But most of the Earth’s animals are domestic - pigs, cows, chickens. Likewise the Earth’s vegetation is largely cultivated fields and managed forestry tracts.

So it’s all under human thumb. Vaclav Smil can provide you with the numbers. Plants are either dependent on us for their growing conditions or are shivering in the corner as rainforest is converted into beef pattie pasture.

It would be funny if it weren’t so literally true.

In evolutionary terms, plants and animals are both just eukaryotes and so the Gaian atmospheric gas regulating package was evolved before either form of multicellular organisation arose.

Bacteria invented photosynthesis - but first it was sulphur rather than oxygen based. It was a low power reaction dependent on the acid oceans and dissolve rock.

The respiratory part of the equation was evolved by other bacteria - the ancestors or the mitochondria. Some ancestral eukaryote put the two bacterial innovations together to create a high powered respiring-photosynthesising Frankenstein organism. The terraforming of a new atmosphere commenced. Life created its own pool of gases mixed in the right proportions. The oceans were also part of this pool, becoming less acidic in the process.

This new arrangement was so powerful - such an entropy bonanza - that eukaryotes went ballistic, becoming megafauna like plants and plant eaters.

If one organism does both jobs, it risks being at war with itself. It has two sets of genes in competition. This is an everyday story when it come to keeping control over our own mitochondria with their little packets of mitochondrial DNA.

So evolution likes to divide and rule. Set up plants and animals as CO2 emission in competition with O2 emission. Encourage a Darwinian free for all in terms evolving better genetics for gas consumption and waste production. Competition between the two sides then will produce a self-correcting balance in terms of supply and demand from both points of view.

Nature believes in the capitalism of free markets! And it works as - until humans came along - there was no one to put a corrupt finger on the scales.

You mean the thermodynamic imperative as the blind will to power, and humanity as the vessel of its ultimate expression?

Except here the twist is that the cosmos seeks its finality in dissipation rather than power - power being work in the thermodynamic context. Power is how the means of dissipation get constructed. Power is how nature smashes through the barriers that stand in the way of its desire for maximum entropy production.

So you can see why the Cosmos indeed dooms Humanity to the burden of “doing the work” that might achieve its concealed purpose.

Someone stuffed up about half a billion years ago and left this great pile of flammable organic chemistry - black gunk - buried under layers of earth crust. We are the poor buggers condemned to now get down there with shovels, dig it out, and find some creative way of burning it all as fast as possible.

As consolation for our labours, we then build a rosy fiction around it. A modern religion of Romantic self-actualisation. We have to make our unchosen fate bearable enough to continue to procreate and complete the given task. And so we distract ourselves with empty idolatry - like F1 racing. Worshiping at the fake altar of fast cars as symbols of the ideal human condition. Nought to 100 in a couple of seconds. The dopamine hit of sitting on top of an explosion of fuel.

Oh how meaningless this existence we are condemned to live!

Hey, there is definitely an antinatalist telling of this story for you to enjoy too. :starstruck:

But unlike angular momentum it is a dimensionless quantity, and is not actually any type of spin. — universeness

The story is much more interesting than that. Isospin was at first conceived as an analogy in that it used "up~down" spin maths to argue for some unknown quantum property that could "rotate" protons into neutrons.

That was a bust.

But then it reappeared as a fix to make a doublet/triplet structure out of up, down and strange quarks - an effective symmetry that connected them as they were all "close enough" in their quantum mass.

And next this strong sector version of isospin became even more properly spin-like when the same maths machinery was employed in the weak sector – the trapped chiral world of left-handed matter particles which rotate into each other via weak force exchanges.

So spin in its familiar spacetime basis of ISpin(3,1), or classical angular momentum, sets up some basic symmetry maths. But QFT is about the internal gauge symmetries that structure the Standard Model particle zoo.

The U(1) quantum spin of QED is already "not spin" in the concrete Newtonian sense, just in a permutation symmetry sense. And that sense got extended to the gauge symmetries of the SU(3) strong sector, and SU(2) electroweak sector.

Hope that clears things up for you!

Are you arguing that this problem -- namely, global warming -- was inevitable, given the availability of the resources and the appropriate technology? — Xtrix

There was all this buried coal and petroleum left over from super abundant plant growth in an era of "too high/too warm" oxygen and temperature levels. Dinosaur conditions. Lovelock argued the planet does best at a cooler 15 degrees C global average with lower oxygen levels – the balance established after the asteroid did for the dinosaurs. A world with 70% ocean to make for a cold energy sink that balances out the atmospheric CO2 sink in a way that maximises productivity.

