophy is just that. It is the attempt to reach the limit of detachment from the point of view of a creature rooted in embodied subjectivity.

Reasoning still depends on affect as we well know. It feels quite different to be certain vs uncertain. We get a feeling when something clicks and seems right - the aha! response.

But in the interests of fostering philosophical detachment, that is why we have come to lean on the pragmatism of the scientific method. We take claims of feeling convinced out of the equation as much as possible. We invent statistical methods to quantify our proper position on spectrums of certainty-uncertainty.

We aim to feel no more strongly about some conviction than that of the response of the click of pattern recognition. We have been presented with some complicated puzzle. There is then some satisfaction in making the last piece fit to complete the whole picture.

So sure, truth isn’t just propositional. AP types got that wrong. Truth comes in its grades of semiosis. The body has to react in ways that are “affective” to be effective in its world.

But then truth as a game being played at the highest level of detached abstraction is understood as “other” to this embodied affectiveness. It is Peirce’s community of reason that aims for objectivity via the cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Make a guess at a general causal relation, deduce the particular logical consequences of that being true, then test to see how those expectations turn out in terms of numbers on dials.

Flickers on needles rather than flickers of the heart are the currency of rational inquiry.

A curiosity here is that the speed of light is fixed. And yet it is tha fastest rate at which something can "change" location (velocity). Could this mean there's some strange union between that which remains constant and that which changes the most rapidly? — Benj96

Relativity builds in the fact that the “speed of rest” is a reciprocal limit. So a photon experiences no time separating locations as it moves at c, and a mass “at rest” in its reference frame experiences the most time passing possible. It is a yo-yo relationship in which as the mass then appears to accelerate in its reference frame, it experiences time dilation.

So you are right that change vs stasis is a unity of opposites. To be stably at rest is to know you have spent the longest time just sitting there doing nothing. To be the swiftest change is to have the least notion that there was anything other that could have been done except that abrupt something.

The Universe started out so hot that everything moved at the speed of light. But it also started out with so little effective distance that there wasn’t any real space to cross anyway.

It took about half a second for things to start to separate out in ways that made a difference between the maximum and minimum rates of change a thing. You could have more slowly moving masses dropping out of the general flow of radiation and now moving at all relative speeds down to the theoretical minimum of being “at rest”.

Eventually after a few billion years, the universe had grown so large and cold that the right kind of reference frames could exist. We could have the rather extreme separation of c and rest that we experience today.

You could sit as lumps of matter in a vast frigid void with mostly bugger all happening to disturb your peace.

And yet still, as lumps of matter, we have those aspects of our being - such as a gravitational field and a little bit of warm radiation - that do spread out from our sense of unchanging location at c. So the falling out of the general c flow is relative.

We're aiming for the philosophical 17th Century. Somehow we keep missing it. — frank

The twisty journey that all must take from lumpen realism, to the body shock of idealism, to the eventual resolution of enactivism and pragmatism.

I've been heavily involved in the design of hardware, firmware, and software of a device that NIST and other national metrology institutes pass back and forth in order to compare the primary reference standards of different nations against each other. — wonderer1

Life is sweet. My position is Peircean semiosis and pragmatism. Peirce, among other things, was the founder of serious US metrology.

So all credit to your “heavy involvement” in instrument manufacturing. But…. :kiss:

Why not then just say what you mean rather than ask dumb questions and expect me to take them seriously.

On your actual argument, the simple reply is think more carefully about what I said. Black and white are useful to the degree they bound all the possibilities that constitute grey.

As absolute values connected by a reciprocal relation, they would in fact make all shades of grey measurable as specified mixtures.

So science is founded on this analytical move. It is how the dynamics of nature can be measured in terms of precisely articulated theories.

This is how we “map language and reason onto the world”!

I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent. — Srap Tasmaner

Pragmatism is not about individual belief but about a community of mind. It is “truth” at the level of the social organism. What it needs to believe to live - to sustain an existence - in “it’s” world.

Language and culture are the genetic information system that organises humans as functional systems of belief. Words are how we feed mouths, not just noises mouths make.

As educated individuals, we can then use the tools of verbal coordination and rational argument in all sorts of other personally-motivated activities. But what society cares about as a whole is keeping its evolved show going by pragmatically modelling the world in which it must thrive.

Why are you pretending not to understand?

Well on the common understanding of “advocating”, what is it that you might doubt and so sustain a view that I am in fact attempting the antithesis of that?

We can probably rule out that I failed to state the position publicly. What reason makes you think I don’t in fact support it?

