How does this not lend cause to abstaining from procreation? — schopenhauer1

Why propose these pussy half measures? Surely the logic of your position demands that all sentience should be ended immediately by any means necessary?

(If you construct a slippery slope argument, there is no valid reason not to slither all the way to its bottom.)

Yes. We observe effects and impute their causes. We can note some change in the world, and then we can construct an explanatory model of what could have caused that change.

But that doesn't seem a contradiction given it is just the rational/scientific/pragmatic way of doing things – constructing models that can be used to explain and predict.

Where things get interesting is when people try to defend one metaphysical model of causality against another. Or even, when they realise that causality is indeed a business of modelling.

I dont know if it diminishes his point, but absence is an aspect of a lot of things, such as a valley or a positive charge which results from atoms that are missing some of the electrons they would need to be neutral. — frank

Absence should incorporate enough of the unknown background environment to explain symbiosis and forward evolution. — magritte

This comes together in any holistic perspective, like Tao, Hegelianism or Peirceanism. You have the three things of an action, its negation, and then the equilibrium balance that is the ground state that was being sought before any particular disturbance rose.

So you discover the flat surface of a pond when a falling leaf makes a sudden pattern of ripples. And you discover positive and negative charge when their natural tendency to be in balance is broken by a local action and its global contextual response.

From a pansemiotic point of view, this makes all nature ententional. Nature is always going to arrive at some dynamical state of balance, some minimal state of dynamical tension. That's just a blind statistical fact perhaps. But thermodynamics thus has finality in this fashion. It is "intentional" even at the most brute material level possible. Though we would properly call it a tendency rather than a telos as such.

So a local presence speaks to its global absence. And the two together speak to the thirdness of a underlying state of equilibrium.

That's probably one reason a focus on "absences" alone is not enough for a pansemiotic rewrite of mainstream mechanistic thinking.

Meaning, and any feelings derived from this process (arousal, stress, fear, laughter), is entirely self-generated. — NOS4A2

That misses the point that words have the power to lift thought beyond such embodied reactions and into what we call a rational level of semiosis or signification.

I am not opposed to this strategy but what puzzles me is how meaning does not seem to reside in letters, words and sounds. — Andrew4Handel

This is the feature and not the bug. It is the arbitrariness of a symbol that allows it to be the signifier of any state of interpretance. It is how thought and speech start off with a detachment from the world, and so become capable to referring freely to any possible world, any possible variety or division of experience.

If I wave a knife under your nose, you have to take its meaning rather concretely and literally. There is little else that such an act could signify.

But if I utter some string of noises - say, “Я собираюсь порезать тебя, сука” - you really have to learn what I could have in mind as the meaning.

I could mean anything. The noises are maximally arbitrary in respect to any thought, intent or action they might encode. And now your ability to understand what I mean becomes a demonstration of just how completely you can rely on a shared mental habit of symbol interpretation. There can only be a mutual engagement through this new realm abstracted from the physical world we also happen to share.

Paramecia and worms are responding out of reflex - a genetic hardwired circuit, so a third level even below attention and habit.

Humans also have reflexes. Put a hand on a hot plate and you will jerk it off as a spinal level reaction.

Are you now upholding that consciousness (as differentiated from the total mind within which it is embedded) cannot hold top-down effects upon the CNS via its consciously performed choices during times of conscious deliberation? — javra

I wouldn’t agree that habit level processes are unconscious and thus that only attentional processing is conscious.

When driving on automatic pilot, your eyes are open and your brain processes the sensations. But because you allowing habit to control the actions, it all just kind of flows through you in an unremarked and unremembered way. There is no deliberation and so no need to form a working memory to juggle options or debate alternatives. You just respond to the road conditions, forgetting as fast as things happen.

So operating purely at habit level, there is awareness - of the unremarked and immediately discarded kind.

Thus - in keeping with the neurology - I talk about attentional vs habitual processes. Consciousness is an ambiguous term, even further confused by the fact that human self awareness or introspective consciousness is a socially constructed and language based skill.

So consciousness has at least three levels of complexity that need to be distinguished. And none of them have anything to do with the usual passive data display conception of experience.

Does this mean that experience is not intentionally directed but emerges as an act of subconscious attentional focus? — magritte

It is more complicated. But as a general principle, yes. Your brain tries to do everything at the level of subconscious habit. And then by default, that which is too novel or too demanding to be handled by automatic routine becomes escalated for a full brain attentional response.

The complication is that whatever catches your attention this way then becomes the intentional frame guiding your next moments of action. So conscious intention exists ahead of the fact in any largely predictable world. It is only when the world is found to have a surprise that there needs to be an intentional reset.

So I head to the kitchen because I'm thirsty for a beer. I could be thinking of half a dozen other things while my feet tread a well-worn path and my hands reach for a familiar location.

In a general way I have made an intentional choice after the idea I both want, and am deserving, of that beer. That is, I have created an attentional constraint of my behaviour that for the moment rules out other things - watering the garden, feeding the cat, whatever. And in that focused state - a state carried by working memory - I can let all the detail, all the supplementary motor routines, just kick in without further conscious choice.

The key thing for attention was to eliminate the many alternative goal states I could have been in. Then as much as possible, learnt subconscious routines are left to deliver the goods.

This is efficient. It takes about a fifth of a second to execute a skilled habit. That is how it is possible to return a 100mph tennis ball serve with practiced ease. It takes half a second to have a full brain attentional reaction to that same tennis ball. That is why the ball flies past the beginner before they have time to take its presence in.

So when it comes to the "machinery" of the mind, this is all well understood neuropsychology. And it illustrates the principle that the brain does not exist to represent the world as a conscious display. The brain is forever trying to learn how to reduce its awareness of the world to some collection of well-honed automatisms that by-pass any need for thought and deliberation.

Of course, the world always has surprises. So in any half second, there is always something a little bit novel to latch on to. Or at least we need to be shifting our eyes towards the beer bottle we mean to grasp just so our hands get enough last millisecond subconscious docking data.

The cartoon version of consciousness is that the mind makes choices and then the body executes its decisions.

But it takes a tenth of a second just to subconsciously hear the starter's pistol fire in a sprint race, half a second to attend to the fact in any conscious way. That is how they detect false starts in international rules.

So any sense of making conscious choices is about the pre-thought that can form some goal - like clearing the mind and getting set to make the fastest race start. And then afterwards - half a second later - we can begin to credit ourselves for getting out the blocks right at the crack of the pistol as a self-centred reconstruction of the facts. We can notice that there is a memory for the sound and for our body leaping into action. So now, we can retroject ourselves as the entity making the choices and commanding the muscles.

Does a computer have the equivalent of either attentional or habitual processing, let alone a complex interaction between the two?

A Turing Machine certainly doesn't. But certain neural network approaches do try to build in this kind of biological realism.

So the whole debate can't come into focus until we can compare and contrast functional architectures. And biosemiosis is about the very different functional architecture that organisms employ.

Of course, the overriding thing he hasn't gotten to is how absence of material processes create the form, yadayada which I am sure is the bulk of the book. — schopenhauer1

As I say, I can't remember Deacon saying anything surprising so far as biosemiosis went.

But the way I view this is to stress that semiosis depends on top-down informational constraints on bottom-up material possibilities. So this means that the right kind of material foundation for a living and mindful system is one that has critical instability. The material aspect must be in some kind of delicate equilibrium balance that both makes it essentially formless, but also eminently tippable. Because that is how informational mechanisms can step in and deliver the tiny nudge needed to tip the material dynamics in one direction vs another direction.

The obvious everyday example is how tossing an enzyme into a metabolic pathway can drive the reaction faster. The chemistry is some kind of equilibrium equation in which one thermodynamic direction is statistically favoured over the other. But the genes can make proteins that then apply a purposeful regulatory framework of over that dynamic, switching the pathway on or off as best serves the needs of the organism.

