Are you talking about statistical mechanics, e.g. pressure arising out of the random behavior of molecules, or something else? — T Clark

Systems with pressures and temperatures are examples of this general way of thinking.

But one of the other things I would point out here is the “weirdness” of the situation where the random kinetics of the particles of an ideal gas is seen as the deterministic part of the story, and macro properties like pressure and temperature become the emergent accidents.

Again, that is the consequence of a backwards metaphysics that wants to make Newtonian dynamics the generic case and statistical systems, and quantum systems, the special cases.

This is like thinking everything is Euclidean geometry - flat and infinite - and that non-Euclidean geometry is some weird extra. We had to flip that around once we realised - ad with relativity - that it is in fact linear Euclideanism which is the special case here.

I suppose macro reality is built atop, arises out of QM. But it would appear the rules for each are so different that neither is needed to make sense of the other. — tim wood

Yep. Your post got me thinking that this is another way into the interpretation issues.

The first step is to drop the monistic demand that something is something "all the way down". Even a classical view of a system exhibiting perfect randomness achieves its goal by imposing a strong dichotomy on nature. Perfect randomness at the local scale of the independent events have to be matched by perfect determinacy in terms of the macroscopic boundary conditions. A die has to be precision machined so that as a six-sided shape, it rolls fair.

And then having understood classical indeterminacy in that fashion, that opens the way to understanding probabilistic systems where this essential dichotomy itself has a larger story.

From a mathematical perspective, you get chaos and its non-linearity - a dichotomy where the opposing limits are about divergence vs coherence. You get every trajectory able to bend away from the straight line in unpredictable fashion, but also the opposite thing of all trajectories being bent towards a common goal - the correlations that produce attractors.

Quantum theory seems to say much the same thing about material reality. You have both more convergence and more divergence than linear classicality would make you suspect. The uncertainties are more uncertain, and the certainties also more certain.

So the monistic ground becomes a fundamental dialectic. And this dialectic in turn is revealed to have a more generic form. Classicality emerges as the perfectly engineered limit of a more basic dichotomy where the non-linearities have yet to be tamed. You get both more divergence in the parts and more coherence in the whole.

The Galton board pegs can dance and so be even more chaotic, but they also can dance in synchrony, and so deliver a more ordered result.

Thus monistic commitment seems right and unremarkable in its proper sphere. Nor am I aware of anyplace Bell's inequality is violated except in tests of Bell's inequality. And quantum tunneling - which I do not understand - if useful in computers must at least satisfy the needs of a macro-application. — tim wood

Sure, linearity does get achieved to a useful degree. Otherwise we wouldn't be here to discuss quantum weirdness or chaotic non-linearity. The anthropic principle applies there.

But the OP did raise the question of how classical randomness can square with quantum indeterminancy.

My answer is that these are not two incompatible models. They may be the one model, but with constraints added. Quantum reality is the non-linear version (as a broad brush statement) and classical reality is the linearised version of that - the thermally decohered limit.

Micro-level, sure, but imo not QM level. — tim wood

But I am arguing that QM is the larger dichotomy in which the classical dichotomy is embedded. So QM is its own less constrained, less linear, version of the micro-macro dichotomy under discussion here.

QM uncertainty is both about the smallest spacetime scales and the greatest energy densities. It is about non-linear fluctuations – endless quantum corrections to any classical particle value - yet also the constraining holism of non-locality. If we take the Feynman path integral literally, a particle explores every possible path to discover the path that delivers on the constraint of the least action principle.

It breaks the rules in both their directions. It is more extreme in terms of its individuated chance, and more extreme in terms of its contextual determinism.

So same old divided world, but less linearised in both regards.

How is it that the normal distribution occurs all the time? It seems at the macro-level, at least, the more likely events occur more of the time.

At the scale of the very small, that rule seems violated. Which may be no more than a case of different rules - very different rules. Or no rules at all. Or a third case: rules, but not that we can determine because of fundamental limits to our ability to determine rules - at least so far. — tim wood

The Galton board is a good example. But doesn’t it illustrate the way that micro chance and macro determinism are yoked together?

The board engineers things so that every peg gives a 50-50 probability of deflecting a falling ball to its left or right. The randomness is deliberately maximised at this level - or else it is a loaded board. We can argue that no board could ever be so perfectly engineered. Each peg might be infinitesimally biased. But the point of the exercise is to approach the limit of pure randomness at this level.

Then given a perfect board, it will produce a perfectly determined probability distribution. At the macro level, you can be absolutely certain of a nice and tidy Gaussian distribution emerging from enough trials.

Each ball hits 7 pegs on the way down. Each deflection is a 50-50 split. There is only one way to hit the outside bin - 7 left or right deflections in a row. And then 70 ways to land in the central two bins as an even mix of left and right deflections.

So the individual pegs provide the pure chance. But the board as a whole imposes a sequential history on what actually happens - a certainty about the number of 50-50 events and the number of different histories, or paths through the maze, that describe the one final outcome.

