It's what you said. And it seems legit. :grin:

Again, you are far too clever for me... — Banno

I mean it could be that you are just trolling, or lazy, or something else. But I don't mind if you believe it is this.

But we agree why that is so.

We agree then. :ok:

What do we use for the unit of substance? — Banno

I realise you are not interested in the real answer here. But physics has arrived at its most general way of measuring units of substantial being - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGh_physics

Serious metaphysics would consist of a discussion over why the Planck scale has this particular triad of physical limits.

The usual lumpen riposte. How heavy is your 1kg mass in outer space? What are your units of measurement now? Are you going to rely on a pair of scales or a stopwatch and ruler?

Every community has its own understanding of what it means to flourish. The way to cut through relativism is through scientific analysis based on evidence. I can confidently argue that ISIS's project of a new Caliphate was wrong and immoral and contrary to human flourishing — Thomas Quine

Great. I’m just pointing out how it contradicts your broad generalisation in the OP. You now need to modify your statement to claim only a community of ideal rational thinkers can be sure of arriving at a morality based on human flourishing. And flourishing as you define it In terms of a quasi Human Development Index.

The claim becomes both more defensible and less general.

...even within the local context it would be hard to make an argument that the activities of ISIS promote human flourishing. — Janus

Sure. That is why I used that example. As a great big question-mark counter to the OP's generalisation....

Any community of human beings who have collectively agreed that such-and-such an act or course of actions is moral, — Thomas Quine

If Isis collectively agreed that its course of actions was moral, then – per the OP – they must have done so because, in the final analysis, they believed these actions to be in the service of human flourishing.

Which is why I then say, hmm, let's define flourishing shall we?

I go with the dictionary definition of "flourishing", it's nothing mysterious. To do well in a hospitable environment. A human community is doing well when there is personal safety, healthy lifespans, economic security, healthy environment, reasonable opportunity for personal growth, adequate water and nutrition, fulfilling work, etc.There are global wellness indicators out there. — Thomas Quine

Again, I don't disagree with the commonsense approach of accepting folk definitions - except if I were to be claiming to be doing actual moral philosophy that wants to avoid building its conclusions into its premises.

Is there an objective definition of flourishing that would avoid us smuggling in our own culturally-subjective agendas? Isis would be an example. If it represents a community that believes humanity would be better off without the presence of the infidel, how do we rule out that as a valid definition of "flourishing" in its eyes?

If you were to bring in our own Western scientific and enlightenment tradition, then yes, flourishing can be defined in terms of things like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it seems both sensible and empirically supported.

I could then cite even more abstracted models of flourishing like Ulanowicz's Ascendency. That would really strip away the cultural and subjective wrappings. It is where biologists would arrive at when they have to define "flourishing" in terms of ecosystems.

I think population metrics are a better yardstick by which to measure human flourishing, in the same way if we ask whether bison are flourishing in Yellowstone, we don't track the life history of an individual bison. — Thomas Quine

Or indeed, we might ask how the bison herd contribute to the flourishing of Yellowstone as an ecosystem. But you seem to agree that it is right to ask about flourishing in that more generic biological context of life in general?

Again, flourishing as a term does smuggle in these naturalistic connotations. It does rather question supernatural imperatives. We would be quick to say Isis is wrong-headed as its morality all based on religious mumbo-jumbo.

Which is fine. I'm all for naturalism. Once more, I merely point on the work still to be done to carrying on and cash this all out in a notion of collective flourishing. I already agree that flourishing in some sense is the right answer. It fits my prejudices wonderfully.

The other reason I like the term flourishing is because it seems to me a more active verb better suited to creatures like ourselves who have a certain agency — Thomas Quine

Yes. As captured by Maslow and self-actualisation as the highest good.

Merely speculating, but I think its important to avoid excessive bias towards a precedential model of brains as no more than a bundle of neurons wired together. The brain is actually 90% glia, which are closer to conventional, nonconducting cells in their structure, provisional of function that may differ dramatically from neuronal streamlining for purposes of electricity transmission. — Enrique

Always looking for the loopholes that might lie in what we don't know? :razz:

In fact we do know plenty about glia.

And you keep talking about electricity flows as if the brain were switch a current of electrons. But charge is carried by ions. And it is only because of the "informational" structure of the axons - the molecular machinery of ion channels - that a wave of anything can flow down a neural "wire". What "flows' is a bunch of these pores opening and closing in a chain reaction that propagates like a wave.

So there is just nothing to suggest the brain is engineered for any kind of naked electrical activity. The energy of actual free electrons would blow its delicate molecular machinery apart.

Thanks for digging out the bit you had in mind.

We have of course been through this hoop before. Not that I mind a re-run. :razz:

As this Stanford article argues....

Aristotle does in fact use the expressions “prime matter” (prôtê hulê) and “primary underlying thing” (prôton hupokeimenon) several times ... The mere fact that he uses the phrase is inconclusive, however, since, he makes it explicit that “prime matter” can refer either to a thing’s proximate matter or to whatever ultimately makes it up:

Nature is prime matter (and this in two ways, either prime in relation to the thing or prime in general; for example, in the case of bronze works the bronze is prime in relation to them, but prime in general would be perhaps water, if everything that can be melted is water). (1015a7–10)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/#PrimMatt

...and as I've argued before, there is this confusion between prime matter and primary substance - between the primacy of whatever could constitute the material aspect of hylomorphically-emergent actuality, and primacy that is then the actualised or enformed being which is thus the substantial substrate of further change and development.

So "potential" - quite rightly - has this double sense that needs to be addressed.

There is what I would consider to be prime matter as Peircean firstness or vagueness. Or indeed, the apeiron of Anaximander. This is just the raw possibility of a fluctuation. The least "formed" or "enduring" or "purposeful" notion of a substantial material action or efficient cause. A difference that doesn't make a difference. A mark that is washed away as fast as it is made.

It seems clear that for anything to be, you do need that kind of general ground that is the radically unformed - a kind of chaos without pattern - which can thus become the prime matter which is in fact formed up (enformed) into some kind of substance, something that is a concrete particular.

