I generally agree with your analysis, but the issue that I have is with the idea that mind is the output or consequence of fundamentally physical processes — Wayfarer

But aren’t I saying the process is fundamentally informational, as well? And that the source of the stably persisting identity of a mindful, purposeful, organism is to be found nowhere in the matter of which it is composed?

So this is a dualism without the causal problems. This is a dualism where the complementary nature of stabilising ideas and labile hardware gets rid of the usual “dead matter” descriptions of life and mind.

The mainstream neo-darwinian view is that life began in the apocryphal 'warm pond' by some as-yet undetermined process involving some combination of heat, pressure, and complex chemistry — Wayfarer

That is old hat now. The other really good new popularisation is Nick Lane’s The Vital Question which shows how life must have started around some active chemical flow. Luke warm alkaline ocean vents are a good candidate.

So the problem with a warm pond is that it stabilises - goes to equilibrium - very quickly. But a sea vent is a themal/chemical flow. It is an active instability. And Lane makes the argument for how life first arose as a managing force in that kind of scenario.

However, this still does seem a generally physicalist account, in that it seems to assume that the biochemical gives rise to, or is prior to, the symbolic - that the ability to speak and abstract is itself the product of biochemistry. So I don't see how here the distinction between information and matter is really maintained - the former is simply an outcome of the latter. — Wayfarer

Well it ain’t a generally material account if it says that symbols or information are nature’s other aspect. So it may be generally physicalist, but it is a semiotic physicalism. It is a full four causes physicalism. And that is hardly a regular notion of physicalism - for the guy in the street anyway. Actual physics has already jumped on the information theoretic/dissipative structure bandwagon and so is cool with this paradigm.

A circle of inter-independent origination. — Janus

Yep.

Why so sour? You can read all about the biophysics in Peter Hoffman’s Life’s Ratchet.

To say life is managed instability is to explain the nature of the connection between matter and symbol, or metabolism and replication.

The usual bottom-up view of causation presumes life needs stable material foundations. It builds itself up from concrete parts.

However the reason why the symbol part of the equation - the stuff like the genetic memory that can encode constraints - can actually work is that it acts to regulate the unstable. If the physics has rigid stability, how could information push it in any direction? But if the physics is balanced on an instability, a point of bifurcation, then it is like a switch that can be tipped by the barest nudge.

So that is how semiotic control can arise. That is how symbols can control states of matter. The matter has to be in a state that is inherently unstable and hence able to be nudged in a direction that is some higher level informational choice.

That is the trick of life. It is the combination of information and matter, a system able to be directed with a purpose because the matter is poised to be tipped and has the least amount of telos concerning its actual state as is possible.

Stable matter knows what it wants to be. It is deterministic. But instability is freedom just begging to be harnessed. It solves the mystery of how symbols could affect the actions of anything.

And how life goes is how mind goes. The same applies when it comes to closing the explanatory gap between matter and symbol there.

If stability is achieved then there is no more instability to be managed. — Metaphysician Undercover

You must be right! Clearly once you have achieved a steady balance on your bike, you could never subsequently wobble or fall off. Genius.

Homeostasis assumes that stability is the goal — Metaphysician Undercover

Adult male cow manure. It refers to a stable balance. The balance is the goal that the system recovers to after perturbations or excursions.

It's blatant contradiction that I have difficulty with. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you construct your own confusions.

Ever ridden a bike? Is there no homeostatic balance involved in managing its instability?

You said "life is managed instability". If homeostasis excludes instability, then it excludes life if life is managed instability. Either life is not managed instability, or it is not homeostatic. Which do you believe? — Metaphysician Undercover

I love your difficulty with simple sentences.

this excludes homeostasis, as instability excludes stability. — Metaphysician Undercover

LOL. It is homeostasis that is the process "excluding" instability and thus creating - dynamical - stability.

Homeostasis implies equilibrium, but the living systems are growing and reproducing. Growing and reproducing, which is what living beings do, cannot be represented as homeostasis which is a form of equilibrium. — Metaphysician Undercover

Life is managed instability. So homeostasis is central to that. The central problem is not about how to grow or how to fragment. It is about how to hold together in controlled fashion.

From what I've read, Rosen argues to maintain a distinction between living systems (as anticipatory systems) and inanimate systems, by describing living systems according to function rather than by describing them as material activity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course I make the same semiotic distinction. And note how it is functionality that is then the basis of any deeper underlying continuity. The telos they have in common is entropy dissipation.

Evidence based policy making has been a thing for a decade.

The attempts of apokrisis are therefore quite futile, since he doesn't understand that his fundamental assumption of the goodness of nature is precisely what naturalism is incapable of grounding... — Thorongil

Again, I never said Nature is fundamentally good. It is what it is. And we get to make it what it is - for us - to an increasing extent.