So in a Platonically perfect world, the micro and the macro scale are engineered to represent the opposing ideals or the accidental and the determined. The system isn’t either the one or the other in some deeper metaphysical sense. It is designed to represent the dialectic of accidental versus determined as being the proper model of a reality that is probabilistic.

Chance and determinism are yoked in a reciprocal relation as the opposing limits of nature, Micro level chance and macro level determinism are how we get a system that has a stochastic character.

Then of course, the problem is that the real world may not be amenable to such perfect engineering. This is where chaos and quantum effects impact on things.

Chaos is about non-linearity. It is written into our assumptions about the pegs and the board that we can keep any imprecision in our engineering within linear bounds. Any bias or error in the construction will itself be averaged away in Gaussian fashion. But if there is non-linearity of some kind - maybe the pegs are springy in a way that reverberations are set up - then errors of prediction will compound at an exponential rate. The attempt to engineer a perfect distinction between local randomness and global determinism will go off course because of the emergence of non-linear divergences that lead to new kinds of internal correlations, or synchronised behaviour.

Then quantum uncertainty also affects our perfect engineering. If the Galton board is very small or very hot, then it is going to start to misbehave. Everything from the balls, to the pegs, to the board as a whole, will be fluctuating in ways that introduce an indeterminism about both the randomness of each deflection event and the determinism about the countable ensemble of paths as a whole.

Again the classical picture of a world cleanly split between absolute chance and absolute constraint will lose its linearity and become subject to an excess of divergence and/or an excess of correlation.

We will arrive at the quantum weirdness of a physical system that either diverges at every event to create a many world ensemble of separate histories, or we have to accept the other available interpretation - that there are spooky non-local correlations limiting the chaos.

So what I am arguing is that the classical picture demands some kind of monistic commitment - either reality is fundamentally based on determinism or chance. But our best models of randomness or probability are intrinsically dichotomistic. It is essential to construct a system - whether it is a die, a coin, a Galton board, a random number generating algorithm- that exemplifies indifferent chance at the micro scale and constraining history on the macro scale.

Then we learn in fact that physical reality can’t be so perfectly engineered. We can approach linearity, but only by suppressing non-linearity. To achieve our Platonic image of the ideal gaming device, we have to do work to eliminate both its potential for divergence - too much local independence in terms of accumulating history - as well as the opposite peril of a system with too much internal correlation, or too many emergent intermediate-scale interactions.

I've missed till now that you are a latter-day Aristotlean (cum Peircean). — 180 Proof

Oddly enough, Peirce wound up thinking Spinoza was the nearest to being a proper pragmatist like himself - on the basis of being a realist rather than a nominalist! At least according to - https://revistas.pucsp.br/cognitiofilosofia/article/download/20978/15446/0

Keeping all options open, I see! So, your position is that anything's possible — TheMadFool

In fact I take the opposite position that something exists because everything was not possible. Reality is what is left over after all the other possibilities cancelled each other away by being contradictory.

I recently offered the example of a wheel. You can make a wheel any shape you like. It could be as irregular as you choose. But constrained by the purpose of getting yourself somewhere efficiently, you too will wind up designing a circular wheel.

But, the question of all questions is, is everything probable? — TheMadFool

Symmetry principles are pretty good at telling us what is probable.

If metaphysic – philosophy – ever produced truth-apt statements which describe or explain physical reality, then the sciences would have been wholly redundant and never have developed as independent theoretical practices. — 180 Proof

You’ve misunderstood. My point was that methodological naturalism is fine, but too often that is taken to mean a classical notion of physical reality is proven by science to be correct, or the best we can get.

However, that classical picture only tries to cover material/efficient cause. It parks formal and final cause on the sidelines. I favour a science-based naturalism that attempts to engage with the larger holistic causal picture.

I can carry out the physical activity of smoking (I'm a chain smoker) while I cogitate on the issue at hand but I cannot think of a problem in biology and, at the same time, find an answer to a mathematical question. — TheMadFool

With enough practice, one might learn. Some folk can add up a column of figures almost by glancing. So you might master the mathematical task to the level of a habitual unthinking skill, leaving capacity to work on the biology problem.

But it gets more complex of course. If you have a genuinely novel problem to solve, you need to add the skill of “looking away”. You need to switch from a left brain attentional style that narrows expectations down to a predictable kind of correct answer, to a right brain peripheral attentional style that is open to unexpected mental connections.

So there is narrow concentration versus wide eyed vigilance as complementary modes of higher level attentional processes.

It shows, in a crude way, that our brains aren't, unlike computers, capable of parallel processing — TheMadFool

Or rather, that our brains “process” by predicting the general flow of the world and its events, and then revert to particular attentional focus to the degree their ingrained habits of prediction need interrupting and updating.

The whole world is imagined as it is shortly about to be. Then we tidy up any small bits we might have got wrong.