And then the second sense of potentiality is the potential for the now actualised substance to be the subject of further developmental change. Iron can be forged into swords, flesh into dogs. You just need the formal/final cause that gives the iron or flesh its functional shape.

So when we talk of Being preceeding Becoming, we are talking about Primary Substance - the dog that can become dead, the iron that can become sword.

But when we talk of becoming preceeding being, we mean the Anaximander's apeiron or Peirce's tychism - potential as the pure spontaneity of unformed material fluctuation. If we had to describe such a general grounding to Being, it would be a materiality with the least possible substantiality. And even then, we should be imagining it as just naked "becoming" as "prime matter" with any materiality has already crossed that threshold into the realm of actualised Being.

This may sound an esoteric distinction. But it is of course vital to grounding the metaphysics of modern physics. How else can we understand "quantum potential" or "the Big Bang"?

I have. Although it’s been a while. Which quote or paragraph did you mean?

I think you are in essence right. The problem is how do you then define flourishing?

Isis flourished in some sense as a community bound by shared precepts.

So flourishing is a nice word, redolent with positive affect. But that means it could be just a bait and switch where values taken for granted as “moral” now get submerged in an unexamined notion of “flourishing”.

This sounds like the work you mean to continue on to.

Which passage did you have in mind where he labelled it a fiction?

Sorry, I misread your "primary substance" as "prime matter". But then I'm still not sure which you have in mind here.

However I would see Primary Substance as the meat in the hylomorphic sandwich. So it is substance that is indeed enformed - that is, the accidental constrained by the necessary. Or material possibility constrained by formal requirement.

This is the hierarchical order by which some particular dog - let's point to Rover over there - is a "dog" by some kind of higher formal necessity. Dogginess is an abstract idea that is real because it really does serve to limit the scope of material accidents.

Rover might have three legs and still count as a dog - if he lost one by accident. Or he could even be a robot - if for good reason, the fact of being factory-made rather than biology-grown was regarded as incidental. A material particular or material accident.

So the Aristotelean approach to substantial being recognises that the world attains its enformed state of solidity and concrete object-ness because globalised necessities constrain local material possibilities in a sufficiently robust fashion.

And in this scheme, we can thus arrive at...

What's "going on" is Potential (Virtual), the statistical possibility of Actual (Real). — Gnomon

...but it is actually a Peircean triad of the accidental, the actual, the necessary. Actuality is emergent as a formal constraint on mere material accident. And so actuality is itself statistical or probabalistic.

Rover is that substantial being, that enformed concrete particular. But also, on closer examination, Rover represents some generalised idea of "dog" that is being honoured in the exception. If Rover loses his leg tomorrow, that counts as an immateriality. Not enough has changed to alter his "essential being".

But keep chipping away, and it will. The leg, for example, no longer fits the bill of being our pet dog.

Aristotle was uncomfortable with Plato's notion of supernatural Forms, yet he still applied the same term to natural things. And the distinction is moot, since he used the metaphysical term "Soul" to describe the "form" component of all beings. — Gnomon

Yes, but what was Aristotle - as a naturalist - really meaning? He wasn't a proto-scholastic after all.

Today, he might talk of the genome rather than the soul. We now have better ways to talk about the formal aspect that distinguishes life and mind as distinctive elements of nature.

So for sure, life and mind have a regulating form - one that constrains material accidents in a very strong way. We have informational machinery - cellular membranes, genes, neurons, words - that are the semiotic machinery to encode "schemas" and impose their designs on raw physics.

Rover is Rover because of his genetics, his immune system, his neurally-encoded memories, the fact that he is socially constructed as a pet within my family setting. There is a huge weight of information to enform the Primary Substance that goes by that name, preserving a constant thread of identity as he sheds hair, loses legs, or undergoes other material accidents that the schemas don't count as information - ie: differences that make a difference.

Substance was used before mass was properly identified and defined. It is now no more than philosophers continuing a bad habit. — Banno

So "mass" has been properly identified and defined? Or did you mean "massiveness"?

Oh dear. Back into the good old metaphysical debate about "substance" I guess. :lol:

Maybe instead of panpsychism, this paradigm can be thought of as something like transpsychism, — Enrique

Trans means "beyond" and so that would be a claim of dualism. Pan is a claim of monism. My own approach is semiotic and so triadic - about a relation between a system of interpretance and the world it models via a machinery of signs.

Is reality all a single dual-aspect stuff? Is it composed of two essential and unrelated substances? Or is "mind" an informational model born out of the necessities of a entropy-regulating process?

These are the positions as I see them.

I'm not familiar with exact science behind the brain's electromagnetism, but I imagine it could simply be emergent from tens of billions of neurons conducting voltage simultaneously, and this EMF along with brain matter might have coevolved so that cellular mechanisms of additive superposition in entangled wavicles are integrated with saturating and perhaps finely modulated radiation as our qualitative perceptual field. — Enrique

A bunch of people, like Pockett, McFadden, many others, have tried to suggest that consciousness is just some kind of global EM field. But it isn't neurologically plausible.

The brain exists in a world with far more powerful EM fields than can be generated by the whole brain, let alone the trillion or so sub-fields down at the synaptic level that would represent the "modulation" of some kind of collective outcome. Your cellphone would zap your brain in a big way.

And so the evidence that it takes a really big jolt - kilo-volts - to pulse your brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation, should be enough to show the brain is in fact a poor conductor and pretty resistant to forming any kind of global EM pattern. It just isn't designed to do that kind of thing. If it were, it would be obvious from the biology.

Science is good at finding this kind of stuff. We know fish can indeed generate electric fields as a form of radar.

Electric fish generate these pulses using special cells called electrocytes. These run in rows along the length of the animals’ bodies. These cells pump positively charged sodium atoms, called ions, from inside themselves to the outside. Then the cells open gates to let the sodium ions back in. The flood of ions back into the cells produces an electrical pulse. The voltages of all the electrocytes in a row add up. It’s similar to how the row of batteries work to collectively power a flashlight.
An electric fish uses its weak pulses like radar. Those pulses create an electric field around its body. This acts like a bubble of electric current. When another animal enters that space, the fish detects a distortion in the electric field.