Are you advocating such a view? — wonderer1

Do you believe it or do you doubt it? How are you going to proceed here so as to minimise your uncertainty? :cool:

You can get around this by bootstrapping the convention non-conventionally, and that means granting that not everything is conventional. — Srap Tasmaner

Pragmatism roots itself in the logical consistency of the dichotomy. We could either believe or doubt. Each extreme is logically rooted in its “other”. Together they simplify your options by excluding all other less polarised options.

So pragmatism is about getting past Cartesian doubt by accepting the challenge of hazarding belief. We form a hypothesis and work to find cause to doubt it. To the degree we fail, we have strong grounds for acting on what looks to be working.

Calling this acting on convention is a negative way to frame it. Habits are thoughts that have proved their long-run worth. Logic itself is conventional. It relies on the habit of dichotomising to uncover polar alternatives that are the most informational. They divide the vagueness or ambiguity of possibility into the counterfactual definiteness of self-complementary extremes.

Pragmatism fixed epistemology by recognising this is logically what works. And ontically, even the Cosmos had no choice but to employ the same symmetry-breaking principle. So when it comes to “grounds”, how could this foundation for analysis come with better authority?

This universe is formed from the fact that chaotic systems naturally produce order.
Chaos is also demonstrated in ever human, all the time, by means of 'random thought.' An ordered thought can naturally form from that process. Watch something like: — universeness

Pretty pictures but like getting a postcard from the 1980s.

You haven’t made any argument in support of your rash assertion as yet. Give us an example of how sensitivity to initial conditions is relevant to human social and political structures.

Are you really wanting to claim they are simply chaotic and random outcomes like the weather? Provide some evidence.

Biosemiosis puts it the other way round. Criticality is the resource that informational structure harnesses. It takes just a spark to explode petrol, gas or even powdered coal. We then wrap the machinery of an engine around that useful fact. And control the spark with a flick of a switch.

So you are making a claim about the physical world as it is without being wrapped in its human system of mechanistic constraints - the formal and final causes represented by our notions of social, political and economic order.

The “butterfly effect” is already notorious as the most pop-sci hot take in non-linear dynamics. Let’s see you flesh out your claims here in some fully argued way.

Sure, there is a tempting metaphor there. Any spark of unrest could be claimed as the tipping point in that it later produced the political storm. But try that on with any real life example like the Arab Spring or Jan 6. You will soon find you are hand-waving as it is the generalised criticality rather than the specific fluctuation that is the material “cause”.

The key is that it is “any spark” that will do the trick. And biosemiosis is about how to harness such criticality and milk it for scalefree growth.

China’s belt and road policy is a good example of this in practice.

Transport networks - as systems of trade flows - are naturally fractal because of agglomeration effects (and no-one calls them “affects”). They reflect millions of individual decisions about where to move to and set up shop once enough economic energy is flowing through a populated landscape.

To maximise growth, the social and political constraints are tuned to maximising this freedom of free attachment over all geographic scales. For something like airports - the classic example - you have a long tail of tiny fields but also the super-hubs that - with a lot of political re-engineering - are allowed to grow to any scale.

So human infrastructure generally reflects this understanding of growth as being the smart harnessing of the vitality that the physical world already provides. Nature is organised by its dissipative structure in ways we began to understand through non-linear dynamics - the kind of dynamics in which constraints can develop or emerge from collective action. Human policies only need to work with that dynamism in a ratcheting fashion.

China is an example of a new player trying to enter an established world system. The international trade circulation system had already been colonised by others like the British Empire and the US’s Bretton Woods deal. China had to impose its own fractal transport structure on all this in the hope that it could then spark the markets which would use the logistics network it provided.

Not a huge success so far. But at least China’s understanding of the situation shows how the real world works. No one is waiting for butterfly “affects” to blow storms their way. Both the Arab Spring and Jan 6 were fires stoked by political actors hoping that the scalefree criticality of social media opinion could be guided in particular directions.

So sure, the physics of dissipative structure are right at the centre of a biosemiotic understanding of society and politics. And we have robust mathematical models of criticality, scalefree networks, spontaneous symmetry breaking, and much else. We can see how dynamical systems are naturally structured in terms of downward constraints acting on upwardly constructing degrees of freedom.

And it is against this sophisticated metaphysics that I am criticising your hand-waving mentions of the butterfly “affect”.

That “any spark could have caused the explosion” was a shocking idea for a hot moment there. But the worst interpretation of this sensitivity was that this meant one particular spark must thus be given the credit. Instead, the emphasis should have been on the “any”. The fact that the world would be better understood through the uniformity of a state of criticality where sensitivity is the property that has been maximised.