Since "classical metaphysics" isn't theoretical – doesn't produce testable explanatory models — 180 Proof

Classical metaphysics is that familiar Newtonian concoction of determinism, materialism, atomism, monism, mechanicalism and locality which we all so love.

As a reductionist metaphysical framework, it has a splendid track record for producing models that explain nature in terms of efficient/material cause.

My point is that this classical metaphysics only works within its own limits. It excludes the other two Aristotelean causes - formal/final cause. It isn’t a holistic or systems metaphysics.

So while classicality gives us elegant models of reasonably simple and reasonably complex physical systems, it runs out of steam when science wants to venture into the realms of the fundamentally simple, or the fundamentally complex. It breaks down when we get to the holism of quantum theory or the semiotics of living and mindful dissipative structure.

If by “classical” metaphysics, you instead meanancient metaphysics, you are still wrong. Or at least, Aristotle neatly divided causal explanations in a way that atomistic metaphysics could gratefully and usefully leave half of the four causes out when it came to “doing science”. :grin:

I suppose I'm mostly a nominalist / instrumentalist in this regard. — 180 Proof

Good luck trying to be a true natural philosopher while leaving formal and final cause out of your reality picture.

Even physicists have moved on from that kind of Newtonian extremism.

What I found was that it comes down to what is considered to be the 'true' self which may emerge when one loses oneself, or the false self. How much is about authenticity? — Jack Cummins

The flow state is neurological, so about the level of selfhood that is below a linguistic and socially-constructed sense of self.

Our brains are designed to predict our worlds - or indeed, predict the effect of our behaviour on the world. And we do that by a mix of habit and attention. Over time, we learn to deal with almost everything at the level of efficient and unthinking automaticism. But we also always encounter aspects of the world that are novel or surprising and must interrupt our automatic reactions to stop and think things through in a broader attentional fashion.

So a flow experience is what it is like to be handling a very complex world with surprising ease. We are lost in the moment in the sense that we hit the tennis ball, write the essay, or climb the mountain with uninterrupted skill. There is no sense of being paused or blocked or actually lost - as in being separated from the world that we intend to master through our actions. We are one with the world, psychologically speaking,

Then a social sense of “being a self in the (social) world” is another level of habit and attention. We can be in the flow of that too - seamlessly one with our sociocultural environment in a way that feels skilful and uninterrupted by doubts or second guessing.

But generally, social interactions are much more challenging and attention demanding. Well, at least in the high paced and fragmented modern social setting. So much more can go wrong. You can’t relax and just be yourself - be some highly automated and skilful collection of social habits - as that in itself is socially construed as “just presenting a facile mask”.

The “real you” in modern society is the attentional one, not the habitual one. The thinking and self-questioning one, not the one lost in the simple unexamined flow of everyday social relations.

This is what makes the concept of flow so surprising and elusive.

Our real neurological selves are constructed to have skilful flow. We are built to automate every useful action to the point it becomes effortless and unthinking. We can drive cars, open cans, tie shoelaces, with uninterrupted simplicity.

And yet when it comes to modern culture - founded on the demand of paying attention to our every action so that we become the ideal of the self-regulating individual - suddenly just being in the flow is not enough. We have to be continually accountable in a way that opposes flow itself.

Flow is about the authenticity of the self which is a lifetime’s accumulation of sturdy habit. But the modern version of the authentic self is the one which ends up constantly interrupting itself with the attention-demanding question - the existential riddle of: “Am I behaving authentically?” :smile:

In short, the term chaos doesn't describe an opposite intrinsic state of a system, but our inability to have a complete observation of the process, its initial conditions included.

I think you are using the concept of Chaos in a colloquial every day sense. — Nickolasgaspar

Even as a well-defined mathematical concept, talk about chaos is too broad here perhaps.

A metaphysical naturalist wanting to talk about order emerging from disorder would take their cue from models of criticality and spontaneous symmetry breaking.

So the beginning of the system - if we are talking about a law-bound Big Bang Cosmos - would be some kind of quantum critical state. And any fluctuation in terms of an action with a direction would crystallise a breaking of its symmetry. Global order would emerge as the new rules of this cooling-expanding game. Classicality would be the general description of nature as everywhere the “other” of quantum uncertainty was being decohered out of sight.

So this is a modern view of the ancient impulse to understand nature as the imposition of global order on local chaos. We now understand plenty about critical systems and phase transitions. There are mathematical models that can be applied in efforts at constructing quantum gravity theories where the regularity of spacetime is emergent from the correlations of localised quantum fluctuations - a foamy network starting point.

This view means that the initial conditions - in terms of some particular triggering cause - become irrelevant. In spontaneous symmetry breaking, some fluctuation is always going to tip the balance. Like the fabled flap of the butterfly wing, absolutely anything at all could have set things in motion. The deterministic fantasy is to think that ascribing causality to some random butterfly is adding any useful information to the understanding of what happened.