I might ask the same of your naturalism. — darthbarracuda

Sure. And the point about it being a metaphysics of immanent being is that it is founded on its dichotomies, not founded on a transcendent negating. Nature doesn't have to be the fallen to your moral purity. It doesn't have to be the imperfect to your Platonic good. So even if good and evil were in play here - your basic argument - nature would be the separation into good and evil as the limits on being, and then some rational balance as the existence defined by those diametrically opposed limits.

But good and evil don't really feature as they are not a good candidate dichotomy for a realistic model of nature. They lack the causal complementarity that is a defining feature of a functional system - one that actually encodes a goal of some kind.

Think again about the systems view of sociology. Civilisation is not about good vs evil. It is about the complementary dynamic that is competition and co-operation. Both the extremes are "good" because together they are synergistic.

You can work away on "good and evil" to try to hone them into that kind of complementary dynamic. You can go the Hegelian route of saying evil needs to exist, so that it can be overcome. The good can't actually be good unless it was challenged and won. But again, that is just giving a nod to immanence on the way to arriving back at a transcendent aesthetic. The claim that there is only one true absolute, not instead the one irreducibly complex dynamic.

There's a common trend in philosophical trends around the globe that see the Good as transcending the material and/or natural realm, often in a spiritual way. — darthbarracuda

Exactly. And antinatalism is the heir to that. Theism based itself on the idea that our everyday world represents the fallen state. Therefore the truth of being had to be transcendent of that. Romanticism was then the reaction to Enlightenment science. It actually quite suited that new theology to believe Newton and Darwin may have dis-enchanted the material world, but the individual human spirit and its purest feelings then represented the actually transcendent. Nothing essential need change, even if God was dead.

Existentialism, pessimism and anti-natalism are the continued working out of that theology. But one that gradually turns the hopefulness of the Romantics into the tragedy of the lost souls doomed to wander in mortal guise until some final decisive act of release.

Antinatalism, in a philosophical pessimistic sense, is a spiritual position in that it tries to deny the immanent, natural world in favor of an alternate reality - typically Nothing. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. The Romantic turns around to Science and says you have proved everything is in fact nothing. Existence is random and meaningless. Therefore - as a disappointed child addressing its cold-hearted parent - I want to die! I want my revenge of taking your nothingness and demanding it right now for everyone!

Do you ever think all the suffering on Earth since day uno of its inception maybe isn't a good thing? — darthbarracuda

What are you talking about? Is the Earth tormented by the heat of its molten interior. Is it in agony with the ripping and tearing of its crust. Is the rain of asteroids an unbearable torment?

It is unbelievable how you and the other anti-natalists think hyperbole makes your philosophising anything else but comical.

How we should live life - especially right now when on the ecological brink - is a serious matter. There really ain't time to waste on this anti-natalist pissing about.

Apokrisis has failed to provide a convincing reason why we should see nature as fundamentally agreeable and right. — darthbarracuda

You mean you simply fail to see that my position - based on the immanence of self-organising systems - wouldn't even seek to make one extreme of existence fundamental. What is fundamental is the triadic thing of two complementary limits and their self-perpetuating balance.

Respect would be the conclusion that in the long run, x is generally right.

Tolerance would be the conclusion that in the long run, x is essentially noise. :grin:

More than 50%?!?

Oh, sure....

Because morality is oftentimes diametrically opposed to the natural. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. And what would Nature be diametrically opposed to here. The Artificial? The Unnatural? The Supernatural? Which of these is your chosen basis for moral imperatives? What makes them better, exactly?

A morality based on the natural world would be a non-morality, akin to basing morality on a deity that, by any modern standard of morality, is a twisted psycho. — darthbarracuda

But you are the one who seems to hate or dread the very notion of life, of existence. You want to wish it all away, regardless of what the more general wishes of folk might be.

Shouldn’t society be able to decide on the morality of its own being? Who are you to deny that?

Deflection. I asked about the probability of your torturer/Stockholm syndrome applying. I asked what percentage you might actually claim as a reasonable guesstimate.

You avoided a direct answer.

I'm thinking that DNA is the current flavour of formal causes. Do you have a different candidate? — tim wood

Yes, DNA is the canonical example of formal cause or top-down constraint here. So my position - the semiotic one - is about generalising that.

Thus I recognise a major discontinuity in nature, as well as an underlying continuity, when it comes to telos.

Life and mind are different in that they have the memory mechanisms to encode the information that constrains their material dynamics. Organisms are different in that they have autonomy and what we would mean by true purpose. Physical systems only have tendencies or propensities as they reflect the information that is encoded externally in their environments.

