Besides -- it sounded like you'd be disappointed if I thought what you said I did. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, that's not bad. I've figured out what philosophy really is dozens of times, but I'm starting to think you can just not do that. — Srap Tasmaner

If one were to reject a "history of ideas" narrative structure for philosophy, what could one replace it with, and why?

Are you claiming to have no horse in the race? You seem to have gone through dozens and now deciding "whereof one cannot speak...", or something.

It's your thread. I was just expecting more clarity to justify historicism as a target here. You seemed right in fingering the problem of using it to close down debate. And I replied that it is what also keeps debate open by being the bookmark which tells where the great adventure has now got to.

Does it boil down to whether you view philosophy as a progressive project or just one damn cultural trope after another?

you could embrace the ephemeral nature of philosophical struggles and shortlived victories and take giddy pleasure in it -- after all, you needn't worry about having any lasting influence! — Srap Tasmaner

Absolutely. But why? Because we don't have any certainty to convey... — Srap Tasmaner

Certainly. When I was young, I read philosophy in a believing frame of mind, acquiring ideas I could endorse or not. Got older and for a long time have read philosophy with little interest in the 'doctrine' at stake. I enjoy Wittgenstein primarily because we have such an extraordinary record of an interesting mind at work. I just like watching him go, and I think I've learned from how he thinks. I've enjoyed watching Dummett at work because his command of logic is formidable and he sees things I have to work through slowly. Sellars also has an unusual mind. I even like the tortuous way he writes. He's every bit as intricate as Derrida, but not for the same reasons at all. — Srap Tasmaner

What I haven't heard yet from anybody is some sort of full-throated defense of, I don't know, 'decentering' philosophy in philosophical discussion, not taking its self-image seriously, and treating it instead as only a part of Something Bigger, something like the history of ideas, the Great Story of Culture, whatever. — Srap Tasmaner

To which I pointed out that Peirce is often categorised as an idealist ... the idealist or metaphysical aspects of Peirce have become deprecated in favour of a broadly scientific (dare I say scientistic) attitude to philosophy. — Wayfarer

I agree the historical context is important to showing how philosophy follows fashions. It could be said hemlines rise, hemlines fall, thus philosophy reveals its essential cultural arbitrariness. It isn't a progressive enterprise building elaboration from solid foundations.

But that broad flip-flopping should be easy to recognise as the natural dialectic of lurching between extremes, as polar opposition makes ideas crisp in terms of all that they can "other". So for good metaphysical reason, we can see why there should be this kind of Hegelian history unfolding in philosophy as a discipline.

Furthermore, we should be expecting the triadic balancing act of a resolution that does build the solid foundations for the next level of elaboration.

And this brings me to the problem I have with your historical approach to contextualising Peirce.

You understand the historical development in terms of a simple realist vs idealist ontology. And you have picked a side that ought to be monistically the winner in the end. So you seek to assimilate Peirce to that reading of the necessary answer to final philosophy. But you don't really appreciate Peirce as in fact the step that finally helps resolve the realism vs idealism dichotomy in Western metaphysics. Your history telling is wishful rather than factual.

So a close historical reading is the way to go. There was the big set-piece debate of realism vs idealism dominating Western philosophy. And its resolution in the triadic systems relation of pragmatism/semiotics was very important – and still unfolding in radical fashion, now spilling openly into scientific thought.

To seize on Peirce as a scientist who was a closet idealist is just shutting your eyes to the historically significant event taking place within philosophy at that time. You will never appreciate his place in the history of ideas.

Relating this to the OP, @Srap Tasmaner sounds to want philosophy to be an open and unstructured kind of thing. A pastime with no real purpose or stakes. It is talk that is free and not to be constrained by grand ends.

I instead can see why a historically-rooted approach is correct. We are dealing with a grasping after something that defines the limits of our being, and have been doing that with surprising success since Ancient Greece woke up to the idea of living in a Cosmos that must express some universalised cause.

The greeks worked their way to a dialectical method of inquiry that helped produce ever sharper focus. It was the logical machine that generates integration and differentiation, generality and specificity, in equal dichotomous measure.

Philosophy as a discipline emerges out of that self-structuring dynamic. It is properly Hegelian and has a historic destiny in reaching its ultimate limits. So a sense of how the debate has progressed is a crucial to placing yourself in the "now" of philosophy as part of this arc from its past to its future.

Peirce's triadic systems logic is an obvious milestone of thought in this regard and shouldn't be trivialised by claims he was "really a closet idealist all along". He was the first proper semiotician and not the last prominent idealist before the dark tide of scientistic logical atomism swept through Oxbridge and outlawed metaphysics for a generation or two.