And contrariwise, this view argues that it is indeed the intrinsic balancing act which is the causal story. The beginning state is critical because it is finely poised between two opposing limits. It is exactly balanced at the point between its correlated and uncorrelated behaviour. It is equally differentiated and integrated over all scales.

So in fractal fashion, a generating algorithm is what primally exists. The cosmic system begins with the duality of being neither yet integrated, nor differentiated, but at the critical point where that dichotomy could begin to emerge into being as a symmetry breaking.

In other words, order arises out of chaos as the Big Bang sees spacetime start to expand and gain the regularity of global lawful habits as its energetic contents start to cool. But also, a positive notion of disorder arises as well. The local energetic contents undergo a condensation to become material particles bumping around kinetically in a void. Randomness becomes a concrete thing in the Cosmos - the blind independent wandering of atoms with ever weakening interactions. Eventually, the Cosmos becomes a vacuum with a sprinkle of dust - a perfect blend of global law and local freedom.

My point is that methodological naturalism can indeed lead one to look at reality through a model-theoretic lens. And I agree that many have read the salvation of classical determinism into the huge success of theories about deterministic chaos.

But if you dig a little deeper, you find even better support for an “order out of chaos” metaphysics. Models of criticality and symmetry breaking in particular tells us that initial conditions - as particular acts of measurement - don’t really matter if you have a proper handle on the deeper thing of the system’s generating algorithm.

And then this generator is not a monistic law but the begetter of cosmic dialectics. It is a division that speaks to a unity of opposites. If everything is a matter or relations, then that brings with it a tension between integration and differentiation, between global correlation and its local “other”.

Methodological naturalism risks just collapsing all explanation to a classical metaphysics. Metaphysical naturalism may be better served by paying closer attention to specific aspects of generic chaos theory such as the physics of critical systems.

but my point is even trivialities are slightly annoying. — schopenhauer1

If you have time to be bothered by mild discomfort, that suggests you actually have bugger all to complain about.

Your point argues against you.

The question remains, why should we put more people into this game? — schopenhauer1

Who is forcing you too?

There is a paternalism underlying all of it. There is also a political agenda. apokrisis thinks the game must be played, so people must play it right? People just got to stop their bitching and/or accept the (non-inevitable) outcome that one must play the game.. one MUST play the game, because see circular argument here.. apokrisis says it MUST be so. — schopenhauer1

But it is you who is inventing an unnatural story to frame a political response. I merely point out that choice arises because there are limits. The two go together as the essential structure of any natural game.

A game is forced, you haven't addressed this, only tried to red herring or ad hom about me complaining. Answer the three questions perhaps in the OP and then I'll see if you are really engaged with what I'm saying. — schopenhauer1

What can one say about a game enforced by an evil villain when there ain’t no evil villain?

Life itself doesn't offer much beyond it's own game, homelessness, and suicide. — schopenhauer1

Don’t forget the uncomfortable shoes. The final outrage.

Even if that metaphysical level were true, at my epistemological engagement with the world, I can evaluate the situation as negative. — schopenhauer1

Yes, you are free to frame your reality as if you are the helpless victim of a malign intelligence. You can choose to perpetuate that self-image. No one can stop you starting yet another thread on the same old topic.

At every decision there is an annoying outcome. One might lament that one should try shoes on better next time.. One can focus on that, but that doesn't change the uncomfortable shoes right now.. — schopenhauer1

Oh the cosmic tragedy! The inhumanity! Shoes that pinch.

Our degrees of limitations are more limited than we think if we zoom out just a bit.. We are in a game. — schopenhauer1

Yes, don't even mention the unbearable burden of having to make a choice on shoe colour as well. Those bastard shoe manufacturers and their 30 colourways on the sneaker you wanted to buy.

Humans don't just reproduce by instinct alone, so this would be a false narrative. Rather, people can make a choice and do. — schopenhauer1

Like I said. We get to make choices ... as a direct result of being constrained by a game. We are free not despite some malign intelligence, but because we can understand reality in terms of obstacles to be overcome.

The constraints and the freedoms are the two sides of the one game. Each is the "force" that shapes its "other".

The more obstacles you can identify in life, the more choices you are also producing. So it is not a game imposed on the self. It is the game in which a selfhood is constructed as an opposition to "the world".

If you are perpetually moaning about finding yourself in a world "not of your making", you don't really get what being "a self" is all about at a deep metaphysical level.

What if the villain is replaced by nature and evolution? What if this game produces organisms that must have the counterfactual freedom to act in their own best interest in organising their environments? What if there could be no mysterious intelligence setting up the game and so all the obstacles are just another way of regarding the freedom to make smart choices in the world?

What if we simply stop framing ourselves as helpless victims of a malign reality and instead embrace the responsibility of navigating our lives in a way that seems intelligent?