So I am not arguing anything mystical.

My response to the OP quotes was that they looked to get things the wrong way round. The material world is already reasonable or intelligible because its dynamism is formed or shaped by constraints. Life and mind are just the same story, with the twist that organisms can remember habits of constraint and so start to act from their own stored context of goals, purposes and reasons.

I lean toward regarding the "mystery" as an artifact of a certain kind of thinking. — tim wood

But the “how” of the least action principle is an important question to tackle if you are interested in developing new physics.

Unlike a particular or accidental mystery - like perhaps the glass of water on your desk - it is a general or universal level mystery. If you want an emergent or thermal model of time, for instance, then the metaphysical issues raised by the principle of least action are at the centre of that.

Why is nature such a dirty word to antinatalists? How has it become the ulitimate source of their intellectual discomforts?

God didn't ground morality so much as he limited it. — darthbarracuda

A constraint??? :gasp:

When God is dead, humans are confronted with a vast sense of moral responsibility, being the sole reservoirs with any moral sense in the universe. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, there is Naturalism. Wave goodbye to the Big Daddy in the sky, say hello Mama Nature.

Why wouldn't we want to understand life and mind, hence even morality, as natural phenomena? What good argument do you have on that?

Or is it just some kind of mechanics that is obvious when well-explained. — tim wood

Well that is the big question. Can you succeed where others have failed?

We can of course find approximative and perturbative mathematical techniques that do work well enough to solve problems as if they were simply a matter of determinist mechanics. But that then is to ignore the metaphysical mystery of how nature arrives at its rather more exact solutions.

In passing, your definition of telos as encompassing what you have listed seems to broaden and stretch telos beyond the limits of any original significance. If telos is that broad, then it means merely that there's a cause - and that's already presupposed! — tim wood

Or else it deflates the rather inflated notion of telos that folk have in the first place. I prefer to look at it that way.

It avoids being a mind~world dualist, while accepting that mechanistic physics is only talking about half the cause in its stress on the material, rather than the formal, causes of physical being.

So yes, if we go your pragmatism route then many ethical categories don't make sense. I'm saying that's an argument against your pragmatism, and a very powerful one too given your apparent inability to shrug off what you claim is romantic nonsense. — darthbarracuda

In the end, I'm not religious. I don't believe in transcendent being. Naturalism is the position that there is only nature and its immanent meaning.

So there is a stark choice when it comes to metaphysics. You can be like me, or be like you.

But I can show you my workings-out. I can point to the pragmatist metaphysics and their resulting history of successful empirical inquiry.

God is dead. He never lived. Moral dilemmas can only find a grounding context in Nature itself. Get used to it. ;)

I didn't think it relevant, and thought you'd straw man it anyway. — darthbarracuda

There must be a fallacy which is the fallacy of posters hoping to win debates by claiming every possible fallacy that springs to mind once all their other arguments have disintegrated.

Yet the choice to commit to the "pragmatic route" must also be subjectively motivated, no? — darthbarracuda

Pragmatism is about collectively demonstrated truths - what a community of rational inquirers would believe in the end.

So it both accepts the subjectivity of phenomenality, and it then sets out the method that can achieve the most objectivity in the light of that constraint.

I'm fine with you going the pragmatic route, so long as you recognize that this isn't a moral avenue. — darthbarracuda

But why should I accept your dualism? You can propose it. I simply show its incoherence.

Your decision to pursue the "scientific" route here is not a God-given decree but probably something to do with your character and background. — darthbarracuda

Sure. I hope it has everything to do with my character and background. God certainly had nothing to do with it.

I dislike how you claim to speak for all scientists on matters outside of the domain of science. — darthbarracuda

Yet you are fine telling all natalists how they are simply irrational in their delusions about life having a value for them.

Why did you erase your mention of terror management theory?

I thought it funny that you again wheel out a theory about the extremes that people will go to to avoid confronting an end to their lives when you are so busy trying to claim folk would universally be happier never to have been born.

How do you "divine" Natural Law would be the first question. — schopenhauer1

As I agreed with Darth, in the end there is a choice. Either you go with the subjectivity being expressed by all you anti-natalists - where your personal preferences are treated as a self-evident moral ought - or you are prepared to follow the natural philosophy route that became the pragmatic scientific method.

So mine is the evidence-demanding approach that stands against your subjective articles of faith. :)

And yours also is the one that frames things in terms of laws - natural or otherwise. I keep telling you how my position is a natural philosophy one in that it depends on constraints and freedoms. Mine is the systems logic which has that inherent balance.

Am I do see you as an oracle, proclaiming the truths of reality? Of course I believe what I think is reasonable. — darthbarracuda

Yep. You believe that what you think is what is reasonable. The simplicity of the circular argument.