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/shocking-electric-eel

So EM fields can be harnessed by biology as a tool of its information processing. It uses regular neural hardware - the ability to create pulses of ion exchange across membranes. The technology is there if consciousness did have something to do with generating EM fields. And so by the same token, we can see this is not what the brain is normally trying to achieve.

Instead, electric eels turn EM pulses - generated by batteries of electrocytes - into a way to attack rather than just sense other fish. It blasts them so hard that their muscles are spastically contracted.

Thus any EM-based account of brain function has to deal with the fact that brains don't seem in any way designed for sustaining fragile EM patterns. Instead they are designed for robust information processing once the necessary delicate physical signals have been transduced.

This is in fact the central feature of biosemiosis, as I have explained. Information becomes possible as its own thing because physical signal transduction does reduce the "mind's" actual physical contact to the world to the smallest possible scale.

The eye can detect single photons just about. The nose tells you there is a rose from connecting with one corner of some stray organic molecule floating about.

It is not an accident that we sense the world in terms of its faintest sensory traces. Models must stand apart from what they model. The mind - as what the brain does - has to be as far removed from the actual physics of the world as it can so as to represent the world using its own neural language of "synaptic switches".

The map is not the terrain, as they say. So the mind is formed by the machinery that first gates the physics of the world so as to make it possible to start building an informational picture of it.

And to the degree that the world is quantum or electromagnetic or whatever, the brain must filter out that raw physics as a first transduction step. And by the same token, that means that any mark recorded - some neuron in the eye or nose gets triggered in threshold detector fashion - becomes a significant or meaningful feature of the resulting mental map of the world that is being composed.

Biosemiosis is all about the need for an intermediating transduction step - the one that makes physics controllable. That is how organismic nature imposes its desires on a physical environment.

Panpsychism is flawed from the get-go because it is all about avoiding what Howard Pattee - the theoretical biologist who laid the best groundwork for biosemiosis - calls the "epistemic cut".

That may be all a bit technical still. But it is important that science has considered panpsychism in all its guises and has good reason to find it wanting. And now the evidence has really stacked up in favour of the biosemiotic approach to life and mind. The recent findings in biophysics seal the deal.

So the cryptochrome example would go to my point. The nanoscale is where quantum effects can be harnessed by molecular machinery. The claim is that is how a physical energy - variations in the earth’s magnetic field - can be turned into an information processing signal.

So consciousness is what comes from the information processing side of the equation - the reality modelling activities of a lifeform’s nervous system. The quantumness is just part of the necessary balance where the physics of the world becomes a bistable switch. Information processing has something it can work with - a switch to flip - just like a computer needs its transistor gates.

When our laptop does its thing, we don’t consider that quantum computing even though a transistor gate is a quantum device down at the level of the flow of electrons in the semiconductor matrix. In the same way, the fact that the brain relies on exquisite quantum balances to transduce the physics of the world into neurally encoded signals doesn’t mean the resulting conscious state is fundamentally quantum. It is instead fundamentally information processing.

And the same argument applies if it is shown that ion channel dynamics seem better described in quantum terms rather than classical terms.

From a biosemiotic point of view, the quantum and classical descriptions are two crude ways of saying the same thing. What is actually going on only comes into sharper focus with a quasi-classical level description where we are modelling the way some kind of molecular machinery (the information processing aspect) is harnessing some kind of entropic potential (a physical flow that is poised at criticality and so amendable to switching and other forms of useful regulation).

So a panpsychist is imputing consciousness to the quantum substrate and seeing the molecular machinery as some kind of amplifier of that flow of “qualia”. Subjectivity is basically physical.

But the biosemiotic view is that the quantum physical world is only relevant as a zone of exquisite dynamical balance that lends itself to the new thing of being mechanically switchable. The microphysics can be controlled by informational processes - like whole systems of neural switches doing signal transduction and reality modelling.

Consciousness - like life in general - is a semiotic relation that is made possible by the physics but happens because of the processing.

Panpsychism has thus been refuted by science now. Or at least we have the explanation of how “mind” and “world” can interact at a fundamental level. There is this special thing happening at the nanoscale convergence zone. Physics becomes switchable. And so life could arise as the molecular machinery doing some self-interested switching.

But Aristotle's Primary Substance was described as more like immaterial Essence (intrinsic quality necessary for existence; Qualia -- mental stuff). — Gnomon

Surely what Aristotle meant by prime matter is one of the most fraught debates in metaphysics. But it can’t be cashed out as mental stuff. Nor even, immaterial essence.

It is more like a fluctuation or the least possible notion of a material action or efficient cause, in my view.

Peircean Firstness or tychism in other words.

It has to be the case that the matter~antimatter symmetry couldn’t actually cancel away, and so some latent asymmetry exists. This has been confirmed by a number of examples - under the banner of the quest to solve CP violation - and there are theories about uncovering more.

So understanding the question is a live one and has started to be solved. It has to do with the way that nature in fact has to break down multiple possible such symmetries, and then different breaking processes get snarled up in each other in ways that introduce asymmetries.

The famous case is how Higgs symmetry breaking creates an asymmetric breaking of the electroweak SU2 symmetry. Three of the bosons gain too much mass and become the weak force. The photon is left to emerge as the massless boson underwriting electromagnetism.

So everything might be trying to cancel to zero and then one process hangs up another process. You get the world we see as the outcome.

At least in the short run. In the long run, the Heat Death says all the crud matter left floating around will get swept up into black holes and evaporated away as the simplest possible matterless particles - a quantum sizzle of photons.

So matter will join anti-matter via a further natural process - black hole evaporation. The end will be an arrival at maximal nothingness. The blackness of a completely generalised 0 degree K thermal cosmic “glow”.

In essence can a mathematically sound theory of everything really be achieved or is there always "uncertainty" or intangible information thus an impossibility of any true equation being acquired. — Benj96

There is certainly a logically sound approach to metaphysics at this level - the dichotomy. And that can be cashed out mathematically - ie: measurably - in the notion of reciprocal limits on Being.