Which brings me to my bad interpretation of Joshs. The tree image suggests there are a lot of steps between where we start, out here at the leaves, perhaps, and the answers we seek, near the root; @Joshs's idea of intimacy actually does look like a claim that we can instead do valuable work right here within a step or two of where we are. He could even say, maybe there is hierarchical tree structure here, but we needn't peg value to depth, to distance from where we are. — Srap Tasmaner

You look to be setting yourself up for a false dichotomy - an either/or demand.

Modelling theory says optimality is always going to be a pragmatic trade-off between accuracy and complexity. The structure of knowledge you create to represent your world has to balance the desire for fundamental simplicity with the need for creative expressivity. It must be just as good for talking about the particular as it is about the general.

So you can't have the leaves without the trunk, and you can't have the trunk without the leaves. The fundamental and the superficial go hand in hand as two limits on the one whole.

And it is a pragmatic balancing act as you don't want more leaves than the trunk can bear, nor more trunk than is needed to sustain its weight of leaves.

So you ask a rather emotive question - what is "deep"? We all know the opposite of deep is shallow. And who wants to be labelled shallow?

And you get a reply, maybe what we should value most is intimacy. That kind of sounds like a good counter to deep. Who wouldn't want to celebrate a capacity for intimacy? Who wouldn't now see that as good reason to reject the claim that it all comes down to the pursuit of depth - the pursuit of grandiose unifying generality?

But if we move beyond the usual cultural wars to a mathematics of modelling, then we can see that the right answer is one that expresses a fruitful balance.

Depth is drilling down towards maximum generality and simplicity. But the trade-off is that the broadest explanations must encompass the greatest amount of particularity as well. Foundations need to match what is to be built upon them. And they don't actually need to be stronger, deeper or wiser than that.

If so, what makes them deep? — Srap Tasmaner

To be deep implies the issue raised is foundational. You are getting down to the bottom of things in some very general way.

So as a metaphor, it seems quite reasonable. But it does make a commitment to the notion of there being a foundation - a general unifying basis - to all that could matter.

Philosophy then divides itself on that point. Inevitably you get the antithesis of the anti-foundationalist response.

But that response is not deep. It has to ignore all the success of foundationalism as the project that got philosophy going. It also has to ignore the very fact that it employs dialectics to argue against the dialectics which has proved the most generally successful variety of foundationalism.

The concept of depth is a no-no to the postmodern ethos. Why is this? — Joshs

Precisely.

I would suggest intimacy as a preferable metaphor to depth. — Joshs

Well if the object is to avoid being merely shallow, then good dialectics would indeed say that we ought to be able to label the other pole as something that is fruitfully complementary.

Intimate is a pretty good stab at that.

But that still leaves a position being created by appeal to a foundational level of reasoning - a deep view, the dialectical view, which encompasses even its own attempts at contradiction.

The sense of agency (SA), or sense of control, is the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world.[1] It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In non-pathological experience, the SA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SO) for that movement. However, you would not have felt that you were the author of the movement; you would not have a sense of agency (SA).[2]

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

Oh. Wait. I mis-read. You said a self and its world, modeling, where I took it as a self and the world, being modeled. With this new understanding, I disagree, insofar as the self and its world as a unified modeling relation does exist. Otherwise, what would suffice as causality for any model at all? — Mww

I don’t think you understand me as that reply makes no sense.

The point there is that there is the one general thing of a self-world modelling relation. It is a technical term for what is going on that biosemioticians and the theoretical biologist Robert Rosen would use.

So it is in fact a model of the causality of living and mindful complex systems - in Rosen’s words, of systems closed in their efficient causation. Or as Howard Pattee puts it, systems with an epistemic cut. It is a mathematical claim with mathematical generality.

Then the point I was making is that the modern human psychological self is constructed of four distinct levels of semiosis. That is why it becomes such a confusing thing.

I live in at least four worlds. There is my genetic world - the selfhood that is my immune system, metabolism and other stuff way below my neural world of perceptual awareness.

Then I live in the consciously experienced world that is constructed by neural semiosis.

Then there is the sociocultural world that I experience through sharing language as a world-constructing code. This socially constructed world includes me as now a self-conscious being. I stand outside myself and see myself from a sociocultural perspective as a player in that larger realm.

On top of all that, there is the rational and mathematical self-world model that takes shape through science and philosophy as a new level of human culture and world-making. I see the world around me - both my perceptual environment and my social environment. And on top of that, I experience a rather Platonic sense of the world and of being that comes from a habit of high level abstraction.

This leads to the making of rather self conscious statements about consciousness and self consciousness - the view of the self as a natural and social creature from the further vantage point that is a self now placed in a world of scientific and philosophical arguments.

So the sources of the self get stacked up and most people don’t even realise the fact.

But the science of semiosis does provide the truly meta view.

But all this is fugurative. — Alkis Piskas

No. It makes the point that the boundary between self and world is perceptually constructed. It is a fact of the modelling. And this is well known psychophysics.

What do you mean by "agency"? — Alkis Piskas

The usual meaning. The feeling of being free to choose and act on your own behalf.