QBism expands upon the notion of "participatory realism", that quantum physicist John A. Wheeler postulated back in the '60s. From the perspective of Materialism, it may sound like anti-realism. — Gnomon

The less woo understanding of this Bayesianism is that the human measurer can construct the mechanical constraints on a prepared quantum system so as to decohere it to the degree it answers to a classical counterfactual description.

This is biosemiotic. The basis of biology itself is the ability of cellular machinery to decohere the quantum nanoscale realm of chemistry to ratchet the available energies in the desired metabolic fashion.

An enzyme mechanically grips and forces two reactants into the exact conjunction that gives them no choice but to bond. A respiratory chain gives a hot electron no choice but to quantum tunnel down its mechanically structured pathway.

In effect, this biological machinery is making quantum measurements. The fixed shaped of proteins assembled by genetic information prepares the world in a way that quantum wave functions are left with “no choice” but to collapse in the counterfactual fashion that the biological machinery is insisting on.

So ontologically, the physics of the world can always be “quantum”. You don’t need actual collapse. You just need systems of constraint that limit the possibilities to the degree that the state of a mechanical switch is “almost surely” flipped. On the side of the physics, it is still a probabilistic world. But encounters with the mechanical structures built with genetic information can make those probabilities asymptotically close to 1.

Humans in labs are simply doing the same trick at a much larger energy scale. Biology lives right on the quasi classical border of the quantum realm, milking its potential for tunneling, superposition and other holistic actions. Labs use special gear to create states of coherence over metres that can they be decohered by mechanical structures which enforce measurements that then fit their models of quantum physics.

So the key here is to realise that the physics takes place in a decohering environment. There is no “collapse of a wavefunction” needed. But you get the effective collapse because environments certaintly reduce the uncertainty of quantum probabilities in a historical fashion. The holism of contextuality means the Universe does develop classical looking structure in terms of its statistics.

And then life and mind can apply mechanical logic - the counterfactuality of informational structure - to impose its schemes on the physical world. Genes code for biological molecules which can “make measurements” and entrain chemistry at the nanoscale to an organised metabolic network. Human scientists can likewise create informational theories that are a recipe for the electronic devices which can likewise entrain the quantum realm to a technological level of metabolism - the sapiens-feeding metabolism of the modern global economic system organised by its micro-electronics and informstion flows.

So you would agree, then, that the appearance of organisms is also the appearance of intentionality and agency? — Wayfarer

Sure. That’s what semiosis explains. The feeling of being a self in its world by being a prediction machine with its collection of interpretive habits.

Desired by whom? — Wayfarer

The bleeding organism. The system with the metabolism. Don't pretend this is some tricky mystery.

There seems an implied agency here — Wayfarer

Implied? It's a fucking theory of teleology.

if molecular structures are ‘the bottom’, what is the origin of the ‘top down’ constraints. — Wayfarer

Read what I said. Criticality itself "others" the possibility of its own stabilisation. By molecular chaos being the rule, semiotic constraints become that which could then take maximum advantage of this material lack of constraints.

With the sciences -- geez, with medicine especially, it seems -- it's becoming commonplace for half of what you learned in school to be falsified by the time you retire if not much sooner. — Srap Tasmaner

To be fair to science, how much free thinking does society really want or need? Especially at the introductory level, you want to impress a certain useful rigidity of thought on all those who are only going to need to apply learnt algorithms on the grown-up world.

And those who do philosophy at university only need to come out with a useful facility for critical thought and perhaps show some comfort with uncertainty in the grown-up world. The history of philosophy is not relevant in the job market.

Medicine became engineering applied to biology and then got corrupted by Big Pharma and Big Food. So no surprise it is what it is.

Again, how should philosophy be taught? That winds up being answered by whether it serves some useful purpose as far as society goes.

I think this is an excellent specific reason for reading original texts, but then that only throws into sharper relief my original question: what does the history of ideas contribute to such an experience? — Srap Tasmaner

You're right. If you aren't looking for a totalising world view, then browsing other smart minds is at least a pleasant diversion. I like reading crackpots for the same reason. It is useful to be able to tell the one from the other via intimate literary acquaintance.

But one could also be seeking that totalising world view that both philosophy and science have as a selling point. And a history of ideas – in both spheres – is important to that project.

Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.? — javra

This is monism. This is reductionism. So how I think of things – how Peirce thought of things, how systems science thinks of things – just doesn't share your ontological commitments. You are trying to jam square pegs into round holes.