So life and mind boil down to this trick. The natural world offers up tippable states of matter. There are fundamental sources of instability that can then be harnessed - given some stable and definite direction - by a machinery of information. It is the lack of form and purpose in the states of matter that permit form and purpose to become the purview of the informational machinery.

In terms of "absentials", this just means that some state of matter could accidentally go in a near infinite number of directions. If it is a complex and unstable network of relations, then chaos rules. Tippping one direction is as good as another.

But once under informational regulation, all those other trajectories become potentials being actively and intentionally suppressed. The matter can no longer lurch off randomly. It is being nudged so that it keeps falling towards the right outcome.

If we zoom in on any material process in a living system, then it still seems to be just some kind of statistical event. Every metabolic reaction can still reverse itself. An enzyme is just tilting the odds in favour of the house. So - unlike a machine or computer - the material process is not being actually controlled in the positive deterministic sense.

And that is where talk of absences would fit. The negative space view. What is critical in semiosis is the ability to constrain the material system - limit other outcomes. And that is how on the whole, the desired outcome, the desired material form, is sure to emerge into concrete being.

That is why consciousness is not about an attentional spotlight that illuminates the world for some ghostly viewer. Instead, an attentional spotlight is what emerges from the active suppression of every other possible state of interpretative response. We are conscious of "something" because the brain has just filtered out "everything else" that might have been the case.

As a general principle, the brain is assaulted by a barrage of noise in every instant - all the sensory energies flooding from every direction. And its job is to suppress the noise to discover the meaningful signal it can pick out of the chaos. You can record the wave of excitation followed by the wave of inhibition as the brain makes this focusing transition to a state of attentional connection.

It just seems to me that at the end, we are going to get a lot of what the machinery behaves like, but then lose how behavior becomes something like the internal colors and textures of our internal subjective self. — schopenhauer1

Of course. But that is a prejudice bred by believing in a computational model of mind. You are presuming the world is all signal, all data, not all noise, all material dynamics. And so the job of the brain becomes to form a display or representation of this data - for some ghostly homunculus to then "experience" ... and probably then issue some spooky mental commands that cause the material body to jerk into neural and muscular reaction.

If the brain's job is to instead impose that kind of attentional and behavioural particularity on the chaotic energetic assault of an environment, then this is quite a different thing. It is by successfully being in the world - regulating its flows - that we develop this sense of being conscious. Our actions construct an "us" that is rendering a "world" as some meaningful structure of being. There is a place to be understood in terms of "its" colours and textures.

It does provide interesting ideas for how biology can be considered information rather than mechanistic, but that's not answering the question I am interested in. — schopenhauer1

Yeah. But that is a question that can arise only because of a materialist/mechanical world view. It make sense because you also accept that the Cosmos is essentially a dumb Newtonian and Darwinian machine.

That is Cartesianism in a nutshell. If the Universe is dumb matter, that justifies an endless pining for the absent thing which is the mindful soul, the moving spirit, the machine's missing ghost.

But biosemiosis is a different paradigm. With it, science has moved on. Talk of qualia and suchlike become redundant relics. Empty questions challenging the sterile notion of physical materialism.

You're saying numbers had to become abstract in order for zero to be accepted? — frank

In maths, zero doesn't stand for the void. It is the additive identity element - just as 1 is the multiplicative identity. Anything plus 0 is unchanged. Just as anything times 1 is unchanged.

So where this leads is a notion of symmetry and symmetry-breaking that is critical to scientific models. The positive number line can be mapped on to the negative numbers by a reflection through the zero point. And so a notion of "threeness" can be mapped on to the notion of "a lack of threeness" as a justified symmetry operation.

Once you understand the role of the identity element as a fulcrum of symmetry, rather than as a void, then useful mathematical results follow. Presences can be matched up to absences. Complex directions in space and time coordinates can be simply inverted or reversed.

Note also the practical uses once the modelling of nature became reduced to the 1/0 of a digital code, or the yes/no of any bivalent logical argument.

It really has nothing directly to do with nature and everything to do with formulating a reductionist view of nature. And from there, imposing a controlling mechanical design on nature.

So realising that zero was the key to unlocking a higher level of generality - a new level of symmetry - in counting operations, was crucial to the rise of the modern mechanistic mindset. A way humanity could enslave nature to its desires.

But the tricky part about biosemiosis is the realisation that nature was already playing its own version of this game. Just a much more sophisticated one in being "organismic" rather than "purely mechanical".

This animation of the molecular machinery that regulates the thermodynamic instability of every living cell gives an idea of just how literally life depends on having one foot in the informational/mechanical side of things.

And now imagine humans trying to replicate this kind of organic complexity with their clumsy reductionist science.

Does anyone want to comment on his criticism of computational theory of mind? — schopenhauer1

I can't remember the detail of his position - his book came out 10 years ago. But to the degree he understands biosemiosis, the critical difference is that a biological system employs "computation" to stabilise its "being in the world". Biology has intentionality baked in by its need to rule over material instability.

So life and mind - as the intentional attributes of an organism - are this hybrid thing of information and dynamics. Computers - under the Turing Machine definition – are just plain informational mechanism.

Now you could broaden your definition of computation to start incorporating some biosemiosis - some biological realism. That is what neural network architectures attempt.

But computational approaches to theory of mind play fast and loose with this critical distinction, largely because the messy facts of biology and neuroscience seem so irrelevant if you are a computer scientist. You don't know what you don't know.

However this is what to beware of. Biosemiosis doesn't exclude "computation" as an important part of its theory of life and mind. It just says that a Turing Machine notion of computation is something else.

A TM is designed so as to be materially divorced from reality. A biosemiotic system is evolved to be intimately connected to the construction of its material reality.

The two ontologies are so wildly at odds that there is no point making "computational" arguments until you can show you get the difference.

Where Chalmers seeks to just plop these unexplained aspects of consciousness into science as something fundamental, Deacon wants to explore it from the angle of absence. — frank

What point is Deacon trying to make in regard to "absentials"?

As with Pattee, Bateson, Peirce and many others who speak for a biosemiotic approach, the transformative physicalist insight is to see how complexity in the form of life and mind is all about the interaction top-down "informational causes" and bottom-up "material causes".

DNA changed the game for reductionist physics. It showed how information is part of a physicalist ontology as a way an organism can stand outside its own material being so as to regulate that being.

The import of that has become ever better understood. In particular, it is the way that an informational code can in fact interact in way that stabilises material dynamics which is explained by Peirce's story on semiosis as a mechanism. A system of interpretance.

So when Deacon makes a big thing about absences, he is highlighting that the material aspect of the world has no choice but to be what it is. It's being represents what exists.

But then information gets its supra-causal power by being able to represent what in fact does not exist. Memories, habits, pathways, molecular machinery, and other forms of semiotic mechanism can represent what is not present, what is merely possible, what is indeed materially present but able to be suppressed or ignored.

Reductionist physics does talk about emergence and other varieties of causal holism. But it doesn't really work because they are only talking about bottom-up emergence. And that can still only produce that which materially exists. There is no real room for intention, design, choice - all the qualities that would characterise a living and mindful organism.

But having an information aspect to biological systems now makes possible the capacity to construct absences. Acting top down from the realm of symbols and interpretation - the realm of genes, neurons, words - an organism can constrain what is the material case. Information can limit reality so that some things are definitely not there. Material physics can be given a chosen shape.

So biosemiosis is a way to re-introduce teleology to science without having to claim anything spooky.

The material world just is whatever it is. But organisms have an epistemic cut, an interpretive machinery, that allows them to make sure a wide variety of possible material states are prevented from existing. And in that act of selection, that must leave the "desired outcome" as the actual result.

So material cause can be seen as the positive action - matter flowing into some natural pattern. And informational cause sits over the top of it – constraining the possibility space in such a fashion that what happens becomes a reasoned act of choice.

It means that all of material physics was true. All that science still works.