So you could see fossil fuels as biomass that got shoved under the carpet as the Earth was still finding its global biological balance and didn't have the means to recycle everything with maximum efficiency at the time.

Locked in the ground, it was out of sight, out of mind. But life continued to evolve above the ground. It developed increasing agency as it gained new energetic advantages like being warm-blooded and more sophisticated in its understanding of its environment.

Then along came Homo with big brains, language, social organisation and tool use. The keys to unlock the goldmine of fossil fuels.

So it is inevitable in the sense that if it could happen, it would happen. The probability was 1, especially once the semiotic means to "objectively stand outside biological nature as a sociocultural organism" came along.

In the fullness of time, fossil carbon may have got slowly degraded by being geological exposed to bacterial recycling. Either that, or recycled by the earth's hot geological core itself – the cycles of plate tectonics. So genetic level semiosis would have been the "brains" adapting itself to this entropic mop up chore. Other outcomes were possible there.

But the Gaian biofilm continued to exploit the "technology" of semiosis – life's code-based approach to constructing dissipative structure. Genes led to neurons. With humans, this led on to first language – sociosemiosis. A code based on words. That then led to technosemiosis – codes based on the complete abstractions that are numbers.

So above ground, the evolution of semiosis was continuing, helped by the ideal conditions being created by the Gaian biofilm.

First we had an era of "climate stress" – the glaciation age which acted as a filter on hominid intelligence and sociality with its rapid cycles of change and the abundant herds of horse, deer, elephants and other big game that roamed the open grass plains that resulted across much of Eurasia.

Again, we have a "energy bonanza" just asking to be over-exploited. Large herds of yuumy bison-berger. And this drove an arms-race among the varied hunter-gatherer hominids that evolved to be top predator during this ice age. Homo sapiens came out on top, having developed the best linguistic software. But also, the large herds were pretty much wiped out in the process. It looked like Homo sap was out of a job.

But then the climate clicked into a longer stable interglacial period. Agriculture could be invented as the Homo tribes being shove about the landscape by shifting glaciers could instead settle down to tend and defend their patch of soil. Grow their own bison-bergers, and the buns and spices to make them even more delicious.

Again, other outcomes were possible. Language-equipped Homo might not have been lucky with a shift in climate. They may have eaten the last mastodon and gone extinct soon after.

But agriculture became a new energetic bonanza – although one now demanding a very organised and measured approach to its exploitation. Homo had to build a culture around working with the daily solar flux and annual farming rhythms. We had to become experts at recycling even our own shit to keep the paddy fields going, or burning the cow dung to heat our huts. We had to really take care of the ecology of our environments. They became the gods, the ancestors, that we worshipped and revered.

Roll the clock forward and we have the rise of agricultural empires. Then this turns into the age of expansionary empires – Rome and European nation states – as societies are reorganised from being farmers to being soldiers. If you are 15th C Portugal with a fleet of ships, there is the whole world to start raping and colonising. Again, an entropic bonanza just begging to be exploited.

And now the military technology - in the form of the Greek hoplites that invented the Western notion of all out war based on self-actualising "democratic" control – had been refined to the point that ships, muskets and cannon could really project focused power. Again, gunpowder. An entropic bonanza that followed its own logic all the way up to nuclear warheads. The shit that actually worried us in the 1970s and so probably pushed climate change down the list of concerns at the time – especially at government response level.

Anyway, you can see the pattern. Entropic bonanza. Semiotic control. Put the two together and you get explosive growth, like a spore on a Petrie dish, until the system hopefully finds some kind of homeostatic long-run balance.

Humans - once equipped with the sociosemiosis and technosemiosis to take a view from outside "nature" – outside even the Gaian Earth as a biofilm regulated entropic enterprise - could start to look for all the new loopholes it might exploit. Our busy minds and hands were pushing and probing every crack for a seam of advantage – an ability to concentrate semiotic power in ways that topped whatever already existed.

Whether we kill ourselves with nuclear fission or a blanket of trapped CO2 is still perhaps a close-run thing. Overpopulation and ecosystem destruction are still also in the game. All the exponential curves still intersect circa 2050, just as we saw they did in the 1970s when the Club of Rome offered up its first still dodgy computer simulations of the trends.

So it is all one Hegelian historical arc. The relentless upward climb in an ability semiotically to project power. The bigger the entropy store, the more dazzling the semiotic structure that arises to exploit it.