So if you have always an irreducible uncertainty in nature, then that uncertainty can be scaled in terms of its polar opposite - certainty.

The uncertainty = 1/certainty. That is, uncertainty - as a thing - is defined by the degree to which it actually lacks any certainty. And likewise, certainty is measured the same way as 1/uncertainty, or uncertainty reduced to its ultimate limit.

So the shift is from treating uncertainty (or certainty) as states that simply exist as clashing alternatives. We need to reformulate these concepts in the language of mathematical limits. In that fashion, each become measurably tied to the other. The lack of one, becomes the presence of its dialectical "other".

And neither really exist. They are our modelled descriptions of the opposing limits to Being. They are the complementary boundaries on possibility, and hence the constraints which in fact give emergent rise to Being itself.

This is exactly what physics has found in the Planck-scale that encodes the limits of our actual Cosmos.

In brief, the Planck-scale is defined by the three constants of h (quantum uncertainty), G (strength of gravity or classical certainty), and c (the speed of light, the central scaling constant that bridges the two).

And again broadly, h or uncertainty is defined in terms of 1/G. While certainty is defined in terms of 1/h, or a matching reduction in uncertainty. You have a reciprocal deal actually in the heart of the maths that is at the heart of physics.

This "weird" duality is why the Plank-scale defines the limits of reality both in terms of its spatiotemporal smallness and its energy density largeness. At the Big Bang scale, the most thermal uncertainty is confined to least possible classical extent.

And hence you have the encoding of the cut-off point that defines the Big Bang as being a tad larger than a true classical singularity - nothing starts from zero uncertainty. A quantum measure of uncertainty already had to be present as "the least amount of uncertainty physically possible". Just as - contrariwise - there had to be at least that amount of classical certainty (the expanding spacetime point that could start drain off this maximal heat density) present at this shared starting moment.

So we can measure all this with startling precision and identify the balance of two opposites - certainty and uncertainty - that have to both exist to get things going. Or rather "exist" as the bounding and mutually-determining limits on being.

The way I see it is that ultimately the universe must be finite in the sense of energy and information — Benj96

Energy and information - or better yet, negentropy and entropy - would be another way of describing things as the complementary limits on being. And the finitude comes in that they do limit being in that self-referencing fashion of a dichotomy (mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive). Each is measurably present to the degree the other is absent. A reciprocal relation.

But if such system operates with inherent spontaneity or uncertainty then I cannot see how an equation could ever be applied at most just a set of statistics and probabilities that would enbale only semi accurate but never true predictions/ algorithms — Benj96

But with quantum theory - as a maths that embodies this reciprocal dynamics - you have a physics that predicts the world with the greatest precision. You can calculate physical properties like the magnetic moment of an electron to a ridiculous number of decimal places.

So it is by being able to quantify fundamental quantum uncertainty, and tossing it in with the classical model of an electron spinning like a top and generating a magnetic field, that you get an answer that lies within the constraints of both empirical bounds on Being - on what could be the lawful case in our Universe.

The randomness or indeterminism is a completely necessary part of the picture because otherwise, its opposite - the classical determinism - would have nothing definite to anchor itself to as the reciprocal contrast state. The other ultimate limit creating finitude in the other direction.

One couldn't exist without the other. And both can only exist as a dichotomous relation.

Initially, electrical properties in aggregates of tissue such as the brain needed to be robust enough that a stable supervenience of electromagnetic field (EMF) was created by systematic electron fluxing. — Enrique

But the brain doesn't run on electricity. The "fluxes" are at best ionic gradients across axonal membranes - sodium and potassium. And these are all regulated by molecular machinery, transport channels, so are classical rather than quantum in nature.

Quantum effects in molecules of the body are sensitive to trace EMF energy sources, creating a structural complex of relatively thermodynamic mass containing pockets of relatively quantum biochemistry integrated by sustained radiation. — Enrique

The crucial point of the recent biophysical revelations is instead that biology exists because it has the classical machinery to regulate such quantum effects. It is imposing order on chaos. So the logic is the other way around.

For example, oxidative respiration releases enough energy to "blow up" a mitochondrion. But these cellular energy factories harness that by trapping the "hot electrons" in a transduction chain.

Mitochondria have respiratory proteins with a string of iron-sulphur receptors that can "milk" an electron of its energy in nine gradual quantum steps.

So yes, the system is quantum. The iron-sulphur crystal clusters have to be spaced by exactly 14 angstroms so that the electron stays captured by the chain as it makes its (most probable) quantum hop.

But much more importantly, that quantumness is strait-jacketed by the fact the protein complex imposes such precise constraints on its path. It is all about the limits being placed on the quantum freedom in order to extract usable work.

Quantum features of biochemistry have likely been refined evolutionarily so that mechanisms by which relative nonlocality affects organisms, mechanisms of EMF/matter interfacing, mechanisms targeting particular environmental stimuli via functionally tailored pigments along with further classes of molecules and cellular tissues, and mechanisms for translation of stimulus into representational memory all became increasingly coordinated until an arrangement involving what we call ‘intentionality’ emerged, a mind with executive functions of deliberative interpretation and behavioral strategizing, beyond mere reflex-centric memory conjoined to stimulus/response. — Enrique

Again, what biology actually shows is the opposite. Yes, quantumness does provide a necessary ingredient - a fundamental uncertainty at the base of physical being. But the point then is that is why classical machinery - a structure of semiotic regulation - can in fact impose a useful organic order on the "quantum chemistry". An essential lack of order is what paves the ground for an evolution of ordering machinery.

So biology/neuroscience evolves not as a magnification of quantum "coherence" but as the hierarchical imposition of "mechanical" certainty on quantum uncertainty. It is all about the harnessing of variety - levels of regulatory constraint.

Could all phenomena be substances? — Benj96

Note the definition of substance is about that "which stands behind everything". So you can consider the reverse proposition. What if "stuff" is the emergent outcome rather than the foundational being?

Could all substances be phenomenal? :grin:

It is useful to flip the assumptions being made. Everything that seems "substantial" to us at our very human-centric scale of observation turns out to be quite "other" to that once we get digging with our scientific tools.