And now the project for semioticians is to create the models that account for the other half of the equation when it comes to complex systems that exhibit what we would call life and mind.

My problem with top-down causation is that the consequence is already assumed at the top. — schopenhauer1

Not sure what you are arguing precisely but I would talk about top-down constraints more than top-down causation to emphasise that this is about a regulating or limiting context. So the larger environment does set the determining conditions for a physical system.

My post simply sought to show how scale itself creates a bounding effect. A qualitative difference must emerge due to a division in the nature of possible interactions.

Interactions between things of the same general spatiotemporal and energetic scale are going to have one quality. Then the lack of specific interactions - the turning of deterministic specificy into a statistical generality - as you approach the scale of both the very large and the very small, is going to have a different emergent character.

So you were asking about observers or points of view. You were talking about the need for a choice between a first and third person perspective. The first person is the completely local or subjective POV. The third person is the external God’s eye view - Cartesian coordinates - as imagined by classical physics.

I was describing yet another choice - the semiotic or internalist perspective. And this speaks directly to an emergentist metaphysics.

Having a position becomes a thing simply by the fundamental emergent feature I described - the three way separation into a hierarchy of being where there are all the second person interactions an object can have with other objects of the same scale. And then the two boundaries or horizons of the objects that become too small for particular interaction, so becomes a generalised material blur, and the objects that become so large that they totally fill the field of view, so cease to be objects and are now simply the embedding environment.

You get a world that has action in the middle ground and which becomes closed over by generality at the upper and lower boundaries of scale.

Again, this is a way to bypass the view from nowhere externalism of classical physics and also the mentalistic view from me pushed by some kind of Panpsychism. It is its own emergentist paradigm of pansemiosis where position in scale is what creates the contrasts between specific interactions and completely general ones.

As a metaphysical model, it applies directly to cosmology. It is obviously the case that we exist in a world where our kind of particularity and hence complexity of local interactions is possible as the quantum fine grain of differentiation is so small and cold, the cosmological light cone scale of integration so large and empty, that they have both become background statistical generalities.

We interact classically because quantum uncertainty is reduced towards its limit by distance. And also because the emergent “laws of nature” - the generalised balancing act - are now apparently frozen into an unchanging global scale of being.

It is because we can’t interact with the quantum scale, or the cosmological scale, in any meaningful way (until we invented the technology) that there only seems to be classical interactions playing out against a fixed universal backdrop that itself never changes.

But the internalist perspective of pansemiosis sees that the fixity of the upper and lower scales of being is itself an emergent effect of scale. It presents the second person POV alternative here.

I think I agree with that. Emergence thinking is not a negation of bottom-up causality, it is a reminder that causality is a two way street: it can also work top-down. — Olivier5

I was thinking of Wheeler’s aphorism on GR. “Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve”.

In a self organising system, there is no fixed foundation. Neither direction of action has reductionist priority. Instead it is all about the dynamical balancing act. A co-creation.

And you might very well answer, in some cases at least, "It happened because nothing was stopping it." That's quite a serious shift in worldview. — Srap Tasmaner

From my time in mind science, this is a reason I came to dislike the use of the term. Emergence is invoked in the sense that "something pops out" as the product of bottom-up reductionist causes simply as some kind of happy accident.

So liquidity is a bottom up emergent property - unmysterious because that is just the collective statistical behaviour of a bunch of dipole molecules interacting with weak bonds. And consciousness was suppose to be a similar kind of neural magic.

Put together enough quantitative interaction, and a new qualitative state would emerge in spontaneous and supervenient fashion.

But in theoretical biology, I found that emergence was modelling as a composite of the bottom-up and the top-down. The two levels of action have to be mutually reinforcing - each synergistically producing the other in emergent fashion - for the whole to have stably emergent existence.

So life as an emergent state is the product of informational constraints - the information provided by genes, membranes, molecular machinery of all kinds - acting top-down to stabilise the material processes that produce the chemical body. And then the organic chemistry also had to exhibit the right kind of self-organising properties to assemble into cellular structures on a statistical basis.

Every protein folds by chance. But it is also nudged in the proper direction by where the genes place the bonds that tug the strand into a compact shape.

So there are indeed two contrasting worldviews here - and one of them is still basically reductionist about its emergence. Properties pop out as some surprising collective accident instead of being a more complex negotiation between top-down contextual constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom.

Do we call the boulder an "emergent" object? — Srap Tasmaner

I would see boulders as part of a fractal entropic flow. Every boulder is on its way - over eons - to being crumbled into fine sand. And every boulder was once part of a historically cooled lava flow.

So any emergence here - ie: some distinction in terms of a particular size or temperature - is not really of any physical consequence. A boulder behaves like a boulder. Drop in lava and it will melt. Roll it down the mountain and it will smash.

The boulder has an identity constrained by the generality of the laws of thermodynamics. But beyond that, its size or temperature - its relative scale - is a matter of uncontrolled chance so far as nature is concerned.

So emergence speaks to the emergence of a reason to constrain events in the world. A lava flow is an emergent self-organised thing. A scree slope or sandy beach is likewise a self-organising feature of the world.

But a boulder mixed in with general landscape debris - rock outcrops, rocks, pebbles, dust - is a statistical accident. It emerges out of the complementary fact that what isn't constrained can freely happen.

So there is a duality to emergence here - that which is being produced as a necessity and that which is being left to the vagaries of chance.

What actually emerges in natural physical processes is then some balance point. A certain balance of geological forces will tend to produce a bunch of boulders rather than a beach of sand or a rocky outcrop. Context and event tend towards some particular statistical attractor that we could call "boulder-prone".

I'm not sure what an observer has to do with any of this. Either that set of bits is heaped or scattered around or whatever, or it's arranged as a boulder. If we're only asking because of the metaphysics -- whether we countenance the existence of the boulder, and in what way -- that doesn't look all that interesting to me, unless it's to call attention to larger system within which boulders play a part. — Srap Tasmaner

The point I would make is that the anthropomorphic response would be to see the boulder as either something very definite and meaningful, or completely random and meaningless. Whereas my approach sees every object as a product of some balance of contextual constraints and local freedoms.

So who does it have an "interesting" size for? Or temperature for?

Humans might have one kind of answer - one that can range from the boulder being sacred to being the most random object imaginable.

Nature - as a thermodynamic process - can also have its more general physical answer. Is the boulder typical or atypical given the general environmental context in play? To the degree that it is not yet statistically typical, we might expect it to become more so as time passes. The appropriate thermal balance is what we should expect to emerge.

Scale: Can things have scale without a viewer? Where do objects and events obtain in space/time if there is no stage of scale? — schopenhauer1

The problem is that "viewer" already implies a passive notion of consciousness - the classic Cartesian mistake. So it builds in the conclusion that the mind could exist in some separated res cogitans.

My reply is built around an active, Peircean, understanding of consciousness. What you call a viewing, I would call an interaction. There is always the semiotic wholeness of things in a triadic sign relation.

So scale itself becomes defined by cogency, or the question of whether things can or can't be in an active, informative, relation.

To have a viewpoint in regards to some object or event means it can matter to you - physically - whether it is changing or not changing, pushing or pulling, hot or cold, etc. But if something is so small that it becomes part of a backdrop blur, or so large that it just is the backdrop, then you can't "view" it. You just interact with some statistical level effect.

So differences in scale are what create "viewers" in the first place. If all differences had the same scale, there would be no effective differences. Once difference breaks up across many scales, then you start to get the emergent effects where there are the interactions you have at your own level vs the interactions you have with the finest grain, and also the coarsest grain, of being.

The Cosmos started with no scale difference. Everything was Planck scale at the Big Bang. Spacetime extent was so small, and energy density was so large, that there was no effective separation of the two.

But then it expanded and cooled with exponential speed. And matter could clump out and even start to move at less than the speed of light. You started to get the possibility of a Universe of "medium sized dry goods" – our "everyday" world of people, tables, fridges, boulders, cows, puddles. All the similar scale objects and events that we see as being particular, concrete and deterministic in terms of our interactions with them.