If ecologists governed the world rather than the engineers who run the communist bloc and lawyers (or more lately, the derivative traders) who run the free west, then the burning need to establish a new Gaian planetary balance would be top of mind. But no one ever wanted to vote for hair-shirted greenies. They offer no fun at all.

I mean this soap opera world where absolutely everything teeters on the brink in mad self-destructive fashion. What more exciting and interesting time is there to be alive?

Again, here I would include this as “religion,” using a fairly broad definition. In the OP I mentioned Christianity especially, but only in response to the problem. — Xtrix

So the Church of Self-Actualisation and Limitless Growth? :smile:

I’m just not sure what calling it religious buys you in terms of rational analysis here. My own view is founded in biological science and indeed biosemiosis. This is all about an ecosystem acting naturally to maximise its entropic throughput.

We are the mould spore that landed on the Petrie dish of fossil fuels. Explosive growth to exhaust this huge energy store followed.

The Earth had a carefully evolved Gaian balance. A carbon cycle had been built up to recycle the waste products of O2 and CO2. Life had earlier stumbled on another explosive energy pathway in photosynthesis. The over production of oxygen damn near made life extinct.

But then a balance was created where autotrophs used CO2 to make O2, and heterotrophs used O2 to make CO2, and the whole planet settled down to a rhythm of life tuned to the daily solar flux. A biofilm with feedback mechanism stabilised the climate of the Earth.

Humans are in the process of blowing up this balance by burning all the ancient phytoplankton that got accidentally buried in sediment strata as part of the global carbon cycle.

My point is that the big picture of why this is rational - explicable in a natural evolutionary sense - is understood within biological science. Fossil fuel had to be entropified if it was technically possible.

It was just sitting there waiting for a suitable speck of the right organism to land on it.

What this organism thought it was about - its religious beliefs - were quite irrelevant. An enabling fiction.

Homo sap just stood on a steep slithery slope and nature took its course. A mass extinction event will follow and even the Gaian climate regulation cycle might never come back quite right. But in the wider evolutionary view, it is what it is.

This is exactly what I mean. It’s all done with a kind of mock realism, a semi-plausible story, to suck you in. But always with a happy ending. Don’t Look Up is the only one that doesn’t do that. I consider it the Dr. Strangelove of climate change. — Xtrix

You single out religion and Hollywood as a source of the magical thinking. But consider also the role of high finance. We don’t expect rationality from religious belief or entertainment, yet neoliberalism and financial engineering have been far more directly responsible for keeping the global self-delusion of limitless growth going.

The financialisation of the economy achieves the wonderful thing of enforcing maximum short-termism in regard to consumption patterns, coupled to creating the maximum distance from the debts being incurred in the name of that consumption.

Any advanced civilisation would look at us and wonder why we are so crazy. We have built the expectation of permanent exponential growth into every aspect of our society.

Actually it became a religion in Silicon Valley with the Singularity cult.

Any ideas? — Baden

Just taxing carbon could have done the trick. But politics is too corrupted by industry. We’re fucked I’m afraid.

Although Elon Musk will surely be using his rockets to shower the stratosphere with tin-foil, or some other crazy last ditch geoengineering solution crowdfunded by the credulous.

But I am not convinced that that alone is the only contributing factor. — god must be atheist

And I’m sure you have studied the science thoroughly, so your opinion counts. :lol:

Since preindustrial times, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased by over 40%, methane has increased by more than 150%, and nitrous oxide has increased by roughly 20%. More than half of the increase in CO2 has occurred since 1970.

https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/basics-of-climate-change/

So in your opinion, what are the natural causes that play so heavily in these climate gas increases. What percentage of the blame must nature take?

Hmm. I’m a little unclear as to what you man here. If you’re saying the real problem is the idea of constant economic growth and expansion, I think that’s a big part of our problem — especially in destroying the environment. — Xtrix

I’m saying the problem is deep rooted as modern identity has been constructed around the “limitless growth” that fossil fuels promised. Our political and social economy is premised on it.

So it is not a matter of confronting folk with the bad news and expecting them to make quite different choices. You are attacking the source of what they think they are. That is why they attack the messenger rather than heed the message.

Thus to fix the problem, it is not just about providing better information. It is about redesigning the very psychology at work in “tackling the threat”.

My point in the OP is that we have failed to appropriately react to the unprecedented threats we face, and that one explanation is that of simple hubris — we believe we can’t die. I think religion and media contribute to this hubris. — Xtrix

Does anyone really fear death given its inevitability and the fact sleep comes for us every night?