Forget it. Until you stop and think about why your questions are wrong, you can't begin to learn how to think in holistic terms and ask questions that are meaningful in light of that ontology.

But I'll cut the crap. — javra

Then stop excusing your lack of effort by claiming I haven't ever said anything in reply.

Isn’t that a reductionist (i.e. bottom-up) model? — Wayfarer

It is semiotic. The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction.

The biochemistry is the bottom-up degrees of freedom in this systems equation. But the point of the nanoscale is that it is a special zone of energy convergence. The ordinary type of physics you might imagine – a world of neat determinacy – is instead turned into a state of radical instability or criticality. It becomes exactly that which the most minimal "informational" nudge can push in any material direction chosen.

So it is the tradic story of the semiotic modelling relation which bridges the "explanatory gap" – the question of how a model of the world could influence the world. A ratchet describes this. It is the switch that imposes the informational asymmetry on the entropic flow. It is the central "how" of how the whole causal story works.

For ordinary bottom-up engineering, building structures amidst raging thermal storms and quaking quantum uncertainty would be what suffers from an explanatory gap. It would seem blatantly the wrong choice of material foundations.

But life and mind are natural systems – organisms implementing modelling relations. And the edge of chaos is what they can colonise precisely because there exists a maximally tipable state of material fury.

Life evolved its handling of chemistry until it could harness the most violent available chemical process – redox reactions. This should blow the mitochondria apart. But respiratory proteins can dance a hot electron down a chain of precisely aligned receptors, dragged along by quantum tunneling effects towards the oxygen atom waiting at the end.

What is then bottom-up, if you like, is that the metabolic system the genes stabilise can then become the platform for building further levels of life and mind. Neurons can play the same trick by stabilising the flux of a sensory world. Language can stabilise the flux of a psychological world. Logic can stabilise the flux of a rationalised world.

It all rests on the ability to use the instability of the nanoscale as the right kind of material fashion. A zone of maximum switchability – that occurs only in a watery solvent on a Sun heated planet – which in itself makes a system of mechanical switches the next most probable evolutionary step.

Information can have maximum meaning where maximum entropy or uncertainty is present.

But first, the material itself has to be a dissipative flow. It is useless trying to milk action from a dead equilibrium. The material realm has to be in a critical state as Hoffman describes. And then the lightest of touches can bend it to your will, from the organismic point of view.

As in something that ontically occurs. — javra

Yes. But what are the ontic commitments of this term "real" that you employ. Or what has become now the term "ontic" that I guess is supposed to mean "really real" or "fundamentally real" or "monistically real".

I'll tentatively interpret you meaning that matter is the constitutional makeup of any given (what Aristotle intended by "matter") - and that consciousness thereby supervenes on its own constituents. — javra

I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.

So your line of argument goes wrong from there. I am not a reductionist. And you don't seem to have a clue about what else that leaves.

real? — javra

Really what? Really an idea? Really material? Really semiotic – as in the modelling that connects the two?

If you want a conversation, I don't need you to be polite. But you do have to do some work setting out your counter-position. If you just make the plaintiff cry, "you haven't made me understand", then you will stay stuck in the back seat with all the other time-wasters bleating on about "are we there yet".

How can I be an eliminativist given I spend all my time arguing for holism against reductionism? You are just talking out of your arse because you can't be arsed to make a proper effort.

If you feel like you are in kindergarten, it is because that is the level at which you are prepared to engage here. You could keep that up all day. Now impress me by stopping, thinking, coming up with dissent or agreement in terms of the ideas I have presented in some depth.

You might need to brush up on the philosophy and science I've cited. But you could then engage in a way where you learn something, and I might learn something too, which is the outcome that usually comes from talking to people who are up to the task of an informed dialogue.

My bad for assuming you might have had the curiosity and knowledge to follow arguments already much simplified.

Ask javra.

Ask RogueAI.

:up:

Remind me which one you are again?

What don’t you understand about an F grade? Too many syllables? :grin:

C - Semiosis is the specification of the general function. What folk call consciousness is this function implemented at four levels of semiosis within a suitable “world”.

F - Go back and read your texts on social construction and Vygotskian psychology if you hope to stay on this course.

When do you think that will happen? — RogueAI

For you, never. But thanks for asking. :up:

You don't have to answer if you don't want to of course. — bert1

I did answer. It was how I would start to deflate an over-inflated term.