And at the same time, you got a backdrop of a Cosmic backdrop void. You got your stage that is a combo of completely cold and completely expanded physics – a 2.75 degree K sizzle of cosmic radiation filling a 93 billion light year visible light cone.

So scale was born of a cosmic division – two kinds of exponentially receeding limits. The global light cone the local average energy density. And our "view" is now divided into the world of objects/events that have material meaning to us - like fridges and puddles – and the contrasting realms of a giant spacetime void, and near zero temperature sizzle, which we only relate to in the most averaged-out of view way.

Properties: Can things have properties without a viewer? Where do properties inhere if there is no stage of properties? — schopenhauer1

Again the reply that if you demand that there be "viewers", you are taking a Cartesian mind~world dualism for granted. And I agree that is a very "classical physics" way of looking at reality.

But my whole position - for both physics and mind science - is relational (indeed, semiotic). And so a "viewer" is simply another term for speaking of things in meaningful interaction.

Properties are thus contextual. Something has properties in contrast to other things. And both have properties in contrast to whatever constitutes the general averaged backdrop.

Does the Cosmos have a temperature? We can say it is 2.75 degree K in contrast to the heat it had earlier in its evolution and the near zero degrees it will have by its Heat Death. So that is a comparison we make by standing outside the current Universe itself.

Then the stove can be hotter than my hand as a more particular statement. It depends whether it has been turned on, etc.

So properties = meaningful distinctions. And meaningful distinctions can be both between individuals and even between the general states of the embedding context, if it was one thing before and another thing later.

But yes, that means there must always be a stage, the contrast that a generalised backdrop provides for the foreground of particularised events. And that is precisely what the Salthe/semiotic/hierarchical approach brings to the table. It shows how once scale is born by a symmetry breaking - such as cooling~expanding - then you must get the secondary distinction between those things that are within reach of your interaction, and those things that are so far out of scale as to turn into a generalised blur of smallness, or a generalised view-filling of largeness.

A semiosis of interaction just drops out of the whole shindig in a natural fashion. And life followed on from physics in being able to apply its constraints on the world - fix things so that it divided more sharply into what was general and what was particular.

Events: Can there be events without a viewer? Without scale or properties, what kind of events can happen? — schopenhauer1

What is stopping events from happening? They are going to happen pretty freely over all scales if that is possible.

The real question is how can I - as a pragmatic organism - minimise my need to care about events? How much can I push out of my zone of concerned interaction so as to maximise my "own" capacity to pick and choose the events that occur.

So I can't stop the weather. But I can build a roof. I can establish a generalised indifference to the rain.

You are arguing for an ontology where there are objects with properties in a spacetime context that is then characterised by interactions or events. And sure, that is what emerges as a good account of the Cosmos about halfway through its entropic journey in the sparsely located locales that are planetary lumps of matter.

But I'm talking about the developmental whole and how to characterise that. I'm talking about the emergence of an object oriented ontology itself, and how it arises due to the geometric logic of scale differences.

But even this simple statement seems so simple in human understanding and so bizarre outside of it, as an event in itself without a perspective. — schopenhauer1

It's just a model. That is stated up front. And models are about frames and their events - some set of laws and some collection of components.

So sure, atomism did make "action at a distance" interactions, like gravity, seem bizarre to Newton and Descartes. Descartes struggled to make things work with a corpuscular theory of the vacuum. Newton just got on with the maths and gave up trying to fill in the gap with his imagination.

Einstein fixed things with a new model of the spacetime frame in which energy density shaped its global dimensional metric. We then had a "still more bizarre" reality that really made explicit a cogent moment approach to modelling classical emergence. The whole shaped its parts as the parts shaped their whole.

So I don't get your complaint on this. Atomism might have seemed so simple and obvious to us humans. But as I say, that is because it was the way of thinking that allowed us to ignore the most about reality. It allowed us to picture a purely mechanical world of relations. A world ruled by immaterial laws and brutely existent matter. A world described without the point of view that scale brings, and thus the canonical view from nowhere.

Physics has even since been building hierarchical scale and cogent structure back into this way-too-simple atomism.

But my point is about how this is all to do with the emergence of generalised indifference - a stochastic picture of nature. We shouldn't zero in on atomistic interactions (like Whitehead) and expect to find anything mentalistic going on. The mentalistic thing that is going on is instead the "cognitive" process of developing a global capacity to ignore details, stabilise a "world", by establishing points of view that are safe from the thermal fray.

If we want to unify physics and mind science, pansemiosis is how we can do that. Both the cosmos and the brain run on the same principle of being able to impose habitual predictability on an essentially unstable world. Both become what they are by imposing statistical constraints that turn all action into some unchanging average.

Temperature and pressure are measured. They are properties of the observer. What would that be in itself? — schopenhauer1

They are what can be measured from a larger scale - if that larger scale is imposing the right constraints on the smaller scale.

With human observers, that imposition is pretty literal. We have to trap some quantity of gas in a flask and let it come to equilibrium in a heat bath. So as humans, we are inside the physical world. But we do experiments by flipping positions on nature.

Nature just is nature. Stars have a steady-ish temperature and pressure as they are the product of the forces of gravitation and fusion reaching some long-run equilibrium balance.

Give me any major philosophical work, and I guarantee it can be split up into yes/no questions. — dimension72

This is just an optimal cognitive strategy. We employ counterfactual reasoning - if not 'yes', then necessarily 'no' - to extract the most possible information from reality.

So there is a logical technique - the bivalent frame we seek to impose. And then there is the material reality - which we have good reason to believe is fundamentally ambiguous or under-determined in nature.

Thus in a general way, we see why there is this air of paradox. Nature is some kind of unbroken whole. Everything is relative. Everything is quantumly indeterminstic. Everything is shades of grey.

Yet our best success at describing nature is to break its wholeness with a dichotomistic analysis. We seek to extract the black and white alternatives that themselves would now define the ontological limits of any grey. Every shade of grey must be a little lighter or darker than another. So by extrapolation, we presume that eventually we can arrive at some absolute state of light and some absolute state of dark. With these two epistemic options - black and white - we can logically construct any possible ontological mix. We can compute every shade of ambiguity we find back in the ambiguity of the material reality.

So we have a way of thinking about reality that works. And it works for good logical reason. It extrapolates what exists towards two opposing limits of being that then must encompass all the states that actually could exist.

But this descriptive apparatus, this habit of rational analysis, should never usurp the reality it is so handy for describing. We also need to accept that the reality is a wholeness and thus has fundamentally "ambiguous" parts. Or to be more technical, reality itself is at base, logically vague. The PNC fails to apply in the way it likes to pretend.

But what stage is the event happening? Panpsychism and process philosophy gives a first person perspective to the object itself. There are "occasions of experience". That sounds weird, so what else is there? We can keep pretending that we are narrowing in on some specific "object in action" from the third person imaginative perspective, but that's not the case. — schopenhauer1

As some one who defends a pansemiotic ontology, I would point out how a brutely physical level of reality would be organised by the failure to care, or the indifference of the system.

So emergence, rather than being a way to insert some kind of mentalism into the fundamental picture, is highlighting the way that differences in physical scale lead to a generalised blindness to detail, a generalised stochastic blanding out of physical interactions.

Stan Salthe nailed this with his hierarchy theory work and his notion of "cogent moments".

For any observer - or scale of physical interaction - there is some spatiotemporal region in which a forceful or energetic exchange is taking place. Atoms react with other atoms in their vicinity. This action can be captured by general physical models of the usual type. And if you have some collection of atoms, they will fall into some collective state as their interactions go to equilibrium. A collective state - defined in the language of probabilty theory – will emerge to characterised the atoms as a system with generic properties like temperature and pressure. The system will be thermalised and predictable and so have what Salthe is terming cogency.