As social animals, if we are hardwired for anything, it is to defend against threat to our tribal identity. We are quick and reckless in our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for that.

The impact of exponential growth seemed a issue that any simpleton could understand when I was doing ecology in the 1970s. By about 2000, I had already concluded that folk weren’t going to react.

Changing the world seems easy compared with being asked to change your self - to challenge the unconscious roots of your standard issue modern world identity.

pfft…

Your view is that the clay was divided when it went from a six sided shape to a five sided one. — Bartricks

Your evasions are pitiful. The nature of the transformation is irrelevant. The source was what was in question.

Again, how does the clay change its shape from a cube to a pyramid? That was the claim you made.

You need to refute the argument I gave you. — Bartricks

I did. You couldn’t follow. So it goes. :up:

But also you framed your position in terms of clay changing its shape, which led you smack into a contradiction over such change being effected by substantial being. That was pointed out. You pretended nothing had been said. :down:

The question is whether something can cause a change in itself, yes? — Bartricks

But I have now questioned your answer to that question. So again, where is the cause of the change in form If the substantial matter is a “clay”?

There must be some reason you thought this was a good argument.

5. If the changes in things have causes, they do not have an infinity of causes — Bartricks

Why not?

But anyway, I’ve already argued that casualty acts in the opposite way. It acts to constrain possibilities, to stabilise instability.

That is the holistic framework I am working from. A hylomorphic theory of substantial being where material states are self-organising, and so indeed the cause of their own existence. The material aspect of being is not some inert clay but infinite free possibility … that then imposes stabilising limitation on itself because much of that free possibility cancels itself away to nothing.

Standard QFT-based particle physics, in other words. :smile:

Yes. A thing can cause a change in itself. — Bartricks

So again, how does your lump of clay change itself from a cube to a pyramid? Does it have a change of mind or sumthink?

My physics is limited as well but from my reading there is 'no particular reason' for the names given to the various quark types. Up and down has nothing to do with quark spin as far as I know. — universeness

Pro tip: up and down quarks were called that because they formed an isospin doublet.

Why are you lecturing me about particle physics when you wouldn’t know a QFT or Lie group if they bit you on the bum. :lol:

but descriptions and definitions are not logical processes. — Metaphysician Undercover

You seem to be defining definitions by what they are not.

Victory is mine. :party: :party: :party:

Could you address his questions, if possible. — Daniel

Check out the quantum Zeno effect. Just as the watched kettle cannot boil, the measured particle can’t decay.

So we have experiments to show that a “particle” is an instability being stabilised. The holism of the context is what prevents it breaking up into some more entropic, less ordered, state.

It ain’t really about parts and wholes imagined as composites. It is about the (thermal) equilibrium balance between global constraints and local degrees of freedom.

In the Big Bang universe, everything is sliding down the hill to its Heat Death. A stable particle emerges at the temperature where there is some barrier preventing its immediate decay. It becomes a trapped scrap of “hotness” - a thermal island in a sea of increasing cold.

But decay can still happen if the particle can exploit quantum uncertainty to borrow enough energy for a short enough time to vault its barriers and gleefully rejoin the wider world that is doing the generalised spreading and cooling deal.

So the world left the particle behind, walled in on its energy island. But there is a constant possibility - if the particle is left isolated and unmeasured - of it grabbing enough energy to decay, and then repay its debt with interest (in the sense of it producing a world with an even greater entropy content).

So is the particle acted upon, or does it act upon itself?

The two are in fact entwined as I say. And the quantum Zeno effect shows that particles and environments are in a dynamical balancing act. Crud can get stuck behind negentropic barriers as a result of historical accidents. A neutron exists because it ran out of antineutrons to be annihilated by. It is doomed to exist as a fundamental particle forever.

Or does it? In fact isolated neutrons have a half-life of about 10 minutes as they can cheaply borrow the energy to decay into a proton, electron and antineutrino. A collection of “parts” that increases the disorder of the cosmos as the second law requires.

It is only once further environmental constraints are added - like being bound into a nucleus by the strong force - that this decay is halted … because the neutron ain’t now isolated but closely “watched”.

Or to be more accurate, the neutron is no longer merely contemplating its fate as a trapped heat wanting to rejoin an ever cooling environment. It can’t make the supreme sacrifice of jumping its barriers to merge with that which is cosmically fundamental. Instead it has to hang around with a bunch of nosy neighbours that keep it from jumping. It is stuck with being part of a higher level of composite crud-ness … until a black hole eventually comes to its rescue.