Seems to me YOU'RE the one who thinks they have special privilege to the whisperings of nature. — schopenhauer1

LOL. I listen to the science. Sue me.

Quite reasonable. — Thorongil

You give up on your lines of argument rather easily.

Reason and life do not always parallel each other, and when they intersect it's not always beautiful. — darthbarracuda

Yep. It does come down to me being happy to let nauture tell us what reality is. You have some invented image of rationality that you won’t even questioin. You know the right answers despite what nature might say.

Someone earlier referred to paths of least resistance. — tim wood

Yeah. So how does every particle, every event, know how to follow the path of least action? How do you accommodate this “weirdness” that infects even classical physics in your metaphysical picture?

But that is just the failure of language to accommodate the tree's living. It - the tree - doesn't follow; it doesn't go. It just is, from moment to moment. — tim wood

Science can talk of grades of telos - physical tendencies or propensities, biological function, psychological purpose. So finality or anticipation can be treated as something that comes in obvious grades of complexity.

Then you just need a general story on how complexity arises. That is where pan-semiotics slots in. There is information bound up in a system’s history of constraints that gives it the tendencies it will express in the future.

This only gets truly weird on the micro scale of quantum events where now - as in quantum eraser experiments - choices experimenters might make in the future can act as constraints on an event’s past. Time itself gets caught up in the least action principle.

But the point is that finality is profoundly part of physics. And it’s exact understanding still an open question.

It is not something to be dismissed. It is a forefront issue.

Yes, it is true that many people irrationally find life to be something positive. Yet people can be profoundly misled. — darthbarracuda

A billion happy people has no value when it depends on a single victim of torture. — darthbarracuda

Every single person who exists is a possible suicide. That's a fact. — darthbarracuda

No words.

Just as the torturer could make reasonable predictions about whether, on average, his victims will develop a Stockholm Syndrome such that they feel grateful to him. — Thorongil

Finish the thought. What would that reasonable prediction actually be in real life?

10%?

1%?

0.001%?

And then ask yourself how good is an argument that must rely on extravagant hyperbole? Surely it must be facing desperate times if that is the best it can manage.

I couldn't count "interaction", because that's what you left out. Look:
The whole shapes the parts, the parts make the whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

????

What is the point of having children as we approach the cliff off of which we will collectively fall? — Bitter Crank

Now you are talking about the actual world - the one where we would take a pragmatic decision. :up:

It's not fanatical to abstain from having children. People do it all the time. — darthbarracuda

What I said was that it is fanatical to take up absolutist positions. Not having kids can be a perfectly reasonable choice - "reasonable" meaning "on the balance of probabilities".

And I think you are using the term "reasonable" illicitly here, in that you effectively monopolize the term to refer to anything you agree with. — darthbarracuda

Huh? I used a general definition of reasonable - the pragmatist one.

I can just as easily say that reasonable people do not take unnecessary risks, — darthbarracuda

And that is what I actually said. We make pragmatic risk/reward choices based on a balance of probabilities.

In this form antinatalism is the logical extension of the common ethical categories (common-sense morality), and it's only because of the affirmative assumption that life and reason must never intersect that antinatalism is seen as unreasonable. — darthbarracuda

No. It is unreasonable because the facts are that the majority of people don't go through life wishing they had never been born.

Antinatalism is only logical to those who take a black and white absolutist stance on things. Any pain or suffering - even a papercut - makes existence structurally intolerable.

For most people, life is a mixed bag. And yet overall, they don't regret living. So if you are going to take on moral guardianship for the unborn, deal with the facts as they actually are out there in the world.

The reason as to why this assumption is so prevalent is probably evolution and the basic biological drive to survive. — darthbarracuda

No. Most folk can just see that antinatalism is another of those extremist points of view that are essentially unreasonable.

Yes. The arguments are made with black and white logic. But no. That is not reasonable.

"It" here, being the thing which causes, refers to constraints. — Metaphysician Undercover

You have two dichotomous elements, the parts and the whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Did you forget to count their interaction?

If we are reasonable people, we could make reasonable judgements about whether on average those babies will later feel grateful.

And being reasonable, it would be on average rather than absolutely. Practical reason also includes the principle of indifference. Near enough is good enough. We don’t have to be fanatics about these things.

Once more, you have simply ducked the question. Why should your personal "is" be society's collective "ought"?

A constraint cannot cause anything unless it exists. So it cannot cause its own existence because that would mean that it exists before it exists. — Metaphysician Undercover

It causes the parts that construct it to exist.

It's a feedback loop. The whole shapes the parts, the parts make the whole.