Are you indeed preoccupied with such a thing? — Alkis Piskas

I don’t have to be preoccupied as it is the very habit of psychology that constitutes this “me”.

We all have a history that makes us routinely who we are. And then occasionally we might get jolted into a more questioning state. Your foot slides on a muddy step and there is panic and disorientation.

The hypothetical example I gave about the driver was not feeling the the car is part of him but that he can really believe the he is the car, which consists a severe illusion and mental condition. — Alkis Piskas

A common symptom of schizophrenia is this loss of sharp and secure boundaries between self and world. The fact that a normal level of embodiment can be disrupted is what shows that it is normally a continuous perceptual construct.

To talk outside the box, I don't believe that all these reflect your actual life and behavior in the world. I can't believe that you cannot instead use simple reasoning about and experiencing of your existence. Because that would mean that you are more thinking about your life than actually living it! — Alkis Piskas

I am giving you the psychological explanation of why we feel about selfhood the way we do. The construction is so basic that it is an unthinking habit.

It is only by learning about the science that you might start to notice these things.

If the model contains the modeler, the modeler becomes a part of the model rather than being in a relation to it. — Mww

But a human, as a psychological being, is formed by at least four levels of semiosis - genes, neurons, words and numbers. So the modelling is both hierarchical and increasingly abstract in terms of its worlds and its selves.

The self and its world as a unified modelling relation don't exist at some single scale. They exist - in modern humans - at levels that are meta- to each other. We can't make the questions of selfhood simpler than they in fact are.

So an animal lives in its world genetically. It has a body that is the kind of self that works in a basic metabolic way. The genome is a self which is "conscious" of the biochemistry that is its world of energy and entropy gradients over eons of adaptive history.

Then an animal with a sufficiently evolved nervous system becomes a model of its environment. It is now the kind of self that lives in a world of prey and predators, a world with a near and a far, a world with its obstacles and affordances - a world that is generally outside its "self".

Pile on top of that the linguistic and mathematical semiotics of humans.

The neurobiological self, with its matchingly neurobiological "world", or Umwelt, becomes a cultural self in a cultural world.

We learn that we are the "I's" and "me's" at the centre of our social narratives. We live in a world made of "you", "us" and "them". Our linguistic model speaks of a collective world that thus contains our selves, along with many other selves, who are also part of the continuity of identity and agency that constitutes our selfhood, or contrariwise, form the social "other" that would resist our wishes and norms.

And then as logic, maths, philosophising, and the other rationalising/abstracting habits of modern humans evolved these past 2000 years, we get the world of physics and computation, matched by the kind of abstracted and universalised notions of selfhood that such a form of semiosis demands as its "other".

We get the Newtonian, Darwinian and Turing selves that are quite at home in world where everything has become a quantity rather than a feeling.

So of course, the linguistic self can be seen as being in conflict with the abstract self. We have romanticism vs rationalism. This is just evidence that all the levels of semiosis, and their accompanying worlds, and their accompanying selves, might not be so perfectly integrated. The history of being human might not yet have made sense of our selfhoods. It could be an unfinished, and even unfinishable, project.

Does it even make sense to imagine an uploaded cyber mind future, or an AI next step?

Well, that kind of question can't even be addressed until one understands selfhood correctly as the logic of a dichotomistic modelling relation - the outcome of the necessity of an epistemic cut or schnitt between the "subjective" modeller and the "objectively" modelled.

Sorry, I can't resist: is this the transcendental unity of apperception? — Srap Tasmaner

A serious answer would be no - not if the unity is understood in terms of a synthetic bundle of experiences.

The argument here is semiotic or dialectical. Self and other arise as complementary distinctions. So it is not about being able to add up a bunch of individuals and assign them to a collective category. It is about the deeper thing of always having to form any categorical judgement as a unity of opposites. It is about a reciprocal relationship, not an additive one.

The self emerges as the limit on the world. And the world, in turn, emerges as the limit of this self. So we end up with a semiotic story - von Uexküll's Umwelt.

Thinking that you are your body is like a car driver who gives so much importance to his car (he can't live without it, etc.) that he eventual believes he is that car! On a higher level, the driver knows he is separate from his car but he still believes that his body drives the car. — Alkis Piskas

This is an important starting point. A racing car driver can feel their car as an extension to their body. We can all feel the world around us in ways such as we know when something is within our personal space and when it is just beyond our reach.

So selfhood - as something embodied and biological - is a "selfish" point of view. It starts from the absolute necessity of being a self in the world. And that involves a constant running judgement about the boundary that divides the world from "us". We fluidly construct a sense of where the limits of agency end, and where the resistance of the world begins.

If we float in a sensory deprivation tank, the resistance of the world disappears, and so to does our sense of being embodied evaporate in disorienting fashion.

So selfhood seems dualistic as it involves this constant construction of the idea of a self in its world. There is a world out there with all its opportunities and challenges. And it is matched by a biological sense of agency and intentionality.