The simple fact is that we define a thing by describing what it is, not by saying what it is not. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is not true. Or as you might describe it, that is false, :joke:

But even if it were true and not false, then my argument is about the definition of categories like thingness itself.

How did Aristotle decide matter was not-form, and form was not-matter? Why more generally did he treat contradiction and contrariety as different levels of negation in his square of opposition?

Any type of difference makes the two things not indiscernible, therefore different things. — Metaphysician Undercover

More bollocks. An essential difference is different from an accidental difference. One is treated as signal, the other noise.

Aren’t you conflating two different attitudes?

One is techno-optimism. We are self making gods. Our fate is in our own hands.

The other is old fashioned fatalism. We are the playthings of the gods. It is what it is.

Christianity kind of bridges the two. It claims a personal connection with a singular god and so we can work to achieve an ascent to heaven even if we can’t avoid the trials and tribulations of living a life.

What is really going on is an evolutionary competition between two general ways of human life.

The original fate-bound way of life was the one that was lived within the energy constraints of the daily solar flux. Humans lived off renewables, and so had a religion - and indeed a whole moral economy - adapted to accepting this fact. You couldn’t just magic up unlimited energy or material resources, so social organisation was focused on being the kind of people who flourished within a restricted sense of the world.

Then humans stumbled into the fossil fuel cornucopia having invented science and technology. A new romantic conception of humanity made sense of this. A way of life was developed that could exploit a world made different by its unlimited supply of energy and material. The idea that our fate is in our own - technically adept - hands took firm hold.

We reorganised the whole planet around this new attitude to existence.

The rest is recent history. Right now is the evolutionary reckoning.

The problem is that techno-optimism hasn’t been clearly ruled out yet. Geo-engineering might save us. Fusion energy might save us. Even if the rest of the world burns in hell, we might live in a spot where we are at least the last to fry - and rapid global depopulation is what saves us.

So the problem isn’t “media” in the sense of public misinformation. The problem is much deeper. It is in the mind of the global social organism receiving any message. Our collective identity is predicated on the exponential growth that became a thing with the industrial revolution.

Can a unity act on itself — Daniel

Remember the question.

So this lump of clay. Does it change itself, or does it get changed?

I don't think this is correct at all. We define "A" with a description, not by saying what it is not. "Man", for example, was defined by Aristotle as a rational animal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Once again you are confusing the predicate logic approach of reductionism with the dialectical approach of logical holism. You are saying the whole - the A - is composed of some set of particular properties. A is constructed in additive fashion from a selection of parts that it either has, or doesn’t have.

So a man has two legs and a willy. But a one-legged man doesn’t seem to have lost anything formally essential, just something materially accidental. However the castrato? Now the debate may start about whether we have cut into something essential.

The dialectical argument operates at a quite different level - that of metaphysical generality. The discovery of categories or universals themselves. The properties or qualities of Being.

This is where everyday reductionist constructionism must give way to some better understood logic of holism. We are dealing with how sameness and difference themselves can both be “true” of the world. We are talking of the creating relation where wholeness and apartness are two faces of the one coin.

That then leads us to the triadic logic, the hierarchical logic, the systems logic, of the likes of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel and - above all - Peirce.

I really cannot think of anything which is defined by stating what it is not. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yet even at the level of a logic of particulars, we have Leibniz and the argument from indiscernibles - the differences that don’t make a difference and so speak to identity as sameness.

The one-legged man story.

Minds are not made of their states. They 'have' states. They are not made of them. — Bartricks

Even the kinds of states are divided. Most would agree the mind is composed of visual states, auditory states, gustatory states, tactile states, and so on.

So even the divisions have divisions. And yet there is the opposing thing of a wholeness too. That is how the divisions can even exist as a positive contrast.

This is not puzzling from a systems science point of view. The dialectic of differentiation~integration is simply what is expected. Only variety can be combined in a cohesive and directed fashion.

Einstein, by the way, was wrong, so they say, about quantum physics. In what sense and degree is an open question nonetheless. — Agent Smith

That’s a little unfair. Especially as his Nobel was for his contribution to quantum physics - the photoelectric effect.

In that case, you've rejected the premise of this question. — absoluteaspiration

Certainly I rejected it. But hopefully providing a solid motivation.

The OP posits the idea of the partless whole. I argued that this would be as nonsensical as making claims about wholeless parts. Parts and wholes only make sense as the reciprocal aspects of a system of relations.