Any solid object is mostly space - as you say. And yet any empty space is also "substantial" in having a temperature, a gravity field - the various other measures that suggest the presence of material properties.

So our standard reified notion of substance has to be treated as suspect and broken down into whatever could cause such solidified existence to emerge.

And hey, Aristotle already did a good job of that with his own investigation into substance or ousia.

His idea that being is emergent from the combo of formal and material cause (as the broad generalisation) holds up pretty well.

If freedom were merely binary, then it would cancel itself out, yes. But what if freedom had no limits, was far more than binary? Would it still cancel out? — DanielP

That is rather the point. Freedom without limits has too much symmetry. Once you make everything equally possible, then its own negation is just as possible and you wind up with nothing. Your freedom self-cancels in binary fashion.

So there has to be some asymmetry built into this business of freedom somewhere. There in fact has to be some limitation in play to have freedoms that are defined in terms of the "everything else" that is the forbidden. To have a figure, you need also the ground.

This is a deep issue for current fundamental physics. A naive quantum calculation of what should exist tells us either nothing (as all quantum possibilities add up to self-cancel), or instead an equally unhelpful infinity (if every quantum possibility instead just sums and results in an "ultraviolet catastrophe).

The world we observe is the result of critical freedoms in fact cancelling to just about zero, and yet not quite. There is just enough asymmetry in the underlying symmetries of quantum spin, for example, to mean that a tiny bit of matter avoids being annihilated by all the anti-matter also produced during the Big Bang. The CP violation phenomenon.

So what I'm saying is that your OP ain't silly. It is an issue that is central to an understanding of fundamental physics.

Whether it's social status or business/wealth or romance competition is pervasive in human affairs and the losers suffer real, serious consequences. Life is often a high stakes competition. — BitconnectCarlos

Yes, there is always pain and pleasure. But the cooperative end of the spectrum is also experienced in these terms.

Who enjoys feeling constrained and having to play by the rules? Who loves paying their taxes - until they need a hospital? Who in their right mind would want to be in the army - until it is in defence of their home town?

So living has real consequences - pleasant and unpleasant. But competition and cooperation deliver both in their own ways.

Balance would be then whatever could be a happy medium that achieves the most overall good - however we then decide to measure that.

The losers don't necessarily deserve it, either. There's an element of randomness to it ... I think there's an element of tragedy to it that cooperation doesn't quite have. — BitconnectCarlos

But how much is this a modern cultural mythology - the image of the striving hero battling against fickle fate? You don't have to go far to see counter-stories where the tragedy is to be cast out of the collective bosom.

So we can play this both ways - a sign that this dynamic truly exists as a mirror reflection of its own self.

Information/entropy might very well provide a viable model of quantum fundamentals to an extent, but I think this is still reifying our intuitions of bulk, relatively macroscale matter and applying it at the quantum scale, similar to the particularity of atomic theory. — Enrique

Mmm. I would argue instead that we are only just getting to a position of understanding how the transition from the quantum to the classical scale of description is not a black and white cut off (the arbitrary binary of the "wavefunction collapse) but instead itself a zone between the two physical extremes.

The problem is we have these dual schemes - quantum physics and classical physics. And both claim to cover the same total ground as quantum physics goes "all the way up" - because there is nothing formally in the quantum model to create a cut-off. And likewise, classical physics pretends to go "all the way down" - as again, no lower threshold exists in the theory to provide a cut-off.

Understanding that there is in fact this quasi-classical transition zone - in the very particular world that is room-temperature water at atmospheric pressure - now becomes a way to marry the two kinds of physics with an effective cut-off mechanism.

It does root the quantum~classical transition in an already particular scale of "stuff" - tepid water. But that is the obviously correct "stuff" if we are going to locate life and mind as natural biological phenomena.

The most general quantum~classical transition is of course way down back at the Planck-scale – the physical universe as it was with the energy density and interaction distances it had at the moment of the Big Bang. That is the most generic description of the transition zone - the phase changes that did stuff like turn the quark-gluon soup into a flood of gravitating particles in the first split second.

But that is a time when biology and neurology had no place. There is no room for what we want to explain - the "mind" - when even physical stuff was not properly formed.

When you get into quantum phenomena ... its complete transcendence of the spatiotemporal paradigm. — Enrique

It is incompatible with a classical Newtonian framework. Sure. But rather than getting carried away by the thrilling surprise that Newtonianism was too simple and mechanical to be the final theory, let's pay attention to how physics is actually knitting everything together nowadays. And how biophysics now has the tools and concepts to explore the quantum~classical boundary zone in empirical detail.

This is a not-insignificant advance in knowledge that must constrain our biological (and hence neurological) theories.

A panpsychist can't just jump on the woo mystery of 1920s quantum theory and ignore the 2020s pragmatism of biophysics as it reveals the really new insights.

We don't merely have to stop at a theory of the macroscopic/microscopic spatiotemporal divide, but can postulate a completely new, essentially nonlocal facet of substance yet to be detected directly by instruments — Enrique

As a scientist, you can freely postulate what you like if you back it up with empirical confirmation.

I went through those hoops with Stuart Hameroff when he was proposing quantum decoherence in microtubules as the special sauce mechanism. I was quite happy to talk to a whole bunch of quantum consciousness researchers (and the psi community too) even if I felt they were deluded or charlatans.

In the end, so long as they played the game of making testable predictions, they passed as scientists. And I'm not picking on them. Science is full of crazies who sometimes wind up right.

If qualia are integral to not merely matter as spatiotemporally conceived but this nonlocal substrate as well, we can legitimately expect to explain vastly more phenomena, — Enrique

I see your point but the problem remains that this is extrapolating an analogy rather than producing an empirical theory.

The principles of nonlocality may completely defy or reconstitute our fundamental image of entropy among much else, such that the structure of all prior models is like a delusion — Enrique

My argument is that "non-locality" is a transgressive shock to classical physics - as the metaphysics of substantial being. And that appeared to open the door to all kinds of wild ideas for a time. Plenty of folk invoked the quantum as the explanation of mind (just as an earlier generation invoked electromagnetism).