A butterfly’s wing beat might have done it. So might a half beat, quarter beat and even virtually no beat at all. The frog fart nearby, the bee coughing a moment later - anything can be regarded as the material/efficient cause of a storm. But then what really explains the storm are the boundary conditions rather than the initial conditions. An atmosphere driven by a solar flux and dissipating turbulently. A system of vortical motion over all scales, from the tiniest ones of no reasonable human concern like butterfly beats to ones of no reasonable human control, like weather systems.

But a well placed fan or windmill or sail? Biosemiosis can use its smarts to insert itself into the entropic flows of nature. And that is where any useful mathematics of self-organising chaos - order for free - comes in.

Are you hoping to cause your own little butterfly affect? — universeness

Just one wee point. Could you at least call it the butterfly effect. It would be less cringe.

In news just in, man the hunter has been debunked. Haven’t had time to assess the credibility of this. But it could be a problem for those defining masculinity in terms of risky trades.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

You have mentioned what could be seen as a kind of iterative process going from ground up, influenced, perhaps guided or corrected , by "communications" or signals from above. Elaborate on this a bit if you would. — jgill

It you want to do a pure math model as your project, you probably don’t want to get bogged down in the added intricacies of biosemiotics.

Life and mind are systems of information that can impose their own arbitrary or non-holonomic constraints on the physics of dissipation. Physics just has its boundary conditions. The modelling just needs to capture the holonomic constraints that result in “order out of chaos”.

In simple terms, physics applies some version of the principle of least action on the system so as to close its dynamics. That is all you need. An action functional. A way to integrate in holistic fashion that is the inverse of your reductive differential equations. A global optimisation rule to bring the system’s degrees of freedom “alive”.

Gauge invariance now seems the most generic approach. I cited a Bayesian Brain paper where even biosemiotics is now trying to align itself with that. :smile:

The link again - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0029

I also mentioned before why the complex plane might be better for modelling for real world physics. It offers the dimensionality to capture both the translations and rotations of Newtonian mechanics - wave mechanics especially.

It is hard to turn vectors into interestingly structured landscapes with macro features arise out of micro actions. But spinors offer the kind of dichotomy - of moving in a line vs spinning on a spot - that builds realistic texture into the “world” being described.

You can get the chaos of a turbulent flow as your landscape fills with wandering vortices of all sizes.

The dichotomy becomes one of divergence and convergence over all scales - which is what you seem to want to model.

You seem rather ignorant to the fact that small butterfly affects can change political and social landscapes in the long term. — universeness

You are ignorant if you think that political and social landscapes aren't instead ruled by structural attractors. They have memories and thus place constraints on their variety. They evolve as information systems and don't simply unwind as an accumulation of accidents.

So to the degree that semiotic systems have sensitivity to initial conditions, this is a designed-in level of accident. Evolvability itself evolves. The criticality that grounds a living and mindful system is precisely tuned.

You might have familiarity with the maths of non-linear dynamics, but citing the butterfly effect in this context is yet another irrelevancy you have tossed into this thread.

Keep whistling. But I can see how tiny irrelevancies do set you off on ever wilder gyrations. You can’t follow the line of the argument.

Add chaos theory to the list of things you are not expert in. :rofl:

That is why no definition is finite: there still might be a thing that fits the description, but is somewhat different. — Jabberwock

Agreed. A description or interpretation is open or vague in the way you describe as there is no value in being more precise than the occasion demands.

The line between lumping and splitting itself has to be drawn exactly at the critical point where neither the lumping nor the splitting adds value to the game. To split more hairs would subtract from the cohesive identity being claimed, while to go the other way would be to risk losing meaningful shades of distinction for a small gain in greater generality.

A good definition has to strike that tricky context-sensitive balance. Which is why atomistic definitions of words rarely seem very good.

I would make the opposite claim concerning Kantian Idealism. It is more popular among allegedly anti-Idealist empirical realists than they realize. — Joshs

Do you accept the realism of the enactivist/pragmatist as having properly gone beyond Kant now? What we experience of the world is the self-centred reality of its affordances?

Is 'the epistemic cut' avoidable, do you think? It seems a necessary condition of existence. — Wayfarer

The cut in organisms separates the material dynamics that constitutes the physical world from the information or algorithms that are the regulating model of that world. So you have the chemistry, and you have the genome. You have the environment, and you have our self-centred, self-producing, neural model of it.

When it comes to philosophic detachment, this came about with the further levels of the epistemic cut represented by the codes of words and numbers. Mainly numbers. The Greek concept of logic and proof as the ultimate way of modelling an utterly abstract environment from the point of view of an utterly abstract selfhood.