There is nothing "mental" happening. And from any internal view, it is just atoms mindlessly bashing about in accidental fashion. But from a larger scale of observation - as might be adopted by a scientist or even any larger physical system having an interaction with the thermalised atomic state - this little system of atoms is instability stabilised. From a distant in spatiotemporal scale, all the specific details of the interactions are information that has been discarded, to leave only the core statistical properties like pressure and temperature. Or rigidity, conductivity, etc.

So emergence is a product not of the mindfulness of some higher scale point of view. And especially not the product of small scale mindfulness expressing itself as some higher collective property.

Instead it is about a higher scale of interaction emerging via an ability to ignore the physics of the internals of a lower scale of organisation. The higher scale now only sees the stable, long-run, statistical view. And that stability of view is what in fact allows there to be a new higher hierarchical scale of material organisation. The ability to ignore the small scale physics - treat its "determinism" as "randomness" - is the foundation for constructing a next level of causal order.

Of course, the key to sealing off a lower level of materiality like this is all about being able to impose the constraints that allow the detail to be ignored. The larger scale is the entropy sink or heat bath environment which permits a closure via a generalised information forgetting.

So the atoms might be modelled as a bunch of deterministic interactions in which every informational detail is heeded. That seems very mindful. Yet emergence is predicated on being able to treat all this action as purely statistical - a pattern encoded in some stochastic attractor.

The whole of classical physics is then itself emergent from a blanding out of the quantum scale of material action. The difference for our modelling is that we now have to include the fact that it is the environment that constrains the material freedoms to some wavefunction state of possible outcomes. The quantum "internals" no longer have the taken for granted stability and deterministic predicability of the classical view.

From Satlhe's cogent moment point of view, nature is thus organised as a hierarchy of thermalising scales. From any (classical) point of view, we are going to look down in scale and see a lot of deterministic detail blur into a single flat statistics. All the atomistic interactions are going to have some stable average that thus supports are own more complex scale of observation. We can now have our own definite and particular physical interactions as we have no need to care at all about the micro-detail supposedly supporting our own.

Our ability to ignore such detail is what makes our level possible as its own thing. And also by definition, we have to be unwittingly imposing the right constraints on that lower level to be keeping it stable and untroublesome. Whatever we are doing, it must be bounding that lower level in a long-run fashion.

That is the view looking downwards from where we are - which is a place capable of a classical description, and thus a scale which can emergently take its scale of interactions for granted.

And likewise, there is the view we have looking upwards. We must be embedded in turn in the same arrangement where we become the indifferent elements of some much larger cogent moment. We become the statistical blur of some still larger spatioscale of statistical indifference.

So there is us here as entropic systems, complex life feeding off the solar flux. And we can do this because we live within a cosmos that is so large and slowly changing that it seems like an eternally fixed backdrop, with a constant temperature, pressure, energy density, chemical composition, etc.

We don't need to care the sun will rise tomorrow, or that protons won't decay. We can be blissfully indifferent to physics on the largest scale, just as we are to physics on the smallest.

The small scale is furiously changing, but that just blurs into a generic statistics from our point of view. Likewise the cosmic scale is making a wild change from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. But that is so large a change that is completely fills our entire possible point of view. We only sample a tiny fraction of that reality during our own cogent moment of emergent existence.

So the pansemiotic view of nature does build on "mentalistic" concepts like observation and information. But it is anti-mentalistic in that its stresses the fundamental importance of achieving stability by means of forgetting, ignoring, becoming indifferent.

And as I have pointed out before, even the biology of life and mind is dependent on being able to ignore and forget. The brain doesn't want to be exquisitely mindful of every possible detail. It wants to master the habits that allow it to deal with the challenges of reality as if they were meaningless trivialties.

Not every road bump can be flattened out by good suspension. But the basic principle of good suspension is to be able to notice as little as possible. And that mindlessness is what - by its contrast - produces the further potential to construct some new level of telos and material directedness.

And as I have also pointed out, we need to look closely at what humans use their undoubted mindfulness for. Entropy production. We can persist as a level of physical emergence as we are smart as serving the underlying thermodynamic flow the Cosmos has established.

And what is it that we are so good at ignoring? This very fact. We are indifferent to climate change and ecosystem wipeout as just something that goes along with the nature of being an emergent system. We construct a point of view on the back of being blissfully indifferent to the smaller and larger scales of physical being in which we are embedded.

That is why "cogent moment" is such an apt term. Cognition emerges as the ability to obsess about "internal" detail ... because the capacity to maintain a generalised indifference to actual worldly physics has become some sophisticated.

Similarly, acts of cognition not only inform us about the object of our attention (its objective object), but also that we are informed (its subjective object). — Dfpolis

Is that different from what I said?

Without knowing subjects, there is no agent capable of "modelling an actual world." — Dfpolis

Sure. My point is that this is something that has to develop. Every newborn has to go through the process of discovering its own hands as something “they” control.

You present empiricism. — telex

Just because you keep repeating that claim doesn't make it true.

So far you have neither demonstrated that your conception of Nothingness is actually a priori in any strict sense, nor that a priori reasoning is even a legitimate method here.

But if you're not interested, that's fine. It's still a worthy topic. :up:

This is very simple. You present empiricism. And my argument is for a priori. — telex

That is just a formula you keep repeating to duck the points I've made. You have yet to justify it as a reasonable position to take - a priori, or otherwise,

Sure, you can say it goes in one line. But that's again your interpretation of this. — telex

Well what are you giving as the proper interpretation of what you had in mind?

Quantum physics is an empiricist point of view. This is a a priori argument. — telex

What's your argument for a priori reasoning being exempt from empirical content? I guess you may be claiming Kant as your model. But clearly I'm not persuaded by that kind of idealist manoeuvre here.

I mean famously Kant claimed that space could only be imagined as Euclidean - then whoops, along came non-Euclidean space.

There can be similarities, however, this argument is for a priori. Your arugment is for empiricism. — telex

So you keep repeating. Now you need to lay out the argument why this makes any difference.

My own argument is pragmatic. So it explicitly fixes the hole in Kantian epistemology. Reason and evidence are the two halves of the one larger whole. Human thought goes nowhere unless it ties the two together.

That again is why I talk about the value of revisiting the "why anything?" question from the latest available vantage point. We have new ways of making our ideas more precise.

Having been caught out once in a big way with presumptions about the "naturalness" of Euclidean geometry, we can see how to avoid such clangers again.

The article also concedes....
— telex

The situation might be changing, albeit gradually. The current generation of philosophers of physics takes quantum mechanics very seriously, and they have done crucially important work in bringing conceptual clarity to the field. Empirically minded physicists have realized that the phenomenon of measurement can be directly probed by sufficiently subtle experiments. And the advance of technology has brought questions about quantum computers and quantum information to the forefront of the field. Together, these trends might make it once again respectable to think about the foundations of quantum theory, as it briefly was in Einstein and Bohr’s day.

There is of course a central unresolved tension in quantum theory - the issue of wavefunction collapse. The maths works beautifully right up until the point that it suddenly doesn't. And that results in some extravagant metaphysics, like the Many Worlds Interpretation.

If you are trying to teach students, it probably does seem good policy to tell them to shut up and first learn how to calculate.

But I don't see much evidence that physicists actually stopped trying to crack the riddle. The attitude Carroll cites certainly exists. But that itself is a metaphysical position - the epistemic response known as positivism. The contraption works, so you don't need to understand it. :grin:

It seems like what you're saying is that since my argument is grounded in a priori but quantum mechanics is grounded in empiricism, you are attempting to make my argument into an empiricist argument, so that you are able to argue with it head on. — telex

Nope. What you are denying is that you are expressing a Newtonian era conception of nothingness when you speak of it as a void with no properties - and yet still "a void".