But from a holistic or systems science perspective - as with a modern thermal decoherence approach to QM - this non-locality is seen for what it really is. And that is the holism of contextuality, the holism of global informational constraints. It is no longer a bug but a feature - a prediction of the metaphysics. (Peirce arguably predicted it.)

Entropy is quite safe in this new scenario because thermal decoherence gives a nice explanation for why the Comos has an emergent arrow of time.

Classical entropy does tend to get regarded as a substantial stuff, it is true. But really it is about gradients - a slope down which development rolls. And that general slope is from the Big Bang (the moment of maximum quantum chaos/minimal classical deterministic structure) to the Heat Death (the end state that is its exact reverse)

...but the most true account will probably blow all current materialistic conventions to smithereens, and this is tantalizingly within reach. — Enrique

Well, for me at least, the recent biophysical discoveries were a confirmation way beyond what I expected.

As I say, the surprise is that the mystery of where biosemiosis could start has turned out to have such a complete and quite simple answer.

When in practice does the Universe become organised enough that it can provide a substantial platform for the new level of entropic complexity we call life and mind? Well it is rooted at the nanoscale of tepid H2O. There is enough entropic instability or quantum indeterminism concentrated at that physical point to drive the (classically-described, informationally-encoded) molecular machinery of biology.

Everything is unlocked by making that connection. Everyone involved should be getting their Nobel prize in another 30 years or so.

I just wonder if the notion of cooperation is inherently limited to an in-group. — BitconnectCarlos

If a system - such as a social system - is working properly, then competition~cooperation is a dynamic that will be in full effect over all its scales of operation. This would be a measurable prediction of a systems model of the situation. (See Adrian Bejan's constructal theory approach to social economics for instance.)

So "in-grouping" would be found on every scale. The smallest in-group would be just you. You would say to your left and right hand, don't squabble guys. Let's all be friends and work towards the greater good. Dr Strangelove ring a bell? :wink:

Then your family or friends or sports team are larger scale ingroups. The sports league you play in is full of rival in-groups that can have useful fun only because the teams all accept a shared framework of rules.

Nations are in-groups, religions are in-groups, the United Nations is an in-group.

So cooperation defines the general framework that constitutes an in-group as even a thing. And by the same token, defines what is legitimate in terms of displaying some competitive fire within that generally agreed set-up.

That was what democracy was all about. Paving the ground for a scale-free expression of interest groups - the basic unit of society according to a classic like Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Goverment: A Study of Social Pressures, 1908.

Communism and Fascism fail - when in competition with better balanced democratic politics - because they don't implement the basic social dynamic, except sometimes weakly and accidentally.

Competition can get out of hand quickly ... I wouldn't call it a "necessary evil" but it is something to be careful of. — BitconnectCarlos

But is that a result of experiencing the US system which leans too far in that direction? Or a reflection of how neoliberalism as a philosophy has tried to take the whole globalised financial system in that direction?

Sure, what should be balanced can also be unbalanced.

But we should celebrate competition - in its most creative sense - as much as we would celebrate cooperation (which can lean just as far in the direction of unnecessarily stultifying regementation without competition to balance its constraining tendencies).

The same debate lies behind Darwinian evolution.

Victorian Britain felt that the emphasis on "red in tooth and claw" competition in evolutionary theory was a justification for the very unequal capitalist empire it was running at the time. And since then, any biologist understands that nature only thrives because evolution is actually about an ecosystem of "interest groups". There is plenty of cooperation going on once you start looking for it.

If coherence fields are found to be supported by the molecular assemblages of cellular biochemistry in the nervous system, especially likely to be discovered in the brain, their extremely complex additive properties may be what we know as ‘qualia’. In this scenario, qualia are not merely an immateriality supervenient on atoms, but instead a kind of exceedingly complex “color” or electromagnetically quantum resonance, material states intrinsic to tangible structure of the physical world. — Enrique

Replying to the essence of your position, I've indicated here - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999 - why you might be right about the fact of quasi-classical nanoscale "coherence" at the level of organic chemistry, yet this actually supports a biosemiotic rather than a biopsychic position.

Your argument is still based on treating consciousness as a Cartesian substance. Logically it is a stuff that can then be fractionated or diluted. You can imagine little droplets called qualia, or the very faint glow of qualia as a kind of radiation starting up from its dimmest setting. Qualia simply exist in some brute primal fashion - the mind-stuff out of which everything is made, or which is at least another aspect of the stuff out of which everything is made.

So this is a familiar pattern of thought that leads so many to conclude that some kind of panpsychism is the case.

But science shows "consciousness" is some kind of information processing. And semiotics gives - for my money - the best model of that. Consciousness boils down to our organismic modelling of the world - indeed a model of the "world" with "us" in it. It is modelling with an embedded point of view - what we call a self in relation to what we call "the world" (or the Umwelt).

As I report in that post on the new biophysics, it is is now known how life itself is based on this kind of semiotic machinery. Down there are the molecular level, there is "information processing" going on in terms of molecular machinery that harnesses the entropic forces made available by the quasi-classical level of physical "stuff".

So your approach - talking about quasi-classical effects at the transition zone between the quantum and classical scales - offers no reason at all for why anything happening at that level should have the "property" of consciousness. That is only a conclusion derived from the presumption that reality is fundamentally "a substance". And so if there seems to be material substance and mental substance, perhaps we can collapse the two into the one by the material analogy of thinking in terms of atomisation or rarification.

Panpsychism is a solution derived from a particular ontological model - substance ontology.

Pansemiosis by contrast is about moving forward with the fundamental dichotomy between entropy and information that lies at the heart of modern science.

Mind (as understood by neurology) is some kind of information processing - but one anchored in entropic reality. And matter is no longer a "substantial stuff" anymore. It is somehow anchored in informational processing - quantum instability stabilised by classical constraints.

And as I outline, the findings of biophysics show this to be true at the boundary on which life must first form. We see the two sides of reality - the quantum instability, the mechanical regulation - coming together at that nanoscale of being.