You can class that under clarification if you like. You could class it under theory if you noticed that biosemiosis was the theoretical framework I employed. You could class it under definition if you wanted to note how I somewhat sarcastically used dictionary style conventions of defining a whole in terms of its component parts.

What's so hard to understand here?

This is true, but I would put it this way: philosophy curricula more closely resemble literature curricula than they do the sciences or mathematics, and that's slightly odd. — Srap Tasmaner

That seems a better question then. How could one restructure the pedagogy to reflect a different approach? Oddly, I can remember exactly how my introductory philosophy classes started, but not the science ones. But the air of certainty and present tense is definitely what was intended to be conveyed.

And I don't think you would want philosophy to exude that kind of authority where the right views are already there to be learnt?

So does the historical approach not go very well with the mature practice of philosophy?

Kant only matters to us because his ideas are interesting; his ideas aren't interesting because he's the one who had them. — Srap Tasmaner

I certainly agree with that. And you can only make an academic career by having ideas of your own that your peers find interesting. Even if it is just offering a revisionist telling of philosophical history.

But what you learn from close reading of the big names is as much the way they thought as what they thought. You can get into their thinking and attitudes and so discover the habits that work in the philosophical game.

Yet how would you set up Philosophy 101? It would have to be some kind of map of the field that oriented students the right way. It would have to use some surprises to get the kids gripped and thinking.

The most philosophical moments for me came in fact from my first psychophysics class were the professor used the example of the Mach bands that give sharp outlines to all boundaries in our visual field. I walked outside and for the first time noticed the contrast edging around the dark buildings against the bright sky. Or at least understood the neural mechanism responsible for what had seemed a defect of clear vision and the processing logic behind it.

The things I would have in my introductory class would be the epistemology of modelling and dialectical ontology of metaphysics. So Kant and Anaximander would be useful historical starting points. But a quick sketch of the context in their times would be enough.

Then one could add a review of comparative philosophy – pay the necessary lip service to theology and PoMo as cultural traditions, along with science, Eastern traditions and the general theory of socially-constructed belief systems. :grin:

I would attempt to start the deflation of the confused use of "consciousness" by first pointing to the conflation of neurobiological levels of semiosis and sociocultural levels of semiosis.

The human species has the further advantages of language and logic to structure its modelling relation with its world.

The animal kingdom just has its neurobiology ... although ants and termites are arguably an example of ultrasociality as well. They use a system of sign – pheromones – to "think" as a colony organism in a similar structural way to how humans use words to coordinate their group thinking social order.

So get the story about "consciousness" right and all the more interesting scientific questions start to flow. You don't get locked into the plaintive bleat from the back seat that is the Hard Problem being repeated over and over as the end to intelligent discussion.

According to your theory of mind/consciousness, are insects conscious? Do they have minds? — RogueAI

I could address this in detail. I’ve spent time in labs where they investigate the neurobiology of jumping spiders. Cockroaches and wood lice are the stuff of introductory classes.

But I have no patience for you because you can’t stop harping on about “consciousness” when I’ve carefully explained my position on that and why it is such a confused term.

At best, consciousness = attention + reporting. A jumping spider has something that is primitively like what we would call attentional processing. But it doesn’t speak so can’t report or introspect.

And now you go back to bleating about whether insects are conscious in whatever muddled way you understand that term.

My question was not whether it's worthwhile in general, but how does talk about the history of ideas contribute to philosophical discussion? — Srap Tasmaner

But what do you study when you do a philosophy degree but the history of ideas? You hope to learn critical thinking and even eventually join up with some current research project. Yet you get sat down for your first years and walked through the history of philosophy.

Perhaps you can skip ancient Greek metaphysics and start off with Enlightenment epistemology, but it makes sense to understand the context of what has gone before so as to ground what seem the concerns now.

I would say that in fact a problem is that folk skimp their history and don’t realise how much is simply being rehashed with each generation. And also, close study shows how much the telling of the past is a sloppy caricature of what was actually said.

Anaximander is a prime example for me. Philosophy is a social game and its winners write the history. So the complaint might not be that the history is rather irrelevant - which for poor historians, it would be - but that it is a lot of bloody work to be historically accurate.

My starting point was wondering what Wayfarer's point was in telling @apokrisis what he did, as quoted above. What effect did he expect that paragraph to have on apo's views? — Srap Tasmaner

This has its own history. At least five times now I’ve had to respond to the jibe that Peirce was ultimately an idealist because he used the words “objective idealism”. I have to point to the context in which Peirce philosophised - the very churchy world of late-1800s Harvard and Massachusetts academia which placed Peirce under considerable social pressure to conform. And also that Peirce was arguing for semiosis as a general ontology before there was a clear notion of their being genetic and neural codes to match the linguistic and logical codes of human thought.