We became causal thinkers existing in a causal cosmos. Rational and detached.

The pay off of such a modelling relation with the world was the technology that could regulate the realm we call the physical. Western natural philosophy took things to that level. It built a culture around that habit of thought - especially after the industrial revolution saw us hop on the entropic rocket of fossil fuel.

So the epistemic cut speaks to the modelling division that pays its way in the world. It is a necessary condition for life and mind. But we didn’t have to get so technological in some inevitable sense. It was an accident of history that a Europe undergoing a minor post-Enlightenment agrarian revolution stumbled into a use for lumps of black burny stuff that appeared to come in unlimited supply.

What can I say? My point was about labelling ourselves in predicate logic fashion as a bundle of atomic attributes. You started withering on about being labelled by our proper names as well. If you can’t understand the irrelevance of that to what I was arguing, then so be it.

Is there a tentative solution to this? — Tom Storm

There are plenty of ecologically informed scientists who have fingered how we wound up in our current bind. The short answer is fossil fuels want to be entropified. Humans stumbled into that role of becoming dedicated to the mission. The industrial revolution was about reorganising society - it’s politics, economics, and other “humanitarian” subjects - around this new task.

But that is not a solution so much as the late in the picture diagnosis of a terminal condition. :confused:

But this isn’t how people use words. The actual use of a world creates a distinction not between it and an indiscriminate infinity of alternative realities, but between it and contrasting meanings that are specifically RELEVANT to the context in which the word is being used. — Joshs

Of course I agree. We don't use words as reductionist units of meaning. We use them to weave the webs of constraint I mention.

We speak in sentences. We speak grammatically. Speech acts have the recursive organisation of the nested hierarchy.

If I just mention "cat", then the implication is that this is enough. I don't need to be more specific, nor more general. The dynamical balance in terms of hierarchical recursion is judged about right so that you will take my "true meaning". The least has been said in a way that the most has also been said.

You could still suspect that with my bad eyesight it is in fact a small dog. There is one in the house and the cat is in fact on your knee. Or the house may have three cats and you want to know exactly which one I mean.

But these small fine-tunings only emphasise just how much can be left out in terms of either the more global generalities or more local particulars.

If I had said there is an animal on the mat, that lack of specificity might have alarmed you. If I said there was a dead cat on the mat, that specificity might also alarm you.

So the deadly dullness of the "cat on the mat" account of a "state of affairs" is chosen by me quite deliberately as evidence for all that naive realism wants to leave out when applying its lumpen account of language pragmatics.

As a statement of facts, it sounds like the kind of thing no reasonable person could dream of disputing. The world just is all that is the case. And anyone with two eyes can see that without further debate.

But even the cat being on the mat is a claim dependent on an unspoken weight of context. It depends on linguistic holism and not logical atomism.

Flicking through a bit more of Lawson, I also want to point out how selfhood - the “reality” of the first person point of view - is a product of the closure, the epistemic cut, that produces the self-interested view we then call “the real world”.

So the ideal gets manufactured by the othering of the real. They become equally "real" as two sides of the same coin. In our consciousness – our semiotically-organised Umwelt or experiential state – we find a self appearing in interaction with its world. We experience a world that has a selfhood as its sturdy centre, giving everything its meaning.

Reductionist metaphysics - which includes the dualised reductionism of Cartesianism and Panpsychism - makes a problem of this. The self is either everything or it is nothing. The self-referential natures of modelling is treated as a fundamental paradox – an acid of contradiction that eats away at all philosophical certainty.

But a holistic metaphysics says the self-reference is how selves become real as actors or agents in the world. The mind's ability to close itself – to learn to ignore the world in the quite concrete way now modelled by Bayesian Brain neuroscience – is how a meaningful engagement with the world, the claimed essence of a "realist metaphysics", can in fact arise.

Of course actual closure – picking up Lawson's principle theme – leads to solipsism. We might as well be living the confusion of a fevered dream.

So pragmatism speaks to the dynamical balancing act of closure and openness. As epistemic systems, we want to become as closed as possible, but only so as to also be as open as possible in terms of what is actually then surprising, significant, or otherwise worth paying open-minded attention to.

Science is set up in this fashion. Make a prediction. Look for the exception. Beef up the model. Go around this knowledge ratcheting loop another time.

Brains do the same thing every moment of the day. The self sits on the side of well-managed predictability and reality – the phenomenal – is discovered by its degree of noumenal surprise. Harsh reality is what we least expected.

Again, reductionism wants to reduce the complexity of a dichotomous relation to the simplicity of monistic choice. Either the ideal or the real has to be the fundamental case. Pragmatism says instead that the closure in terms of the self-centred view of reality is the feature that makes possible any growth of knowledge about the "truth" of the real world.