So pansemiosis is testable hypothesis. There is empirical data. Biophysics gives us a direct view of the grain of being where "mindlike" stuff starts to exist as a causal mechanism.

Panpsychism is simply an attempt to persevere with the substance-based metaphysics that the information~entropy approach to explaining "substance" has already long made obsolete.

Another amazing implication of everything being free is that everything becomes one - not a closed, finite one - but an alive, organic, infinite, open one. Everything being free means everything sooner or later interacts with and crosses boundaries with everything else, causing everything to be this vast, complex, free one. — DanielP

Think it through. If everything is free to happen in one way, it is also free to happen in the other. And the outcome is that you have two freedoms that cancel each other out.

So "freedom" must be asymmetric. If everything can be the case, then everything is symmetric and self-cancels to zero. You actually wind up with nothing.

This seems a linchpin to your theory, and it's false at least in numbers high enough to matter. If it were true, the economic or political theory we chose would hardly matter. — Hanover

Human society is based on the dynamic of global co-operation in interaction with local competition. The two are a mutually reinforcing deal. They go together by necessity. And good economic or political theory gets that.

We have to cooperate to form the marketplaces we then compete in. There have to be collective protections for property rights for individuals to compete over those rights, for instance.

So the mistake is to try to build a theory around just one side of the dichotomy. The goal would be to design a system which maximises the expression of both - both the cooperation and the competition.

As humans, we are nicely evolved to flip between aggressive and empathetic behaviour. We are neurally equipped for the dynamic that has always been the driver of our complex sociality.

Kurzweil reserves the term "singularity" for a rapid increase in artificial intelligence (as opposed to other technologies), writing for example that "The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains ... There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine".[40] He also defines his predicted date of the singularity (2045) in terms of when he expects computer-based intelligences to significantly exceed the sum total of human brainpower, writing that advances in computing before that date "will not represent the Singularity" because they do "not yet correspond to a profound expansion of our intelligence."

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

I won’t derail here. But I might reply in that thread. A quick skim already brings up the fact that the kind of organic chemistry scale quantum coherence you talk about is indeed why I now argue so forcefully for pansemiosis rather than Panpsychism. Biophysics demonstrates the true generality of the semiotic perspective.

See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

That’s right if we are talking about the Kurzweil argument that AI will actually become the conscious super intelligent machines that replace us.

But people now talk of the Singularity in terms of its more modest promise of exponential tech trends driving the cost of everything to zero. So it is AI as we know it - Siri and Alexa. Aids to life. The kind of useful singularity that is now preached by the Singularity University.

Be prepared. I guess enough to be confident you have no reason to live in fear — Outlander

Should I say this? I find it quite exciting to be alive at this freakishly balanced moment in creation where we can both look back to see how the whole cosmic shebang originated and how our own part in its journey its going to pan out.

I should still be around in 2050 (just) when all the critical trend lines intersect. If you ever wanted to pick a time in the past million years, now is good in terms of what we will make of ourselves.

Is it a bad choice to privilege intelligence in a generalised sense?

I can see that there is the view that life is sacred in some (spiritual) sense. So if you believe in that kind of ontology, what you say is consistent with such a backdrop presumption. All life is equal (and the Comos needs to be "alive" too, otherwise its existential meaningless becomes monstrous).

But I am coming from another direction in terms of my backdrop ontology. If I treat reality as a dissipative structure, then that involves the balance of "intelligent" organisation (negentropic structure) and its necessary other in the form of entropy production (or waste heat).

It is a clash of paradigms as usual.

But the probable end of human civilisation while my own children are still growing up gives this debate a certain zing. :gasp:

All your points are familiar. But where I have changed my own position is on having any certainty as to which way the system will go. I certainly used to believe that because the Green Movement failed politically, collapse is locked in.

However now it feels more like a genuine two-horse race. Techno-utopianism could pull off its last minute Gaian twist of a self-organising step to the next "economic" equilibrium state.

Probably not. But the game has got interesting again.

Hi Janus. Isn't the problem that on the whole, humans seem to love this "monstrous" future more than they hate it?

So it certainly isn't "my" dream as such. But - for my own sanity - there has to be a reason why the Green movement has been such a consistent failure ever since I was first on board with its ideals in the 1970s.

If nature is in fact an entropic system, then what is the right moral position to take here? Is finding a way for a global population of 9 billion to kick on in the same basic economic fashion a "monstrous" outcome.

If so then nature itself is the monstrous thing. Us old school greenies are caught in the paradox of seeing nature as monstrous. And what is revealed is we had some misunderstanding of nature as a secret garden spoilt by too many of the wrong sort of humans.

I've cited before Vaclav Smil's excellent book, Harvesting the Biosphere.

As a population of currently 7 billion humans now, we harvest about a quarter of all terrestrial plant growth to support ourselves. A third of the earth's ice-free surface has been taken over by agriculture.

So the earth is mostly constituted of domesticated anthropomass - people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs. The quantity of this anthropomass has increased from 0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10% at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97% today.

The total weight of human flesh is now 10 times that of all wild mammals - that's everything from wombats to wildebeest. And our domestic livestock, our mobile meals, then outweighs that true wildlife by 24:1.

Read the figures and weep if you are a greenie. How could you wind the world back from that in any voluntary fashion?

One can only look forward. The ecosphere is well past the point of no return in being remade in the domesticated (and gardened) human image. We have to accept that trajectory and lean into it to have any chance of avoiding a catastrophic collapse in the next 20 to 100 years.

So what does that future look like - when the earth is even more thoroughly anthropomorphised?

It is going to have to be a world saturated by machine intelligence ... in a way that counteracts our current era of machine dumbness. We've had the fossil fuel Industrial Revolution. We've started the Information Age revolution but are caught between stools as we are still reliant on fossil fuels and it feels like too big a leap to get to renewables.

But as I say, the good news would be if the techno-optimists are right and tech is exponential. An economic rebalancing would become possible if we can return to a hunter-gather situation of living within the energy provided by the daily solar flux, and yet do that with a planet that is some kind of Borg colony of 9 billion and still growing individuals.

A monstrous future or logical destiny of nature itself?