And if we are talking about the actual zeitgeist that Peirce was responding to, it was his response to Kant that most closely echoed Schelling and Duns Scotus.

But anyway, the history of ideas is important as it is the only way of understanding why folk tend to believe the things that they do. And while science and maths are juggernauts when it comes to the production of new things to know, maybe philosophy only has its history, or it’s creative writing wing.

If you're having problems with multiple people here, perhaps the problem is not the other people? — RogueAI

If you call being qualified to speak to the OP a problem, then you’re probably right. I’m probably the only one to have discussed all this with Chalmers, Koch, Friston, etc.

Condescension. I'm not here to pass tests set by you. — Wayfarer

You seem to want to tell me what Peirce really argued. And I happily call bullshit on that pretension.

As in any well constructed argument, I was offering a particular example in support of my general case.

I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work. — Wayfarer

You have yet to demonstrate that understand you semiotics. You have only seized on two words you think you understand - objective and idealism.

A lot of what you say is not science, per se, but metaphysics. — Wayfarer

You make that sound like a complaint. What would you prefer your science to be grounded in?

Do you agree, then, that psychology, insofar as it is the science of consciousness, is in principle capable of the same degree of precision and objectivity as is physics? — Wayfarer

I don’t believe in a science of consciousness as a thing. I believe in a science of life and mind - of biosemiosis.

Is consciousness a substance or a process? Have you got it clear what kind of "scientific" account you are even committed to?

People betray their substance ontology by talking of consciousness as a fundamental simple. A property or quality. They will talk indeed of "qualia" and "phenomenology" as if they are very sciency bits of jargon. They get enthusiastic about quantum conscious, panpsychism, information theory, and other crackpot proposals because that sounds like science "heading in the right direction".

But I understand life and mind as processes. Consciousness is not a noun but a verb. And if I say I am conscious, it is of something. What I really mean is that I can attend and report. I can introspect in the socially approved fashion of turning my neurobiology of attention onto even things that I wouldn't naturally waste time noticing – like the "redness" of red – and speak about it in a narrative fashion as something that "I" have "experienced".

So to be able to look inwards and report is a skill we learn that boils down to being socially trained to use language to direct our attention to all the "phenomenology" that our brain is instead evolved just to "look past". The brain is busy trying to assimilate the world to its running predictive models. Society sets itself up as a higher level self in our heads and demands a full account of all our thoughts and feelings so that we can become "self-regulating" beings – aware of ourselves as actors within larger sociocultural contexts.

Consciousness is treated as a big deal in modern culture because it really matters to society that it can sit inside our heads and make sure we run all our decisions through its larger filter. We must notice the details and be ready to report them.

I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted. We are supposed to always be giving full attention to everything and holding it in memory long enough to report exactly what happened in the event we had to offer a full narration in a court of justice.

But the brain evolved not to pay attention to the world as much as possible by sensible design. And until humans wrapped themselves up in the new collective habit of narrative self-regulation, that is all brains did. Act as "unconsciously" as circumstances would allow. Stopping to note every passing detail was not what "being conscious" was about.

So any scientific theory of consciousness starts with accepting we are dealing with an evolved process not a fundamental substance. And then the first practical bit of business would be deflating the overly socially-constructed notion of consciousness that everyone employs.

After that, the real science could begin.

As I have said, biosemiosis, the modelling relation, Bayesian mechanics, are what I regard as the right kind of approach. They say life and mind arise out of material being, but they have a difference. There is some mechanism or algorithm by which they can grow out of a physical substrate.

This clicks into place when the material ground is understood in the language of dissipative structure. Matter poised at criticality is a source of instability that can be tapped to do stuff by forms that can impose the constraints of mechanistic stability.

An engine can capture an explosion of petrol vapour and force it to turn a crank. A source of physical instability can be harnessed to give a stablised output. Information (as structural negentropy) can regulate the flow of entropy.

So where nature exhibits physical criticality - as it does at the quasi-classical nanoscale – there is an instability which can be fruitfully ratcheted to support a living and mindful organism. There is something a mechanism or algorithm can latch on to and start to proliferate.

The job of science thus becomes creating a generalised theory of such a mechanism or algorithm. Identify the exact design of this essential scrap of form from which wild and complex growth can result. Discover the very thing that makes an organism an organism.