Let’s start with the simplest thing we possibly can. Absolute Nothingness. What can you see when you think of nothingness? Nothing. Black. An infinite non-ending void. If there was an end to this black void, would that imply some kind of a boundary? And isn’t a ‘boundary’ something? — telex

So this posits an unbounded dimensionality as the simplest possible thing. It is empty of particles, but to be empty requires that it is a space. And probably a space of three dimensions - an empty volume. You didn't specify, but the absent particles imply this. One presumes you mean little located point objects with 6 degrees of freedom - three directions of translation, plus three directions of spin.

Even in mentioning particles as an intelligible concept, you are giving necessary structure to your void.

That is what I mean about dichotomies. That is why I say we need to step up the a priori metaphysical reasoning by realising what we are presuming and then finding a way to dispose of both particles and their embedding void in some principled way.

Perhaps, we can say that Nothingness has at least one property of being infinite. — telex

Infinite in just its extent? Are you thinking of Nothingness as a single direction - an endless line? Or did you really have in mind an unbound volume - an infinite 3D Euclidean space?

A single direction would have some kind of ultimate simplicity I guess. But why one direction rather than no direction? And if one direction, why not any number of directions? Why not an infinity of directions. Let's start thinking what that looks like.

And if we have a willingness to talk about unbounded in a directional sense, why not unbounded in an energetic sense? Why not an infinity of fluctuations? What might that look like as the other aspect of an unbounded dimensionality.

So you can see I am taking a perfectly "a priori reasoned" approach here. I say if you are arguing a principle, you will want to take it to its most general extreme. If one direction, then why not any number? If a direction, then why not an action, and thus also any number of actions?

If you click on the three dots at the bottom of your post, you should find a pencil edit icon that let's you change stuff yourself. :ok:

I guess on one hand you could say this - there was a New York times article in 2019 titled: "Even Physicists Don't Understand Quantum Mechanics." [Worse they don't seem to want to understand it] — telex

Maybe what folk mean here is that quantum theory can't be understood in classical terms? There is no point banging your head against that particular wall.

Instead you can move on to more interesting questions like what does metaphysics look like once you give up on locality as a fundamental property of reality and start treating it as an emergent limit?

But again all of this grounded in empiricism. Perhaps again a priori reasoning is, in my opinion, the better justification vs. empiricism based in quantum mechanics. — telex

But I've pointed out that your a priori reasoning is a straight reflection of 1600s empiricism.

Newton and others invented this notion of space and time as abstract dimensions, divorced from the material actions taken place within the stage that created. So its your 1600s empiricism against my 2020 empiricism.

And what do you really mean by a priori reasoning as a contrast?

I think it is fairly easy to show that the history of metaphysics is based on dialectical reasoning. We deduce our way to the complementary limits of what is possible.

So if you say everything is discrete and atomistic, I say everything is continuous and a single holistic flow. Likewise, every possible distinction becomes well-formed to the degree it gets expressed with the logical precision of a dichotomy - a definition in terms of the mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

Dialectical reasoning is the engine of metaphysics. It has generated all the "unities of opposites" such as discrete vs continuous, stasis vs flux, one vs many, local vs global, chance vs necessity, space vs time, being vs becoming, atom vs void, order vs chaos, matter vs form, signal vs noise, and so on and so forth.

That is why quantum mechanics seems so well founded in its anti-classicalism. It no longer tries to fight the inherently complementary nature of Being. It mathematically embraces complementarity as its principle.

Classically-mind folk are so used to thinking that reality must be actually divided into these polar oppositions. Either the Universe is fundamentally grainy - as quantum mechanics supposedly tells us - or it is fundamentally continuous, in the fashion of Newtonian dimensionalism.

But quantum theory has come along and said, hey, nature is dialectical. Any pair of extremes we can imagine logically are just two effective limits on what can be the case.

Particles can be waves and waves can be particles. One is just the most localised view. The other the least localised one. And here's the maths that lets you shift smoothly between the two.

That should be a significant fact. Quantum theory is the maths that makes sense of a dialectical metaphysics.

Classical physics broke things apart in reductionist fashion. Like a kid pulling apart a clock, bits were left spread out all over the floor.

It was a necessary first step. Then physics started putting itself back together again. The Newtonian picture - the one that presumed space to be an infinite, perfectly flat and regular, expanse - became something that actually had a relativistic, and then quantum, holism.

With Newton, space and time were seen as two extremes of the one thing. With Einstein, spacetime and energy density were seen as also two halves of the one geometrodynamic whole - a gravitationally shaped curvature. A major reconnecting step with a mathematical basis.

And when quantum gravity (QG) theory next unites general relativity and quantum field theory, then all the complementary aspects of nature will be smoothly joined by the one mathematical framework. We will have a "theory of everything" as they like to say.

So there is a big empirical project going on here. But it is resolving a dialectical metaphysical conception of nature. It is all about symmetries and symmetry-breakings. It is all about establishing a unity of opposites in a way that is mathematically water-tight and answers to the available evidence.

And if we want to say anything about the big question - why something instead of nothing/why anything at all? - this is why a theory of quantum gravity is our base camp for mounting that particular philosophical expedition.

this views deals with them as they are, cognitive attempts to gain some kind of control [make order] out of existence. — JerseyFlight

Yup. It is by understanding how knowledge is an embodied process that we can start to imagine how to turn it into a disembodied one. We can move from the psychology of ordinary experience to a system of scientific reasoning.

However we can't actually transcend our embodied limits to "see reality as it really is". Science remains weighed down by human self interest. The knowledge being produced has to be intelligible to someone - a someone with some intelligible purpose.

If nothingness is ad infinitum (infinite simple space fabric), from which everything is "molded" into - an ordered state (or a certain state), then something from everything equates to something from ad infinitum nothing. As in this sense, this ad infinitum nothing is everything. — telex

My argument is that we have to start from where we are as the thing we are certain about.

So if we are certain that there is no such thing as an empty spacetime of any orderly extent - because quantum theory actually works as our best description of nature - then you don't have a very good justification for trying to use that concept as your start point.

Now an infinite empty 3D space was a very natural kind of concept for 1600s classical mechanics. The physics of Newton, Descartes, etc. That was the best fundamental description of nature available at the time and so got rather lodged in the popular imagination.

But from the vantage point of 2020, the idea of an "infinite simple space fabric" has long fallen out of favour. It is anachronistic. Any serious metaphysics would start from the physics of today.

So it is still all speculation. But it is grounded in the most up to date way of thinking.

However, I'm sure that in the book Lawrence does not simply discuss a completely empty void, but mentions quantum fields and virtual particles constantly popping in and out of existence. — telex

Exactly. If you wind back quantum theory all the way back to the beginning, you still arrive at something rather than nothing. Indeed you arrive at the everythingness of the most indeterminate state imaginable.

The problem with Krauss is rhetorical. He is selling this as something out of nothing. But it is something as the result of quantum constraint - a universal wavefunction - applied to unbounded quantum possibility.

So it is about how you tell the story.

Do you emphasise the quantum surprise that even an empty spacetime void can fluctuate - produce virtual particle pairs without violating the classical laws of energy conservation?

Or do you instead emphasise the fact that this empty spacetime void is what eventually emerged from the Planckscale Big Bang as a classical suppression of quantum fluctuations? Our Universe is a definite structured something because its thermal flow has decohered all that inherent quantum uncertainty. The radically indeterminate has become the overwhelmingly determinate in terms of the physics.

The reality we know is a place where quantum "weirdness" is both fundamental and now extremely constrained. The void - as an empty and infinite expanse of spacetime - is what we are asymptotically approaching as our Universe trends towards its Heat Death. And we are now only 2.7 degrees K away from hitting that target.

(i guess i do use some empirical examples, like a sub-particle, etc .. ) — telex

Note that all the particles of the Standard Model reflect the constraints imposed by the mathematics of symmetry. So we know from the structure of what exists that there are "particles" due to the fact that the expression of an interaction is already severely limited in the form it can take.