This become clearer once we move out of an object oriented ontology and adopt a relational view. It is hard to see until we are using language that explicitly captures the idea of inverse relations, such as constraints and degrees of freedom, or integration vs differentiation.

So the OP starts with a misuse of language in my view. Rather than accept it on its own terms, I reframed it.

In fact, the bosons don't behave like physical components in any way you might imagine. They only "exist" as a mathematical characterization of the photon. — absoluteaspiration

You are making wild guesses about how I would imagine things here. But I’ve said I’m an ontic structuralist on this. So I don’t believe in material particles. It is a structure of relations that produces the observables we like to read off as “a photon” connecting A to B.

Could you elaborate on why the bosons nevertheless qualify as "parts" in the relevant sense? — absoluteaspiration

They are parts in the gauge symmetry sense. They are differentiated while EW’s SU(2) reigns but integrated once the Higgs breaks that symmetry in effective fashion to allow EM’s U(1) to be a thing.

So photons and electrons are fundamental in the sense that they are where a cascade of symmetry breaking might eventually end, but not in the sense you may be suggesting of some unbroken wholeness that grounds the whole game of material existence.

The cosmos isn’t composed of photons, electrons and protons. It arrived at them as the stable way to balance a collision of structural possibilities - the symmetries that define the Standard Model. They were the crud left as the hot soup of the Big Bang boiled away to its most enduring residues.

If you're not using predicate logic, in what sense are you negating A? — absoluteaspiration

In the dialectical sense. So as I said, you move on from A = not not-A (a statement couched in the language of particulars) to a reciprocal framing where you have inverse generality - some dichotomy where A is not-B, with B being 1/A.

A dichotomy is a a relation that is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. So it opposes two generalities in a reciprocal deal. Each becomes the measure of the other in that each is measurable by its lack of that other.

In Yin-Yang fashion, discrete = 1/continuous and continuous = 1/discrete. Each is true to itself to the extent it negates its other. There is the mutual exclusivity.

Then the joint exhaustivity comes when you multiply them together to recover 1/1 as your unity - the unity of opposites.

As for the Raven Paradox, this question assumes a world where only one thing exists. — absoluteaspiration

Predicate logic fails here because it is trying to reason from the general to the particular, and coupling that with an argument from the particular to the general.

That’s a good way to show up the difference between deduction and induction. Not so much for what I’m doing, which is showing that generality itself has this dichotomous structure. Universals always have to come in reciprocal pairs as everything in good metaphysics is based on a logic of relations.

I don't know what you're talking about. — Bartricks

I was pointing out that you had divided the mind into its general selfhood vs it’s particular contents, thus contradicting your own claim.

There are many problems importing classical negation wholesale into metaphysics. The most famous is the Raven Paradox. — absoluteaspiration

You are talking about predicate logic rather than dialectical argument.

Ravens clearly aren’t metaphysically general. There is no not-raven to stand opposed to the raven in the universal way that discreteness can be the antithesis of continuity, chance the antithesis of necessity, etc.

Predicate logic presumes a world of mereological composition, which is certainly also a popular ontology if your metaphysics predates the quantum revolution.

If you grant that the self is an entity with no parts, which sounds questionable to me, — absoluteaspiration

My ontology is structuralist and holds that all entities are hylomorphic processes. So I simply reject this view at root rather than merely thinking it questionable. :grin:

This applies even to fundamental particles. After all, even photons are “composite” in being a linear superposition of a weak hypercharge boson (B) and a weak isospin boson (W3) according to Standard Model effective symmetry breaking.

then you could argue that the change in state in each step is an entity with no parts interacting with itself:

A ---> B ---> C ---> ... — absoluteaspiration

One could argue it. But fundamental physics would again caution against it. Contextuality rules in quantum theory.

As I argue in the other question thread, the systems view prevails. Everything is a holomorphic structure. So there can be no partless wholes or wholeless parts. Everything arises from a process of local and global interaction between material potential and formal constraint.

We ourselves are simples - entities with no parts - and we can change what mental state we are in. — Bartricks

So apparently we are in fact … entities with parts … because there is some distinction between global selfhood and particular states of mind that it is is useful to mention …

[sigh]

The issue I have is that it has a human component. The thinker. Then observer. And therefore I’m not sure if logic exists without an aware/ sentient observer in the environment or of logical processes occur regardless of us and that “order” is relevant even without people in the picture. — Benj96

Logic couldn’t be boiled down to a system of switches if it were merely a free creation of the human mind and not also an inherent constraint on physical possibility.