Lawson goes off on the usual Romantic tangent of wanting to give art the role of exploring reality's openness. But that's a bit too Cartesian again.

Science is set up as the relentless machine for mining the "truth" of reality. Science's problem is not that it ain't sufficiently open to having its theories confounded by surprises. It's problem lies in its failure to be holistic and realise the extent to which knowledge is an exercise that is making the human self as much as comprehending the world.

Science by and large accepts the Cartesian division between itself and the humanities. It's understanding of causality is limited to material and efficient cause. Formal and final cause are treated as being beyond its pay grade.

This lack of holism is why modern life seems a little shit. And any amount of art ain't going to fix it.

I'm pretty sure Lawson has argued this too, — Tom Storm

I’ve not read Lawson. A quick squizz suggests he is rather lightweight. :grin:

The difference looks like being that jump from epistemology to ontology. Saying that our models of reality are an exercise in pragmatic self-interest is one thing. An everyday kind of point.

But showing that this organisational logic is indeed the way that the Cosmos “reasons its way into existence” is the big step that Peirce takes. This is the metaphysical shock that naive realism is still to confront.

Does Lawson have a point about idealism and the necessity of a realist theory of language? — Tom Storm

Peircean realism would be considered pretty idealistic by some. :razz:

But it leads to pansemiosis rather than Panpsychism or other Cartesian stories. So language as epistemic practice is also more generically the deep ontology of existence itself.

This cashes out in models of the “real material world” in terms of holistic systems of constraint rather than reductionist systems of construction.

This cashes out in self-reference being the feature rather than the bug.

When it comes to Wittgenstein, Cheryl Misak gives a good account of how Peirce was an unacknowleged influence in his eventual “turn”.

The basic issue from a semiotic point of view is whether you consider meanings to be constructed or constrained.

Does a word have to positively put you in mind of some definite thing? Or does it really operate by limiting your thoughts so you pretty much have no choice but to be thinking of something much like what I had in mind, for all practical purposes?

So realism aims to speak about what actually exists. But practically speaking, this is achieved by establishing it as the contrast to all else that could have been the case.

It I say there is a cat on the mat as a real fact, I hope to get away with offering that single word “cat” and thus by implication eliminating every other interpretation you might have had.

There is no tank, or armadillo, or Empire State Building, on the mat instead. You can be sure of that. An infinity of alternative realities are being dismissed by my plain speaking realism. But by the same token, all those unactualised realities now seem confusingly like “actual possibilities”.

The trick is to understand how constraint does the heavy lifting here and not construction. Realism is not a construction of facts. It is a hierarchical nest of constraints. It is a pragmatic limitation of uncertainty made efficient by our willingness to go along with the game of taking utterances at face value.

Would you not agree that a human name was not normally arbitrarily chosen? — universeness

So you want to shift the argument from the general syntactical point – the conventions of mathematical logic - to one of social pragmatics?

Sure, as I am arguing from the viewpoint of Peircean semiotics, I would be the first to agree that the hard distinctions of syntax always have a soft underbelly of semantics.

The syntax claims its limit distinctions. The arbitrary is not the necessary, and the necessary is not the arbitary, by dichotomistic definition. But then this claim is itself semantic. Godelian incompleteness rears its head.

The semiotician says of course. Arbitrary~necessary are the ultimate limits on being ... at least for all practical purpose in terms of a pragmatic system of measurement.

So the human use of naming as a semantic act is going to reflect the pragmatics of human discourse rather than the absolutism of mathematical logic.

But the question for you is do you want to argue that the names that humans give other humans, or even the names that humans give themselves, must come with the force of strong necessity?

To say that the arbitraryness relation can be instead merely somewhat weakened – for the obvious reason that humans have semantic grounds for wanting to signify hereditary connections, job occupations, religious conventions, boastful claims about their children's supposed qualities or social status, or whatever else – is quite something else, and is already covered by my semiotic approach.

"Simplisticator" and "complicator" are two words I coined — wonderer1

Complexity theory has the useful dichotomy of simplexity-complicity to show how simplicity and complexity are in fact connected in mirror fashion.

The apparently simple - like some iterative algorithm - can produce huge complication in pattern. But then the apparently complex, like many things in interaction, can become complicit in producing a very simple coherent outcome.

So the point is that what looks like two extremely different modes of analysis can be shown to be the “other” of each other. The old yin-Yang thing. The simple is actually complex. But then also the complex is actually simple.

And reasoned argument is going to fare better when it seeks to “break down” the world in those terms.