And that is what biosemiosis/the modelling relation/Bayesian mechanics are about. Writing the specifications of the self-organising growth algorithm that allowed this thing we call life and mind to take hold on a material substrate and begin to grow – to develop and evolve.

Friston does want to make it as precise and objectified as physics. He offers differential equations that sum up the central trick of the modelling relation. He calls it Bayesian mechanics so that it can sit alongside classical mechanics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.

And regardless of how you judge his actual formula, at least we know this is what a science of life and mind would look like if it were to achieve the same kind of general format as the physical sciences.

You seem to think science must give some kind of account of all your attended and reported experiences and feels as if they were atomised "states of being" – qualitative stuff. But life and mind are processes that exist parasitically on the Universe as itself a process. There is dissipative structure and then organisms that ratchet dissipative structure.

And the discovery that there is just the one kind of negentropic growth algorithm that explains how evolution could take hold – the algorithm that is the semiotic and Bayesian modelling relation – is the kind of huge simplification we were hoping for from science.

From nothing came everything, and from everything will come nothing, given sufficient time. Matter is mortal. I'm concerned with the logical impossibility past either end of the sentence. — magritte

First off, we can only talk about these things the best we can. But indeed, logic can be extended in the way CS Peirce extended with his sketch for a logic of vagueness.

So the "before" of both something and nothing is the third category that is simply a "vagueness" as logically defined. Peirce flipped the principle of noncontradiction to show this.

The PNC says it cannot be true both that "p is the case" and "p is not the case". Peirce says vagueness is the indeterminate state out of which such counterfactual definiteness can arise. Vagueness is that to which the PNC fails to apply in any definite fashion.

This concept of vagueness gives us a new ground for the emergence of a system of "time, space and matter". For the Universe to swim into concrete being out of nothing is already positing a too concrete kind of ground. Nothing is a very definite and determined kind of state when contrasted to the alternative of their being instead a something.

But vagueness sits easier with a notion of everythingness. If everything is happening, then that amounts to nothing happening effectively. If you imagine the Big Bang as infinite hot fluctuation, that is a pretty featureless or formless initial conditions. Nothing can really happen because everything happening is the most violent kind of disruption.

So if we want to do metaphysics and make a logical argument, Peirce's logic of vagueness takes us a step past the usual "something out of nothing" ontology. We have the deeper thing of the indeterminacy that must be the ground of any consequent acts of determination.

Vagueness doesn't clear everything up of course. But it does give logical rigour to a way of thinking that has been around ever since Anaximander's cosmology of the Apeiron. And it fits the needs of cosmology today by allowing the Universe to have the kind of quantum origin where the beginning is just a "state of indeterminacy" – the vagueness of the "quantum realm" before spacetime and material content emerged as the two determinately opposed aspects of a system of cosmic being.

As for the rest, we all know that he who presents the most ostentatious posturing wins. Much like those chimp ancestors of ours. So, go for it. — javra

The posturing guru speaketh. Bravo! — javra

You started with the ad homs after quickly running out of arguments. And sadly they are not even witty, let alone cutting.

When so loosely understood, what then isn't? — javra

It is your interpretation that is sloppy. The Peircean and Bayesian argument is that this is the most generalised view of rational inquiry. The same basic epistemic arc of predict and measure is what evolution elaborates from biology on up.

So now metaphysics is a branch of science? Um, no, it is not. ... — javra

Despite your boundary policing, natural philosophers and systems scientists are quite comfortable with this thought.

If it makes you uncomfortable, well um …

Good luck with that, apo. I'll for now just choose to believe yours is merely a stinginess of charity mixed with some degree of deception (be it self-deception or otherwise). But hell, I could be talking to a Chat GPT program after all. So who knows? — javra

Comfort yourself however you like. You had no argument you could make.

But none of those qualities are objectively real in the way that bullets or marbles are. — Wayfarer

But these are all subjective qualities. Your notion of the material world is being described in how “it” feels to “you”. It is harder or softer, drier or wetter, hotter or colder, heavier or lighter than the flesh and blood self that wants to prod away at it. The world as you are imagining it is the one that is subjectively related to yourself as the centre of that world.

Science comes along and ends up saying quite different things from its mathematically an empirically abstracted viewpoint. The familiar world of material objects becomes something quite alien once seen from a more properly objectified perspective, with its quantum fields and relativity.

The idea of objects with qualities gets radically deconstructed, showing the degree to which your neurobiology lives within in its own broad brush and self-centred view of physics as it is at the scale of humans living on planets at a time when the Universe is generally almost at its cold and empty heat death.