If my racing car does exactly what I expect in the way its tyres give at a fast corner, then they feel part of me because I've already predicted the precise sensation of that giving as something that was going to happen due to my intention to make that action. The skid is being imposed by "me" on the "world" - within my dualistically-framed neurobiological model of what is going on.

So no need for any spooky psychic essences. It is just the logic of being an organism that models its world. To have agency requires making a constant self-other discrimination in terms of "everything I intended and predicted" vs "everything that then resisted or caught me by surprise".

....YOU who became a president of a company, YOU whom will still be in the memories of people who knew YOU, after you pass away, YOU ... Is all that an illusion? — Alkis Piskas

A neurobiological sense of being an intentional self in a resisting world is what roots us in an embodied and enactive way in physical reality. But as humans, we are also cultural and technological beings. We form intentional models of our world that go beyond genes and neurons to be now also self-other judgements encoded in words and numbers.

So we become very concerned with the idea of the social and technological boundaries between what constitutes the intentional/predictable part of our experience, and what constitutes the resisting/unpredictable part - the other to ourself.

Does our selfhood extend outwards socially so that we feel at one with our group. Or instead, are we being thrown back on ourselves even to the point we don't know who we are? Are we alienated even from our own agency, are we awkward and unpredictable even in regards to our own social setting?

So again, selfhood arises just as a logical necessity. Brains are there to model the world. Or to be more accurate, to model a "world" in which we are there as the "other" of the world. What gets modelled - in a continuously fluid and adaptive way - is a sense of being present as an intentional point of view existing in a zone of complete predictability, and that being juxtaposed to various degrees against a world that is by contrast, resisting and uncertain.

‘The many live each in their own private world, whilst those who are awake have but one world in common’ ~ Heraclitus. — Wayfarer

Zinger of the week. :up:

I must say I find 'agapism' a dreadful word, although I appreciate the meaning. — Wayfarer

Have you read this review from Soren Brier?

It could be better written, but it gives a sweeping coverage of what we’ve been discussing.

The problem I see with that is that the sole criteria for success in evolutionary theory is just to survive and to procreate. — Wayfarer

An evolutionary or developmental view of metaphysics accepts that the basis of reality is an instability that has to become stabilised. The Cosmos exists not because it was brutely given in a materialistic fashion but because it became structured in ways that formed it to have a generalised persistence.

So Darwinian evolution is just an extension of a process or structural view of metaphysics generally. The Cosmos that exists is the one that worked best in the sense of achieving a stable persistence.

So 'the sage' or the 'awakened being' is in some sense the culmination of that whole process of cosmic evolution. — Wayfarer

Cosmology simply demands a capacity to persist. So sentience pops up as something secondary to the primary telos of being - ie: surviving.

Thermodynamics then gives an adequate reason for sentience to evolve. The Big Bang universe fell out of equilbrium due to certain glitches like the Higgs field. Ugly lumps of gravitating mass began to clutter up the place. They tried to radiate away the clumps by fusion - the dissipative structure we call a star. But stars eventually collapse and explode in supernova, scattering even more unpleasant crud - the heavy elements - across the universe.

You get planets - hard core stellar waste. Biological sentience then evolves in places like ocean floor thermal events, doing a little bit of cleaning up in terms of eating rocks, reducing matter back towards the heat which can finally rejoin the cosmic background radiation.

But bacteria becomes complex life. The biofilm becomes Gaian in its ability to regulate the climate of the Earth to its liking.

But fortunately for the Cosmos’s entropy-based telos, all these forms of secondary structure - from stars to humans - are minor and fleeting parts of its general expanding-cooling story.

There is just no way - looking back from the eternal Heat Death - that awakened minds were some kind of culmination of the cosmic reason for its being. :grin:

But, they are all bound together, into a whole system, by the notion that Information is the fundamental element of the real world. — Gnomon

It’s fine to have your own private metaphysics I guess. But I did think you were aiming to go beyond this kind of simplistic understanding of “information”.

Sure, there is some good reason fundamental physics has shifted its notion of measurement towards entropy and information as basic quantities. This shows an acceptance that “matter” isn’t primal but just a story of generalised potential that has become structurally constrained. It shifts the maths of description towards a probabilistic view - the emergent statistical patterns of systems composed of countable independent degrees of freedom.

And this then couples with the shift toward ontic structural realism - the view that symmetry-breaking in particular describes the fundamental invariant structure of nature. It is symmetry maths that in-forms Being in such a way that it can come to be measured in terms of information theory.

So there is a danger in being dazzled by physics having a flashy new ruler. We have an abstraction - a degree of freedom. And we can apply that in Procrustean fashion to count anything.

But that only then makes sense to the degree the acts of measurement are framed within some specific theory about the global structural constraints which are producing this local grain of countable events or material actions.

So that is why I ask about that side of your private metaphysics. It sounds like you want to invoke some kind of cellular automata or genetic algorithm approach as the cause of the structural invariance found in Nature. But I think history is showing that kind of thinking to be too “computer science-y”.