Again, the idea is an old one. Take Greek atomism and the thoughts it had about the Platonic solids.



If you apply a general constraint on geometry - like make every possible 3D solid with regular faces - then it turns out that there are very few actual regular solids.

So again, the same logic. Start by allowing anything to be the case. Then demand that unbounded possibility "flow" towards its most ordered or constrained state of being. That selection principle will result in something crystalising out of everything.

Since knowing is relational, it cannot exist independently of its relata, viz. its subject and object. ... In knowing we do not construct concepts. Rather, we encounter intelligible objects, — Dfpolis

My point was that this is too simplistic. A fully relational view of knowledge makes the psychological observation that the "we" who observes is a construction, not something already given. And the world as it exists for this subject - the "we" - is then constructed as the "other" of this we. It is a phenomenal umwelt. A sophisticated interpretation.

So of course it is taken for granted that we do exist - as creatures modelling an actual world. Pragmatism situates knowledge in an actual relationship where there is a reality to regulate, to act in meaningfully. Thus a modelling relation will target the intelligibility that exists to be discovered.

But it also then makes the point that the model is "self-interested" in its knowledge. It embodies a purpose. And in coming to do that - in developing a "point of view" - a selfhood is constructed. And also the "world" that self inhabits is constructed accordingly. The world - as it "intelligibly" becomes as the "other" to this self - is a system of interpreted signs. A phenomenal world and not a noumenal one.

This is how it has to be for life and mind to exist. Biology is a relation where bodies find a way to stand apart from the physics and chemistry that they need to regulate. That involves a model - an epistemic cut. A sense of self - an embodied state of purpose - emerges in conjunction with a similarly intelligible sense of "the world".

So it is an irreducibly triadic relation, not the simpler dyadic one of a (mental) subject relating to a (physical) object.

The intelligibility lies in the discovery of a way of looking at the world which itself crystalises the thing of a subjective point of view with its idea of the world. And the intelligibility of this model is confirmed to the degree it then works in serving that embodied purpose.

If seeing rocks as rocks works for me, then I will keep seeing them just like that. I will simply take everything at face value. The knowledge relation can just take for granted there is a "me" and "a world".

But pragmatism - as became clear through science - says knowledge is in fact more complex than that.

We have to realise that selves are constructions of purposes. Therefore we need to have a method of deconstructing that subjectivity and instead constructing a new epistemic ideal - the dispassionate and objective "view from nowhere" of the self imagined as a scientist or mathematician.

And likewise, we have to realise our "world" is a semiotic umwelt. A collection of habits of interpretance. So we need to clean that up too. We need to accept that our understanding of the world must be made "more objective" by reducing it to acts of measurement. We take a disembodied view from nowhere by replacing our embodied sensations with the business of reading numbers off dials and other measuring instruments. We construct sets of objective facts.

Under disembodied scrutiny, a rock can become something else to the scientist. Some kind of crystalised compound. Some kind of quantum state. Some kind of whatever it now seems to make sense to describe nature if we are aiming at a maximally "objective" viewpoint to counter what is usually our maximally subjective state of interest in the world.

Rather than something from nothing, or something from something, the third option is something from everything. The Universe could have emerged as a generalised constraint on a state of "everythingness".

Many ancient cosmologies found this an obvious thought. First there was a formless chaos. Then it was "parted" in a series of symmetry breakings that brought about a state of organised materiality.

And that would fit a modern physics-informed view too.

So you imagine a nothingness as an empty void. But a void already has a concrete spacetime structure. It is already a highly ordered state of being in that it is already limited to just three spatial directions and is granted some meaningful sense of "time passing".

Quantum theory says a spacetime void is also already imbued with intrinsic energy. At a minimum, it is a sizzle of photons and other virtual particles. It has an information content as scaled by the Planck constants.

Your options thus become either imagining a state of nothing that is beyond any notions of spacetime extent and quantum content, or alternatively, a state of everythingness that is even less than the structured nothingness that is a quantum spacetime void.

A void with three spatial directions is a highly singular and constrained kind of space. Especially if you allow these directions to extend infinitely. And you imagine something like the speed of light exists to make time a thing in this 3D realm (that is, it would take time to get from A to B rather than no time to connect any two points in this void).

So subtract away those constraints to get a version of this void that is now "less than nothing". Allow there to be an infinity of dimensions - a space that isn't really any kind of space as anything that happens is going off in its own disconnected direction. And so there also isn't any kind of time or coherent restrictions on energetic events. All you have is a state of unbounded fluctuation. Any action happening in any direction with no constraint and thus no coherence or developing history.

This "everythingness" of fluctuations exists beyond any proper notion of spacetime or coherent content. And it would be a state of the highest symmetry. It would look the same no matter how you imagined cutting across it. And as a state of symmetry, we can imagine it being broken - starting to be organised in ways that limit its capacity for disorder. It could develop a "flow" that has a particular reduced spatiotemporal structure.

So we know a lot about the birth of our actual Cosmos - the one with a highly reduced number of dimensions and very strict conservation bounds around its energy or information content. And we can see it is indeed an entropic flow that begins with the Planckscale symmetry breaking of the Big Bang.

There are good arguments for why three spatial dimensions are thus significant as that is the only dimensional arrangement in which a powerlaw cooling and expansion towards a Heat Death void could work

Four spatial dimensions would dilute too fast. Two spatial dimensions would dilute too slow.

A 3D universe is the Goldilocks arrangement that would out-compete all the alternatives if the Big Bang is regarded as some kind of Cosmic evolutionary story where the original everythingness state would have tried every possible way to get organised and our particular Universe is the arrangement that emerged as being the most optimal.

So the argument is that we know something exists - our Universe. We even know a heck of a lot about that Universe in terms of its structure - the way it is indeed a dimensionally organised flow that developed through a succession of symmetry breakings or phase transitions.

And then positing that all this flow could have arisen out of actually nothing makes no sense. We can't even imagine that. A flow can begin somewhere. But it would logically begin from some state of whatever is the opposite of a lack of flow.

Then something from something isn't really an explanation. It is just setting up an infinite regress.

In talking about "the nothing that is a bare void", that is an attempt to argue backwards from our complex Universe full of structured stuff towards the maximal simplicity of a naked empty spacetime. Yet quantum laws forbid any coherent spacetime from being actually empty of stuff. And a void already limited to a 3D space and a measurable passage of time seems suspiciously well set up for hosting a cooling~expanding entropic flow. That is a void which is a very definite kind of something.

So we can keep on going and arrive at a something out of everythingness story. The origin of our Universe would be the beginnings of a super-organised flow - the Big Bang - in being the birth of a universalised state of constraint. So therefore what it arose from was the opposite thing of a least constrained state of being. However we might imagine that.

A state of unbounded fluctuation – of infinite action in infinite directions, and thus the least possible coherent structure – becomes how we could envisage things "before" the Big Bang.

If you have chaos, then order is already an inherent possibility as its "other". And because we do indeed have order - we know all about how that is manifested in our Universe - then it seems well justified to imagine the "other" to that order as a matching ultimate lack of it. A formless chaos.

Further, all knowing is a subject-object relation. There is no knowing without a knowing subject and a known object. — Dfpolis

But what if we use this "psychological" fact as the stepping stone to the larger metaphysical picture?

So your argument is that the "truth of reality" seems problematic as we appear caught between a subjective and objective viewpoint. It is we who construct the abstract concepts by which we understand the physical world. So all becomes modelling and the thing-in-itself never truly grasped.

And once you accept that psychological fact, then perhaps the search for truth must collapse back on itself as being a merely the "pragmatic" exercise as truth as it is "for us". Objectivity must be forsaken and subjectivity accepted?

However rather than inquiry collapsing back onto itself in solipsistic manner, it could also kick on to generalise the very fact of this subject~object modelling relation.

It is still going to be an exercise in abstraction. But now the goal is to generalise the very idea of a modelling relation.