Economics just makes a good lens for examining the realities at play. The moralities of yesteryear are no great guide once the future starts coming at you with exponential speed. Which really started to happen once humans stumbled on the motherlode of fossil fuel (trapped ancient sunlight) and the machines that could release its immense power.

You've got a nice model. But it seems you turn it upside down and say that the model is nature. — tim wood

This is what annoys me. You misrepresent.

Again, your Kantian epistemology is our shared departure point. We can only speak of reality as pragmatic truth. We are in a modelling relation with the thing-in-itself.

The Peircean twist on Kant is to argue that this psychological fact is not a bug but a feature. It is how a "mind" can separate itself off from a "world". The self (as a point of view, a state of conscious being) arises as from the Umwelt that pragmatic modelling will produce.

So the reason why science has the form that it does - a pragmatic story of theory and measurement that "represents" the world - is because it is just a natural extension of how psychological being in general works. The brain evolved to be able to interpret reality as a "system of sign", or the semiotic thing of an Umwelt.

So step one is the model of epistemology. And the Kantian cognitive model was the first major correction on Cartesian representationalism. It began the shift to a triadic and semiotic model - the generic modelling relations model.

That in turn had ontological implications. If we now ask why science is "right", it is because it has that particular epistemic structure - the one that evolution arrived at with conscious brains. And theoretical biology now says it is the epistemic structure that even explains life itself. Life and mind are both expressions of generalised biosemiosis – the ability to construct a "private" world to control the "real" world via a modelling relation (see Robert Rosen for the mathematically rigorous argument).

So step one is semiosis as our best model of epistemology. Then step two is semiosis as the best ontological model of mind, and even life - living epistemic systems.

Step three is where it gets pansemiotic. The Comos itself is - in some formal or model-theoretic sense - is ontologically-speaking, an epistemic system. The huge difference is that the Cosmos has no mind, no sense of self, no experiential Umwelt as such. It is not a private model within a reality, but reality itself.

However what does carry over is the triadic model of causality. A hierarchical or Aristotelean view of causality which is about global informational constraints on local entropic uncertainty or statistical degrees of freedom.

In some useful sense, the Cosmos is its own model. It has physical boundaries that encode information (hence holography, hence wavefunctions). That is globalised or contextual information that acts to constrain everything that can be observed at spatiotemporal locales. Or as Newtonian science would put it, the Universe has laws that regulate local actions.

Pansemiosis is a powerful advance in ontology because it can include all four causes put forward by Aristotle in a logically closed structure. The systems view demystifies "the laws of nature" as much as it does "the problem of mind".

And this is where we get to the patterns of nature as being something physically real - even if emergent from the interaction of globalised cosmic constraints and localised freedoms of action.

Another way of saying this is that Nature is essentially a statistical pattern. It has to develop structure stochastically - as an equilibrium outcome.

Any pattern that can't self-organise in a statistical fashion simply won't be found in nature - or at least on that side of the boundary which is "nature in the raw" and not nature as it becomes to a pattern imposing epistemic system.

So pansemiosis is granting special privileges to life and mind as being able to impose their will on the world. Humans have no problem constructing patterns that are rigidly mechanical and thus artificial. It is how we set ourselves apart from the world - re-imagining nature as a machine and thus gaining useful control over it.

But ontologically - if you have followed the whole trail of thought through to its scientifically-validated conclusion - the world is not actually a machine. It is a statistical pattern generator. It is a realm of structured entropic flows that everywhere do the job of dissipating entropy. And that kind of triadic or hierarchically-organised story - constraints in interaction with degrees of freedom - is Peirce's definition of semiosis.

Every definite material event is also - from the point of view of the cosmic context - an informational sign. Something happened, rather than didn't, and so is concrete step added to the great construction that is a cosmic history. The radioactive atom decayed. It becomes now a contextual fact which changes things for everything else that might follow with "wavefunction collapse" definiteness.

There's more to the tree than any model - models being for some purpose to some end. At best we see a thin "slice" of the tree - that part visible to us when and how we're looking. And how do we know, anyway? Because we are in possession of a pattern, a template, and the tree fits - resembles - to some degree the pattern. — tim wood

I keep saying this is standard cognitivism. This is the Kantian model of epistemology that became validated as the ontology of mind by psychological and neurological science.

Well, to be accurate, that is the 1970s form of cognitivism that suffered from a residual Cartesian representationalism and which has been fixed by the more recent Peircean and triadic brand of cognitivism known as enactivism (and various other things).

But anyway, you yourself are making the move from a model of epistemology to a model of ontology - in regards to our scientific models of an epistemic system like a "pattern-fitting" brain.

What you don't appear to get is that after a dualist causal paradigm must come the larger explanatory framework of a triadic causal paradigm. And that we need this kind of enlarged ontological holism to fully get at the workings of reality in general.

I enjoyed browsing your site. And of course there are both similarities and differences in our views. But generally, this is about the contrast between a mechanical or reductionist view of causality and an organic or holistic view of causality.

One starts off the general conception of the Cosmos as case of "there is nothing, so build me something". The other says "anything and everything is possible, but that in itself is going to result in a self-selecting competition". As in a quantum sum-over-histories, reality is what is left over once all the possible alternatives have cancelled each other out to leave a single sharp outcome remaining.

You seem to be reading way more into what I'm talking about than I am trying to say — Pfhorrest

I’m just interested how you think Panpsychism can work. Where’s the detail?

There's no two kinds of stuff, just events that can be interpreted two ways, both objects (matter) and subjects (mind) emerging from bundles of those interaction events (which are respectively equivalent to properties of objects or experiences of subjects, depending on which perspective you take). — Pfhorrest

How would you test this hypothesis? What perspective would reveal the experiential aspect of a stone?

This thread is about moral semantics, not ontology, and I do plan another thread on this kind of ontological topic later. — Pfhorrest

Cool.

Thanks for that - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281055385_The_role_of_interoceptive_inference_in_theory_of_mind/fulltext/563c935908aec6f17dd79ffc/The-role-of-interoceptive-inference-in-theory-of-mind.pdf?origin=publication_detail