Particle physics has been hugely successful using the maths of permutation symmetry as its theory about Nature’s structural invariance. Information is likely better understood in that specific context.

Does your approach have any connection to Wolfram’s cellular automata theory or Deutsch’s constructor theory? There is a lot of maths in this area - genetic algorithms, edge of chaos, critical systems, etc. Do you ground things in some model?

Yep. It wasn’t as if environmentalists weren’t warning us about the limits of growth in the 1970s. But from an organismic perspective, it is all part of the same cultural package.

Science earns its keep by providing the technological means to strip-mine nature.

The decay will be in the form of implosion from within the scientific community. How? — Caldwell

You could be right in the sense that science delivers the techno-economy that wrecks the environment and leads to civilisational collapse and generalised extinction event before the century is out.

That is one way the scientific project will go through a down phase. :lol:

Can you please address my first point then? — Caldwell

Where is the evidence of science moving into the down phase of a cycle?

I mean, how could you even be an anti-vaxxer if a whole bunch of different corporations hadn’t pulled a whole bunch of novel vaccines out of the bag in record time?

Are less papers being published, are scientific instruments getting less precise, are fewer scientists being employed, is less money being spent on STEM education? In what way is the exponential growth of science even showing signs of moderating?

It would seem more that people are simply overwhelmed by the possibility to apply critical thinking to any issue. If you want to make a sensible and informed decision, then Google gives you the full range of thinking nearly instantly. You only have to wade through a few thousand research papers.

So science has been an exponentially growing enterprise in terms of accumulating more knowledge. The universe is such a complex place that science has experienced no particular brake in its pursuit of both ever greater detail and more sweeping theoretical perspectives.

No sign of decay there. There is no cap on progress in sight yet - the kind of intrinsic limit that would turn an exponential trajectory into a rate-limited sigmoid curve.

But knowledge only counts if it is applied. So that could be the brake that is emerging into sight. Can humans apply everything that is known to their lives? Can technology use knowledge to solve every problem, including all those that technology itself creates?

So, what do we commonly hear? -- anti-vaxers, superstition, creationism, etc. — Caldwell

Is it a down cycle in science or rather a willingness to assert social power? If you can’t get your way in reasoned fashion, then making up any old reasons to get your way becomes a better strategy.

So are we merely witnessing the social media turn in politics? Civilisation has been around long enough that people take it for granted and don’t feel moved to foster the institutions that protect it.

On the other hand, there are also legitimate political grievances. The rational society came to mean the neoliberal power grab. Inequality and climate change are actual problems.

So there are various kinds of shit flying around. And maybe science isn’t in decline at all. Maybe it is the ability of politics to keep up with the pace of technological and social change that is the issue,

I don't view it as completely analogous to computers and I don't go back far enough to know your view of brain information on this thread. I view brain information as embedded in brain state and you need to think of it as existing only in a physical present(time). — Mark Nyquist

My view is neurosemiotic. So it is more about the way an organism is embedded in its world via a modelling relation.

An organism develops stable habits of interpretance which stand the test of time. So as a computer architecture, it is more along the lines of a Bayesian prediction engine. Like a neural network, there isn’t a clear hardware-software distinction. Or rather, the cut between the physics and the information runs through every level of analysis. It is interaction across all scales in a nested hierarchical fashion.

That is why, for example, I think it quite misleading to talk of states and progressions of states. The brain is “processing” it’s understanding of the world over all its available scales. The older you are, the wiser you get. You have a larger weight of experience to apply to any passing moment.

And the brain defies simple state description by being also a prediction-based system. It tries to guess the state of the world so it doesn’t then need to react to the world. This is another way that the state of the brain at any given moment isn’t the whole story. Or if we happen to be running on automatic pilot in a very predictable situation, even a significantly large part of the story.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND ENGLISH — VincePee

Well enough to know that questions of who-ness relate to the logically particular rather than the logically general.

So you may wish to presume your answer by framing it nominalistically from the get-go. As a realist on generality, I simply reply your question is mal-formed.

I understand your view on information (non-entropic, ie, not equal to S=k lnN) but it's too abstract. — VincePee

Too abstract for whom?

As if entropy or information were concrete simples.

If you want to ask ungrammatical questions, that’s your lookout.

You said brain states are physical. I am asking in what sense does their physics determine a “progression” of states.

If you agree it doesn’t do so in a computer, then why are you so apparently sure it does in a brain?

Does one ask “who” of the general rather than of the particular?

But carry on with your efforts to champion nominalism. It must be at least 5 minutes since someone tried that.

Who is selecting? — VincePee

Nature. :razz:

f you back engineered your brains exact physical states in the moments you composed these quoted sentences, you would have a progression of brain states. — Mark Nyquist

So in your view, the states of a computer are determined by its physics rather than its information? Complete measurement of its hardware state would let you back engineer whatever software routine it was handling?

You might have heard of the term “natural selection”.