That becomes pragmatism writ large.

An example of this way of thinking can be found in Robert Rosen's relational biology, for instance. The "physics" of nature is enlarged so it includes formal and final cause.

In direct contradiction of the French philosopher Descartes' supposition that all animals are only elaborate machines or mechanisms. Rosen stated: "I argue that the only resolution to such problems [of the subject-object boundary and what constitutes objectivity] is in the recognition that closed loops of causation are 'objective'; i.e. legitimate objects of scientific scrutiny. These are explicitly forbidden in any machine or mechanism."

I brought him up because there's a lot of "Bayesian brain" talk these days.-- in other words, don't worry about it, your brain is doing math for you that you wouldn't even understand, — Srap Tasmaner

That's a misrepresentation. The brain is not doing maths at all. It is trying to predict its "sensory inputs".

It is saying things like that flower should smell like a rose, that fuzzy patch of grey is probably the cat. And so when you stick your nose to sniff the plastic flower, or stick out a toe to prod the snoozing ferret, you can have the surprised feeling of your "reality" being meaningfully contradicted.

A theory about the state of the world just got disproven and so your running state of conception has to be updated to fit the new evidence.

I was just wondering if we could imagine an arrangement that feels to us like we just have this conceptual framework, but underneath it is being generated along empiricist lines. We have these two levels; the classic empiricists didn't. — Srap Tasmaner

That sounds more like the modelling relations approach.

There has to be some interface between our neurobiological modelling and the physical reality it is meant to regulate. The conceptual part is that we do operate with some world theory. The empirical part is we do put out some set of logical switches that are designed to be physically triggered.

But my argument is that the empirical is a product of our conceptual needs. We arrange our measuring so that it speaks to some state of prediction that was in play - the guts of the Bayesian Brain approach.

How many times must empiricism be killed? — Srap Tasmaner

You mention pragmatism. But maybe Peircean pragmatism leads somewhere truly radical because it says our "reality" lies all curled up inside its own "acts of measurement".

Our realism is so indirect that it involves ignoring the "physics" and learning it to replace it with a system of sign - a semiotic umwelt.

Empiricism is thus a way construct "ourselves" as observers making observations. We form conceptual theories, validate their predictions, and move on, in a way that completely removes us from the noumenal actuality.

This would be the modelling relation approach - an enactive model of neuropsychology. We see the world as coloured as a way to shortcut the process of pattern recognition.

The fact that light has no colour is not then a problem for our "empirical realism". The whole point of a neurological level empiricism is to be able to replace a brute physical response - like the excitation of some random protein by a photon - with the "reality" of a personally meaningful signal.

Our photopigments are there in our retinas, set up as switches to be tripped. Physics can get left the other side of this barrier, this "epistemic cut". Acts of measurement start the business that counts, which is updating a neural control model doing informational pattern processing.

So empiricism sells itself as a realist exercise. It is revealing the actual world. Yet acts of measurement are a way to block out that reality, or at least reduce it to a tidy triggering of conceptual switches.

That is true of life and mind from the ground up. It starts with the encoding machinery of genes and neurons. Then it becomes what humans do through the codes of words and numbers.

Empirical acts of measurement speak to the fact that there is conceptual modelling in place. And so idealism kinds of wins if empiricism is followed through to its proper conclusion.

But of course, an idealism that is rooted in the world it models, not some free-floating idealism that could be its own separate thing.

What was at the back of my mind here was the loop quantum gravity (LQG) picture of particles as knots or braided structures in a spacetime "spin network". So charge becomes an intrinsic property of particles because a "chiral twistedness" is locked in.

So this is basically Bilson-Thompson's riff on the Harari-Shupe preon model of how to build up the standard model particles from twisted, and then braided, 2D ribbons.



And this view collapses charge and parity into a single formalism (or at least, that was what I have been meaning to check more carefully).

Also important here - in relation to my own viewpoint - is the way helicity and chirality become detached once fermions actually become massive and so cease to move relativistically.

https://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/06/19/helicity-chirality-mass-and-the-higgs/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiral_symmetry_breaking

So there is another whole conversation to be had about CP violation and how the Universe wound up actually divided into positive charges in the form of protons, and negative charges in the form of electrons.

If electrons and positrons had been produced in exactly even numbers, then negative charge would not have been a thing as they would have mutually annihilated to a sizzle of photons. Likewise a perfectly symmetrical production of protons and anti-protons.

So the speculative metaphysics I had in mind is a physics where spin is the basic notion - in terms of anchoring a picture of a spacetime that then supports a relational geometry. And where charge is then an emergent property due to trapped knots or twists left in the fabric of that geometry of relations as the Universe expands and cools.

As I say, I started to unpack that but ... well I actually had other work to get on with. But the issues still really interest me. :up:

This is not true. An electron may be spin up or down. — Kenosha Kid

I was steering towards a discussion of chirality. That should have been obvious.

No. — SophistiCat

Yeah. I kind of gave up as soon as I started. So much that has to be unpacked here. :grin:

But it is a good thread topic. The underlying metaphysical question is how do we get these broken symmetries that are ... stably broken?

How does charge become a thing, thus allowing the Universe to be filled with interaction that have some material interest?

Charge is to do with the way a particle spins, or rather its helicity - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(physics)

The helicity of a particle is positive (“right-handed”) if the direction of its spin is the same as the direction of its motion. It is negative (“left-handed”) if the directions of spin and motion are opposite. So a standard clock, with its spin vector defined by the rotation of its hands, has left-handed helicity if tossed with its face directed forwards.

So the difference between an electron and a positron is simply that one is left handed, the other right, in its “spin”.

And the reason that difference can exist is electrons/positrons became massive particles that travel at the less than the speed of light soon after the Big Bang. They were “trapped” into a definite orientation one way or the other.

. The Internet is a peer-to-peer system, — fishfry

It is worth noting how the internet is actually all about the dialectic of connection and memory. So TCP/IP is half the story. The other half is having unlimited memory for everything that happens on the internet.

That is why hierarchical organisation results. It is already baked in by the fact that interactions have a local and global aspect. There is the traffic pattern of connections. And then there is the accumulating memory of the patterns with the most apparent significance. And that memory of what’s popular begins to feedback to constrain the traffic. What might start out appearing to be just random linkages become eventually deeply reinforced habits.

So the internet was based on removing the physical constraints on these two complementary aspects of any self-organising hierarchy - its synchronic action and its diachronic identity.

The internet actually took off with the World Wide Web hyperlink protocol that connected an unlimited connectivity to an unlimited memory. This allowed any text to be connected to any text. And that became a valuable thing precisely to the degree it formed some self-organised hierarchy of connectivity.

The hyperlinking was then extended to other data structures like images, audio, and eventually will become an internet of things.

The idea of a flat network as an ideal in social relations is strangely fetishised in modern life. There’s a familiar political story there. But a society with only “in the moment“ interactions and no memory - an amnesiac society - would be a rather disastrous thing.

So in creating the internet, computer science already knew that unlimited communication needed to be paired with unlimited memory to have “a system”. The whole point was to construct something which would self-organise in a functional way.

A flat communication protocol was not the revolution all on its own. It is the fact that the internet also never forgets anything that happened. It’s whole history carries a weight that is felt by any further interactions. And it was a hyperlink protocol - one that embedded the further ideal of establishing preferential attachment - that gave everything liftoff.

A network became a network of networks. A multilevel network. A hierarchy in other words.

I don't believe we can rule this out, — JerseyFlight

If you can’t rule it out, then you need to provide your reasons.

Here is the creation of a category immune to criticism. — JerseyFlight

It is a scientific claim. So it is either supported by the evidence or not.

You are arguing that we are not even allowed to apply thought here, that what we observe (more like, interpret) must be taken as a divine natural law. — JerseyFlight

Oh, if only you did seem to be applying thought!

So far there has only been groundless doubting based on deep misunderstanding.