OK, to state what should be obvious to those science savvy, such as yourself, one does not - and cannot - empirically test a theory inferred from data via use of strict theory and still declare such test one of empirical science. — javra

I can't follow your argument there. Science is the combination of theory and test, deductive prediction and inductive confirmation. So you seem to be introducing some strong division between "strict theory" and "empirical science". Although I'll degree that in social terms, science does divide between its whiteboard theorists and its lab-coated experimenters. There is a lot of good natured banter between the camps that can also turn to frank hostility when prestige and grants are involved.

But anyhow, it is another social fact that the failure to find supersymmetry – where the expectation was quite high it ought to be showing up at current accelerator energies – is a big part of the reason for string theory, and thus M-theory, suffering a drop in stock price in the current ToE ideas market.

So the interaction between mathematically-robust theory and empirical constraint on belief in that theory is a delicate business. A social game where a community takes a Bayesian view on what smells right and what line of inquiry to invest further in.

To the outside world, science will paint its adventures much more by the book. The funders and managers or science like that. But from the inside, something much more recognisably human is going on.

The ASSC is a very good example of what passes for "science". It is the kind of open mic gathering that can really launch your career. Chalmers and Koch are good examples. Even down to the publicity stunt of betting cases of wine so as to put the drama of big questions in terms every tax-paying science funder can relate to. And puts their names firmly at the centre of the story for years to come.

One does not test a theoretical inference against another theoretical inference - regardless of what the latter might be, that of supersymmetry included (which has alternatives to boot) - and then declare this a scientific test. For there's nothing empirical about such a test. — javra

Bollocks. Bayesian reasoning accepts the dog that doesn't bark as part of its baseline of probabilities.

You are trying to defend a methodological purity that would make working scientists laugh – privately, not publicly of course.

I spent some time with the psi research crowd because they were an example of science in fact trying to nail its methods down with absolute textbook rigour. It was a fascinating tale of the social limits of practicing what you preach. The rigour was eventually exceptional. The scope for any "psi effect" was publicly quantified to decimal places.

Yet still the community divided into the skeptics who knew the believers were cheating, they just couldn't show how, while the believers accused the skeptics of using their unconscious bias to suppress the ability of the squeaky clean labs to replicate the effect that the believers could produce on the same gear.

It always is going to come back to the way humans actually reason and how brains actually operate. Which is why I highlight Friston and his Bayesian brain model of epistemology.

A direct question: does the total self of mind and body which can be to whatever extent empirically observed by others which you (I would assume) deem yourself to be hold a first-person point of view which is now reading this text? — javra

Does that sentence even make sense? And from what point of view?

I can see how it makes sense as a utterance from the familiar point of view of the Western philosophical tradition grew out of the theologisation of Ancient Greek metaphysics. The hylomorphism of matter~form transformed into the Cartesian divide of res extensa~res cogitans. Neuroscience came along with its challenge to finally understand the mind as embodied modelling – the Bayesian prediction machine – but people clung fast to the Hard Problem that arises from believing consciousness equals a representation of the world, not a relation in which the semiotic Umwelt of the self in its world is the neurobiological construction ... that is in turn socially extended when the further encoding machinery of speech and maths happens along.

So you ask a question directly from your point of view. You ask it in righteous fashion. It would be a grave discourtesy for me not to stand in your shoes and thus be forced to agree with anything you might say.

But sorry. I've spent too much time with scientists and natural philosophers. I can see where you are coming from and I speak from a viewpoint that enjoys the advantages we call the third person.

Leave cultural constructs aside for a moment and given an honest proposition regarding what factually is in therms of your consciousness: do you in any way occur as a first-person point of view that is now reading this text? — javra

Same tactic keeps repeating. And this is instructive. It is the only argument that sustains the Hard Problem. The insistence that there is a first person point of view that has primacy.

But listen again to my third person description based on the semiosis of the modelling relation.

Our Bayesian models of the world include the construction of the self within the model as the necessary "other" of this world. It is the construction of an Umwelt.

Until you start to deal with this as the primal fact – the co-arising of the self and the world as the dichotomy that drives the Cartesian division within the model itself – you aren't going to have a clue where I am coming from.

Semiosis is an empirical theory of the "conscious self" around which a world of experience is made to dance – for good pragmatic purpose.

Science is now seeing this as the way to account for the self as a product of the "world" it constructs, the totality that is its Umwelt, so that it can then function "selfishly" within the actual real world in a reliable and largely automatic or unconscious and unthinking fashion.

I didn't say "currently untested". I said "currently untestable". A major difference for those science savy. — javra

I pointed out how it is failing the test in terms of being a generalisation that ought to contain supersymmetry as a particular feature. And in being thus currently tested, that makes it doubly a problem if you want to say it is currently untestable – the stronger claim that it can't even be tested in principle.

Claims like this make one doubt one is talking to another human rather than some AI robot. — javra

Would Chat GPT make as many rookie errors? There are whole shelves on the social construction of the self that could be poured into its pattern-matching data bank. It would at least be familiar with the relevant social science.

Which still leaves the question, is unscientific infinitesimal probability a sufficient ultimate scientific answer to how everything appears from nothing? — magritte

But my position is the opposite. Everything is self-cancelling itself towards nothing. The probability of that was so high that it the Big Bang was a story of exponential decay. Almost everything self-cancelled almost immediately. Very little was left in terms of energy density even after the first second. We are now into the asymptotic last flattening of that curve as the average density of the vacuum is a few hydrogen atoms per cubic metre and the temperature is a frigid 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

M-theory is currently an untestable theory and so is not of itself science — javra

Is it an untested theory or the mathematical generalisation of tested theories? And is it not indeed failing the test because supersymmetry is not showing up and looking increasingly dubious at available particle accelerator energies? The generalisation of the particular case is not worth much if the particular case is becoming so constrained by experiment in routine scientific fashion.

If you find any disagreement with either definition, it would be important that you then express your differences. — javra

I find plenty of disagreement. But not much of importance. You articulate a cultural construct with a long social history. Explaining the neurobiology is one thing, explaining the social history is another. I could do both. And you wouldn’t be happy with either as that would require seeing they are indeed their own narratives,

Being is a verb, isn’t it? — Wayfarer

I would say it should be according to my metaphysics. But it is normally treated in terms of a substance rather than a process or action. Something with inherent properties rather than imposed form.

So rather than an ontology of passive existence, I would favour the “other” of active persistence when it comes to being or ousia.

In other words, starting with a manifold of input such as shapes, colors, etc., it is unclear how the brain ultimately recognizes something as a distinct object. — NotAristotle

Note that the brain has a matching visual path for movement and spatial orientation. So the brain dichotomises by not just seeing a recognised object, but also seeing it in terms of its context, it’s relative position and motion in surrounding space.

Then also think how hard it is to see the trees for the forest or remember all the furrows and gullies that mark the sides of a familiar mountain.

Aspects of our world pop as objects because they strongly contrast with their surroundings as being separate entities rather than just a slight variation within a large ragged patch of variation.

So the eye is trained to recognise that which is an object in terms of having crisp boundaries and high probability of moving in a coherent fashion. Like an animal or other living creature. Or in the modern world, a chair or bicycle,

But when faced with landscapes, branching shrubbery, cloudy skies, it is looking a fractal objects with random markings and indistinct boundaries.

This again is a dichotomy the brain can latch on to as organisms maintain clear boundaries and move “as one”, so that pops out against a background of “objects” that instead do the opposite as they have random patterning as their visual characteristic.

Colour itself mainly evolved to make shapes pop out in the same Gestalt abrupt way. Objects that are indeed objects in being coherent and organised will tend to have a surface that is also coherent in its reflectance because it is all made out of the same material.

Colour vision makes that a big clue. A red plum in a green tree is easy to spot - once you are a primate who has evolved a third retinal pigment tuned to make that slight wavelength difference appear blindingly obvious from the brain’s point of view.

So the object recognition path is already being delivered a sharp contrast in terms of a landscape carved up in a variety of useful ways.

The eye is caught by the cat in the corner - a familiar coiled black presence of unpredictable movement against the contrast of the very bland and predictable furnishings - until we take a second look and see it is really something else, like a tossed aside blue sweater in a heap. The brain does a rough sorting of the visual field to find not only putative objects, but objects worth proper attending and making some further effort in recognising.

Mostly the world pops out in ways we don’t even have to pause and think about. We experience it as a flow of the ignorable. And that then grounds our sense of their being objects we need to properly recognise and take note of.

So the brain is set up with recognition capacities even more complex than you realise. This is the Gestalt figure-ground principle.

The brain is recognising what to recognise by also recognising what is to be ignored. Being “an object” puts something high on the list to being “properly seen”. As does being in “independent motion”. The two going together really grabs our attention.

What this means is that what we know of consciousness, we know because it is constitutive of our existence and experience. It appears as us, not to us. — Wayfarer

And yet who are the drongos who are reifying it as something apart from what is being done?

Is life something apart from the process of living? Does a verb need to be confused as a noun?