So the fact we can build computers with Boolean switches says that there is more to it. The big question is defining the manner in which the Cosmos is in fact a “rational machine” - a Platonic creation. :smile:

How do you conceive of this thing which is not A? — Daniel

This is why metaphysics employs dialectical or dichotomous arguments - the famous unity of opposites.

If I want to define A, I need to conceive of it as the negation of everything that it is not. So that binds our notions about the existence of things or entities to formally complementary relations. I am measurably A to the degree that I’ve measured myself to be not A.

You thus have a reciprocal or inverse relation. A = 1/not-A. And this answers your other question about wholes and parts. You only ever then end up with a world of things in relation. Things only exist definitely as “what they are” to the degree they manage to distance themselves from “that which they are not”.

The usual folk ontology is that things simply exist. And the contrast then is with them not existing.

But that raises questions, like do they not exist because they are simply still just a possibility, or because they are impossibilities?

Metaphysics has to cut deeper and does so by making what exists a concrete story of existence being defined in terms of what is - relatively, rather than absolutely - absent. That is an expanded view that can deal with possibilities (and so also, impossibilities).

To cut a long story short, this is why metaphysics boils down to a naming of the core dichotomies or polarities that underlie ontological Being.

You get familiar metaphysical-strength distinctions like discrete-continuous.

So is reality fundamentally discrete or continuous? A little thought shows that these opposed answers are each just the limit on the other. To be discrete is to have the least possible degree of continuity. And to be continuous is, vice versa, to have the least possible degree of discreteness.

The temptation is to claim that one or other limitation can exist in absolute fashion. Hence one of the two can be the more fundamental.

Yet in systematic reasoning, we only ever find these two fellows in a complementary relation. We can say one is present only to the degree we can assure the other is absent. So the only thing we can be sure about is the existence of this as a reciprocal relation. A basic form of counterfactuality that usefully characterised the world we inhabit.

The same goes with other metaphysical primitives like parts and wholes - or one-many, local-global, etc.

Parts and wholes are the opposing limits of structural order. And there is no structural order - as a unity - without a system divided into relative partness vs relative wholeness.

This leads you to Aristotle’s hylomorphic form and four causes approach to substantial being. The whole is the rational form of the substance, the parts are its material potentials.

What would A (relatively) be different from? — Daniel

A would stand in contrast to not-A. That is the way the logic goes. The existence of A is wholly dependent on it being not not-A. :grin:

On the one hand, the poetic justice! On the other, the evidence that Trumpism mutates faster than a dose of Corona.

Matt Gaetz targeted by MAGA monster he helped create

Ahead of his GOP primary race next week, opponent Mark Lombardo's campaign released an ad that makes a provocative-yet-unproven claim about Gaetz’s relationship with Trump.

The ad questions Trump’s support for Gaetz (whom Trump has endorsed) by suggesting the former president may believe Gaetz was the secret informant who helped the FBI get a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

“When Donald Trump really endorses someone, he goes big," a narrator in the ad states. "You’ve seen none of that for lying Matt Gaetz. What does Trump know? Is Gaetz the informant?”

https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/matt-gaetz-mark-lombardo-ad-rcna43713

In my view it is characterized by attempts to oversimplify systems that science has shown to be complex, thereby characterized by a disregard for the boundaries of science and thereby unscientific. — Tzeentch

I've studied this very issue for a long time. And as an ardent holist and organicist myself, the great irony has been to discover that life and mind – representing the highest levels of "organismic complexity" – came about by semiosis, or the ability to organise nature by employing the constraints of a mechanistic causality.

This is a still recent revolution being absorbed in the biological sciences. And Exhibit A would be the motor proteins that move stuff about on tiny filament tracks inside every cell. On the smallest scale of molecular biology, you have these little protein gadgets with legs that run up and down paths to deliver gobbets of this, that and the other, to tagged destinations.

We used to think stuff just diffused in random fashion to get where it needed in cells. But no. It is delivered door to door by a nanobot technology, complete with a system of cellular highways and traffic control machinery.

So biology is engineering. And that then makes the modern scientific obsession with seeing reality itself as engineering just a simple natural extension of the central trick that allowed life in the first place.

It is the "right" causal perspective from our embodied point of view.

Metaphysics hasn't really caught up with any of this yet. But meanwhile check out the cool videos of kinesins and dyneins at work.

Yep, basically.

However, “measurement” is more accurate that “observation” because measurement apparatus itself rather than consciousness causes wave function collapse. — Art48

A thing to think about is that the “collapse” happens when reality is forced to answer a counterfactual question as some kind of suitable mechanism is imposed upon it. So the experimenter demands a clear yes or no as a logical demand. Some instrument physically implements that logic in its design. Nature delivers an answer in the tick or flash of a detector circuit.

So we can at least see that it is not “consciousness” interacting with nature as some kind of substance. It is us humans imposing our logical conception on the situation to discover how closely nature might conform to our mechanistic vision of causality.

That is not to say that nature doesn’t thermally decohere in a manner that we would describe as counterfactual. But it is to draw attention to the semiotic nature of the interaction between experimenter, instrument and world.

The experimenter is looking for a sign. A machinery is created to produce one. It only has to be “the truth” in a pragmatic sense. A number on a dial.

A good rule of thumb is “don’t live for others any more than you expect them to live for you”. — NOS4A2

Or any less?

What’s interesting to me is what traits these two opposites enable the individual - what skills, capacities for understanding and knowledge, what perspective can one gain from either being highly egoistic or highly ego-death-ish. And which one is better if any? — Benj96

You are making the moral presumption that human social behaviour should divide neatly into the polar opposites of good and evil.

But dig deeper into the evolutionary biology and you will see that it is simply an expression of the dominance~submission dynamic which is necessary for the self-organisation of a social hierarchy.

This is how nature produces social order. It wires brains to make some definite choice - to lead or follow, to attack or embrace. And from those choices, it then becomes possible to have a stable structure of relations. All the parts of the system can lock together in a functional pattern.

So it is not about good and bad – one path to follow, the other to avoid. It is about the having two clear choices and then acting in one or other direction, based on what seems best at the time.

Are you in charge, or are others in charge? Are others your allies, or are they rivals? From the point of view of emergent social structure, it doesn't matter which option you pick (as your "wrong" choice will soon enough be found out). It just matters that you are quite binary or counterfactual about it.

The fact you can flick between opposed states of mind - supported by antagonistic neuromodulators like oxytocin vs vasopressin – is what makes the whole show work. It allows social structure to emerge because everyone sorts themselves into roles as leaders and followers, in-groups and out-groups, competitors and cooperators, etc.

Is it better to serve the self as an individual or see the self as all things and thus serve all things/others equally as your own body/personal needs. — Benj96

The problem here is that this buys into the romantic myth that we are all essentially solitary "self-actualising" agents in life. The truth is that humans are socially constructed. The idea that we are individual "egos" with the private drama of moral choice is itself a social script.

It is quite a functional script in that it was the basis for a shift in the scale of human hierarchical organisation - the step from small tribal bands to "limitlessly" large civilisations. But a script nonetheless.

What’s the common denominator of childhood bullying, branding, classism, war and slavery? The ego seems to be the selfs tendency to apply a degree of value on itself. Either more or less than the environment around it, other selves and other egos. — Benj96

And sure there are problems or pathologies that result from becoming "civilised". We are fine-tuned by a million years of neurobiological evolution to be very well adapted to a tribal scale life. We are very good at self-organising stable social structure just going with our "feels" about our fellow tribe mates.

But now we are trying to live in some version of a "civilisation" – an application of some moral philosophy ... that may or may not be well thought out and functional.

As is obvious, self-interested neoliberalism or status-seeking consumerism may seem quite functional philosophies for social self-organisation in the short-term - 10 to 20 years - yet after that, a self-dooming approach to living.

So it is very important to get this right.

Again, the issue is not that we seem torn between two paths in life. That kind of counterfactuality of choices is the basis of any order at all. We need the thesis and antithesis of two well matched options.

The worst thing for the emergence of structure is to act vaguely. To dilly dally. Just decide. Either lead or follow. Either compete or cooperate. Either decide friend or foe. From the definite choice comes some hierarchy of organisation – some definite pattern of action. And then - to the degree something gets learnt from the direction chosen - the whole system is better equipped to make smarter choices the next time around.

The brain forces you into black and white states of mind so that - collectively - we then click together in some emergent social state that can last for at least a while.

The "ego" is then just a higher level of this game – a linguistic extension to the basic neurobiological trick. We get it grafted on from infancy. We get taught the socially approved definitions of what is nice and nasty behaviour.

And it is all terribly confusing as we are somehow suppose to be both strong and vulnerable, pushy and tolerant, self-advancing and self-effacing, assertive and gracious, etc, etc, apparently "at the same time". Which as an "ego" – an inherently singular framing of the notion of self – doesn't really compute.

That paper reads like something out of the 1970s. It is the opposite of a biologically realistic or embodied approach. :down: