Which is of course true in the context of science; but more or less irrelevant when it comes to philosophy, except in those restricted areas where there are problems caused by philosophers hanging on to the Newtonian worldview, or other reductionist paradigms. — Janus

So how are you defining philosophy here?

To me, the disicipline of philosophy exists to teach a particular method of critical thought. It is about the habits of clear reasoning which lead to positions definite enough to be believed or doubted on the basis of some suitable form of evidence.

What you are talking about are then particular philosophies, Within that umbrella definition of critical thought, all manner of theories, and all manner of evidence, might be advanced.

Essentially philosophy is scientific. As a discipline, it simply allows a far wider range of paradigms in terms of their ontic commitments and hence what could,work as suitable evidence.

Theism is acceptable, phenomenology is acceptable, PoMo is acceptable. They each have their own way of arguing and their own matching notions of evidence. To be part of the stable of philosophies, they only have to pass some minimal critical thinking standards.

Science is then that part of philosophy which has become dominant as its particular kind of rigour has proven its value socially. And I agree that also - as reductionism - has often proven itself anti-social.

The question then is what follows? How do we fix science as a discipline so it is more completely pro-social?

But it is silly to say that even reductionist science is a restricted part of philosophy. It clearly dominates in terms of results to the extent it is its own thing these days. It is no longer merely one of the many philosophies residing within the philosophy department.

Presuming it means something like the excessive use of science, how are we determining excessive? How does Scientism differ from either Physicalism or Positivism such that it deserves it's own name? — Pseudonym

My own definition of what characterises Scientism is that it is a dependence on Newtonian metaphysics. We can recognise it as that metaphysical package that revolves around the notions of reductionism, atomism, materialism, mechanicalism, computationalism, localism, nominalism, monadism and determinism.

So it is not the "scientific method" which is being excessively applied. There are good epistemic reasons to think that rational inquiry - that combination of theory and measurement - is the only proper way to arrive at a more objective view. And that objectivity has been the whole point of philosophy in the modern western tradition.

It is instead a particular brand of metaphysics which is being excessively (or not) being applied.

The Newtonian paradigm justified - at the level of universal observation and mathematical-strength theory - a particular view of Nature. Extrapolated, it says that all there is are atoms blindly following deterministic paths that make all higher organisation or complexity essentially meaningless and epiphenomenal. This is what people object to. The ruling out of everything potentially more interesting than a web of impressed forces acting on dumb masses.

In Aristotelian terms, the Newtonian paradigm allows you to treat Nature as purely the sum of its material and efficient causes. Its formal and final causes just don't have any real ontological standing. Purpose and meaning become a grand illusion of some kind or other. They are now merely subjective.

And that paradigm of Nature obviously has a whole lot of direct philosophical consequences. It says something basic about politics, ethics and aesthetics. It decides what counts as a legitimate question in these areas.

So the modal scope of this reductionist view is completely sweeping. Which is what gets folk squealing.

Obviously I view Newtonian reductionism to be a useful (indeed, super-useful) way of thinking, but also - metaphysically - incomplete. A holistic or systems view of Nature takes the expanded view that brings top-down formal and final cause back into the picture as also elements of scientific inquiry. And of course, science itself is increasingly understanding Nature in this fashion.

So once science cracks holism, then it is game over. :)

Of course, philosophy being a social activity, people can define it as they like. They can talk about other ways of "knowing" - like feeling, or poetry, or revelation.

And that is fine. In an open competition of ideas, all the different ways of thought will play themselves out in good old evolutionary fashion.

My only personal concern is that Newtonian reductionism can be quite a damaging paradigm in long-run social terms. And to counter-act that, it needs a strong and well-grounded response - the kind of response that only a scientific holism could deliver.

Waffling on about feelings, poetry and revealed truth - the ongoing Romantic response to the Enlightenment - ain't going to cut it. The only answer to half-done science is to come back and finish the job.

Poor SX. Always peevish to discover he has been re-inventing the wheel.

I don't see a whole lot of conflict between your (1) and (3) (leaving God out of the picture.) — Wayfarer

Funny. I see them as diametrically opposite. One is about immanence and causal emergence, the other is about transcendence and causal mystery.

Global regularities that 'emerge' could easily be simply another way of saying 'laws of nature'. — Wayfarer

Well they are opposing metaphysics that target the same observables. They are related in that each has to explain the same recalcitrant realities. And perhaps both also share the anti-nominalistic view about the "hard reality" of these causal entities.

The jargon used ought to reflect these distinctions in my view. But in a general way, we are all talking about what folk mean by the Cosmos appearing to have mathematical-strength regularities.

I mean even "emergence" means very different things to the reductionist/nominalist and the holist/realist here. There is a bit of a verbal minefield to pick through. So I'm not wanting to get too hung up calling laws "laws". That's only the start of the disagreements. :)

And my view is that whilst the laws or principles of nature that science discovers provide explanations across whole swathes of the phenomenal domain, science doesn't necessarily explain those principles. I suppose I have an instrumentalist or pragmatic view - that science is useful and powerful, but it's not inherently meaningful in an existential sense. — Wayfarer

But that is just you expressing your political agenda here.

I'm not say that I don't have an agenda. I speak for natural philosophy. However I think I can point to the way science has actually unfolded as the best support for my metaphysics. A process or systems view has worked.

And my emergent constraints approach has the advantage that there is no causal mystery. It appeals to collective or statistical behaviour. And our mathematical models of those explain why the patterns have no choice but to arise.

For interest....

Today, we use the Lagrangian method to describe all of physics, not just mechanics. All fundamental laws of physics can be expressed in terms of a least action principle. This is true for electromagnetism, special and general relativity, particle physics, and even more speculative pursuits that go beyond known laws of physics such as string theory.

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/db275/concepts/LeastAction.pdf

Sorry, there is a misunderstanding here. I agree that "law" is a rather odd term to use. It does have misleading connotations. The reason that nature is "law-abiding" is because it is physically constrained by its own developmental history. So it is "constitutional" in that structural sense.

The ontological issue I am then highlighting is that our efforts to define the laws/principles of nature are targeting something real, even if that reality is emergent. There are forms of organisation that are mathematically inevitable - even from locally random action - and so the Laws of Nature can't be treated as some kind of socially constructed bricolage.

(And the same argument could apply to actual human constitutional laws - are they just a bunch of arbitrary social conventions or do they ultimately target something that is fundamental by way of "natural justice" and "human rights"?)

Anyway, that leaves three views in play concerning the Laws of Nature.

1) The laws are some kind of mysterious thing - the handiwork of God perhaps - that were written into the Creation of the Universe and determine the course of all physical action in some transcendent fashion.

2) The laws are descriptions we freely invent that somehow both account for events in ways that are remarkably effective and yet also somehow have no particular claim to being "the truth" of reality. They never become more than social constructions.

3) The laws are historically emerging constraints on free action in the Cosmos. They are the global regularities that emerge to regulate the dynamics of events. Information accumulates to create general contexts that give every action a common direction. And while the development of these regularities might be "random" on the individual scale, statistically they must evolve towards equilibrium balances. So "laws" - expressing the symmetries broken, and the symmetries arrived at - exist as mathematical-strength inevitabilities of that very process of evolving. There is nothing contingent about the ultimate outcomes of collective random action. Everything gets channelled into the common probabilistic "flow" which we describe as "lawful".

I should be addressing these points to the OP of course. So SX correctly quoted this...

In practice engineers handle irreversible processes with old fashioned phenomenological laws describing the flow (or flux) of the quantity under study. Most of these laws have been known for quite a long time. For example there is Fick's law... Equally simple laws describe other processes: Fourier's law for heat flow, Newton's law for sheering force (momentum flux) and Ohm's law for electric current....

The trouble is that each equation is a ceteris paribus law. It describes the flux only so long as just one kind of cause is operating. [Vector addition] if it works, buys facticity, but it is of little benefit to (law) realists who believe that the phenomena of nature flow from a small number of abstract, fundamental laws. — StreetlightX

But then science moved on to think in terms of more global symmetry principles. Instead of leaving things where they might well seem some bricolage of local heuristics speaking to no universal hand, science rewrote Newtonian mechanics in terms of Lagrangians and Hamiltonians. Symmetry, and symmetry-breaking, became the general story holding all "laws" together in a constitutional framework.

The terminology did switch from laws to principles - in particular, when it comes to dynamics, the principle of least action. An evolutionary ontology became wired in because the most general constraint is that everything should happen by using the shortest path available. Essentially nature is free to take any path to an outcome. And then, because all those paths are in competition, the optimum path is the one that - on the probabilistic whole - is going to be the one that emerges from the fray.

So while to all outward appearances, science seemed to talk of externally-imposed and hence mysteriously transcendent laws, all the actual practice of formulating laws had switched to one based on notions of emergent, historically-conditioned, constraints.

Hence my complaint about the political tenor of the OP. It is easy to attack "the laws of nature" when they are presented in a strawman fashion. The "Newtonian" idea of "laws" falls apart fast under any examination. But that doesn't then make this social constructionist/bricolage rhetoric of Cartwright - or those employing her here - any more correct.

The truth of things is more interesting. Global regularities are emergent, but mathematically-inevitable, constraints on action. The Universe has a complex constitution due to a series of symmetry-breakings that have left it increasingly more organised in a hierarchical fashion. And this is a structure of "law" that science can target in legitimate fashion. In the end, there could be only the one answer in terms of "what exists".

And for philosophy generally, this is important. As said, it ought to impact on even our human debates about politics and morality. For instance, the arguments of evolutionary psychology couldn't simply be dismissed out of hand.

If you don't want to mention the word "law" for some reason - and remember it's not me that defends the term - then what exactly would you like to call this kind of universal if-then statement?

Scientists would elevate it to a principle of nature rather than merely a law of nature I guess. :razz:

There are no special constitutional Laws of Nature, or perhaps, the things we call Laws of Nature can only be so by analogy to constitutional law. — Akanthinos

The deepest physical laws look to capture mathematical symmetries. This is in fact a theorem - Noether's theorem.

All the conservation laws that have allowed us to describe the Cosmos as a closed and coherent system - a Universe - derive directly from symmetry principles. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy. Space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum. Rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum.

So this puts paid to the social constructionist angle that our laws of nature are some kind of pluralist bricolage.

In the end, Nature seems to have had no choice about the fact that - if it is to exist - it must be shaped by these mathematical-strength "laws".

Of course, the interesting thing is that the closure that is necessary for there to be a generalised state of Being is now likely to be emergent rather than fundamental. On the microscale, quantum mechanics shows that things aren't exactly closed and conserved – at least not in unambiguous fashion.

So yeah, symmetry is the ideal limit state description. A story of effective laws. Yet still, as a finality, those symmetries are the inescapable destination of any evolution of a state of Being.

The idea that the laws of nature are some kind of psychological convenience has to deal with the hard facts here.

I was thinking about this too, and especially the curious idea - let me know if you agree - that even positive injunctions in the law are, in a way, simply double negatives. — StreetlightX

Constraints are apophatic in this fashion. Only that which could be predicted can also be forbidden. So possibilities could be ruled out as picked-out individual cases, yet nature can continue to be fundamentally surprising or probabilistic.

I'm tempted to try to start a reading group for this paper discussing Rosen: — fdrake

Howard Pattee did this nice critique of how Rosen turned overly Platonic and mathematical in his last work...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5891221_Laws_Constraints_and_the_Modeling_Relation_-_History_and_Interpretations

Due to the fact that modelling relations are bidirectional by construction, they admit a precise categorical formulation in terms of the category-theoretic syntactic language of adjoint functors, representing the inverse processes of information encoding/decoding via adjunctions.

The interesting question here might be whether it matters that the measurement process is itself informal - something quite apart from the formal model of causal entailment that is the law-expressing theory.

So as a necessity of the modelling relation, the act of measurement (the encoding/decoding) is some kind of purpose-laden and pragmatic exercise in constraining the physics of the system in question so that it yields some number or value or sign. It is a fundamentally free action - a choice the modeller can make - in contrast to the modeller's representation of the world with a theory that is then utterly constrained, lawful, algorithmic and deterministic.

So on the one hand, category theory might allow a representation of this relation - the way the modeller does pragmatically map algorithmic descriptions to a non-algorithmic reality. But then the connection between the map and the territory depends on this fundamentally informal and unconstrained business of measurement.

In practice, habits of measurement are in fact constrained by the fact that they must work to achieve some goal or finality that the modelling relation represents. Measurement may have complete freedom, in contrast to the model's complete formality, yet the further thing of a purpose is used to prune the excessive degrees of freedom.

However that is then an unmodelled real-world physical issue that an overly mathematical or formal approach to the story fundamentally fails to pick up. Any use of category theory couldn't actually deliver the kind of purely mathematical relational biology that was Rosen's ultimate goal.

Again it is the usual central issue of ontology. We struggle to find a story that deals with the observers along with the observables.

But as Pattee outlines, the modelling relation itself is very good for making it clear just where "laws" fit into things. They are the way we can see nature as if it were a mechanical reality implementing a formal system of causal entailment. And then the informal measurement side of the business - the encoding/decoding - is where the issue of the observer with a purpose can get buried safely as everything that really needs to be said about a pragmatic semiotic habit.

The laws themselves are absolved of carrying the burden of telling the ontological truth. They become mere algorithms. The non-formalised part of the business is then our capacity not to feed garbage input into them, and also to recognise when the output might be obvious garbage.

This is an interesting insight into a Chinese approach to good citizenship...source: New Zealand Institute.

China is piloting a social credit system ... It is very simple. Everyone gets a social credit score. If you do good things, pro-social things – things that reinforce trust in President Xi’s institutions and encourage a sense of unity – your score goes up. Volunteering for a charity and separating your recycling can enhance your score. So can donating blood. These are all good things that must be rewarded.

If you instead decide to exhibit bad behaviours, your score goes down. Your score can go down for social microaggressions. Things like not turning up to a dinner reservation or leaving false product reviews. Ubiquitous facial recognition camera systems can assign demerit points for jaywalking. Soon they will be able to also assign demerit points for doing unmutual things – things that reduce the sense of unity and trust in institutions – like engaging in civil protest.

The Chinese pilot scheme so far rewards high-scoring citizens with things like shorter wait times in hospital and punishes low-scores with reduced access to public services and travel restrictions.

"PC pluralism" has on it's side Existentialism and, and this may be a bit chauvin, the non-negligible advantage of being the only non-douchebag game in town, so to speak. — Akanthinos

Yeah. Anyone not standing alongside you is a douchebag. Skillfully argued.

The background to this thread was SX promising to show how the enemies of the left misuse the concepts of evolution to serve their political agendas.

Well great. It's very true. But now he is wheeling out Cartwright to give his own politicised reading of the metaphysics. I find that amusing.

What about the view from anywhere? Can't there be propositions that are true regardless of where you stand? — Banno

Should be simple enough to demonstrate. Just give us an example.

Nature is always being hi-jacked to serve the political agenda of folk.

In the good old days, morality was based on what God told you in chiselled stone tablets or magic books. These days, people find support for the fundamental rightness of their socio-political views in what science might tell us about nature.

The right are as bad as the left, as I say. And SX is very good at criticising the right wing agenda as it shows itself in the Darwinian justifications for capitalism and neo-liberalism, or the racism of facism. I'm just pointing out that PoMo has a long social history of batting for the other side.

If the "laws" of nature are merely a social construction, a convenient illusion we project on to a bricolage of individuated histories, then this would give a metaphysical-strength justification for a politics of PC pluralism.

If Nature itself is a loose and collegial network of différance - it rejects hierarchical organisation, power structures, homogeneity, causal determinism, at root - then who are we humans to think otherwise about what is right and proper when it comes to our political relations? Listen to Nature! She has already spoken.

What Smolin argues is that while some represent the laws of physics as "global", they really are not. — Metaphysician Undercover

To study a system we need to define what is contained and what is excluded from it. We treat the system as if it were isolated from the rest of the universe, and this isolation itself is a drastic approximation. We cannot remove a system from the universe, so in any experiment we can only decrease, but never eliminate, the outside influences on our system. — Smolin

So as I have argued, the emergent law approach taken by Peirce would see contextuality as irreducible. Thus it is certainly right to point this out about any claims which might portray micro-physical laws as themselves basic rather than emergent.

The usual view is that physics must find something definite, crisp, determinate, atomistic, once it drills down to the bedrock of existence. This is why the micro-physical laws are taken to describe something substantially real while the macro-physical laws - like the second law of thermodynamics in particular - are dismissed as merely emergent in the sense of being descriptive illusions. A way of summing over the fine detail as a convenience.

But the view Smolin is expressing - which Peirce made much more clearly a 100 years earlier - is that even the micro-physical would be emergent. The micro-physical realm gains its atomism, its definiteness, due to the downwardly-stabilising action of a weight of global constraints. The micro-physical is pure fluctuation, pure quantum possibility, shaped up into actual substantial events that can then go on to weave a classical world unfolding in a global dimension of time.

So yes. The way our fundamental micro-physical laws get formed just paints right over the fact that there has to be some story of development already. Smolin points that out. However that just says it is contextuality or constraints all the way down. Both the local and the global scales of the Cosmos are emergent. That is the whole point - how you can get something out of "nothing". The local and the global stand mutually or synergistically as each other's ground. Each is producing the other - the dialectical other that it itself needs to have there as the causal source of its own definite being.

This is why Peircean metaphysics is triadic. In the beginning is just Firstness or Vagueness. Then this potential splits - the symmetry breaks - in local~global fashion. You get the two varieties of causality emerging - bottom-up construction and top-down constraint. The outcome is a hierarchical situation - a fundamental asymmetry - that then goes to equilibrium over all its spatiotemporal scales of integration.

Check out this paper which looks at how Peirce relates to Smolin...

SPACE, TIME AND NATURAL LAW: A PEIRCEAN LOOK AT SMOLIN’S TEMPORAL NATURALISM
https://proyectoscio.ucv.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/A7-Waal.pdf

...there are no laws in the early universe. It is only in virtue of a high-level restriction of possibility that laws can emerge by enabling certain paths while precluding others. The laws of physics thus develop not unlike the manner in which a stream wears its own bed (CP 5.492);

... in both approaches, the emergence of regularity is associated with a loss of novelty, or spontaneity, in the system. To both this loss of novelty is not complete (there remains room for what Peirce called “absolute chance”),30 rather “at some stage [it] stops being sufficient to destabilize regularity” (Cortês & Smolin, 2015: 19).

... if there is truly nothing – meaning there are no constraints whatsoever – there is nothing to prevent anything from happening, so that eventually something will happen, which, as there are no constraints, will be a purely random event. In other words, all we are doing is to remove the restriction that came with the concept of nothing as it was conceptualized through the removal of everything, which is that it has to be purely passive –something like an inert, empty space at t0 – unable to generate anything.
Such active, or energetic, interpretation of nothing dovetails nicely with the remarks by Peirce that drew Smolin’s attention, namely that a purely random event is not the kind of thing that needs further explanation to justify belief in its possibility, as any explanation to that effect will give us a narrative
that de facto negates the event’s randomness. It also dovetails with the idea of Smolin and Cortês, discussed earlier, that the events CST speaks of are intrinsically endowed with energy and momentum.

As SX says, Pomo neo-Marxist socialist political correctness.

Both left and right like to make their own readings of naturalism. And nature itself gets obscured in the process.

The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid. — StreetlightX

Ah. It's all mere bricolage. The political agenda shows itself.

My assessment is that the little of apokrisis' posts that I read are on point. The issue is: what is the believer? — frank

You will find that Banno will never answer you on this. He is trying to arrive at naive realism via Witgensteinian quietism. So the pretence is that the question of who has the point of view is essentially idealistic and to be summarily dismissed.

If it is illegitimate to even mention the believer as the issue, then we can all get on talking with naive realism about all the incontrovertible truth we see just looking around with our open eyes in our everyday world.

You are dealing with high level sophistry here. It’s quite entertaining to watch. Just don’t expect a productive engagement.

I’m not sure how you are understanding Smolin. I agree with him about the reality of time. The fundamental laws as they are framed are purely bottom up and deterministic. So that makes our macroscopic reality a kind of epiphenomenal illusion if you simply take those fundamental laws as the complete story.

Whereas I am arguing that the laws represent global constraints. And that now includes the macroscopic correlations that emerge to suppress local degrees of freedom. This is true emergence - where there is also now top-down holism to shape the fine grain of things.

The current laws don’t directly encode that. But you do then have the separate kinds of laws - the various mechanics vs the various thermodynamics - that give you enough of both sides of the story.

So for example, quantum mechanics gets fixed by gluing it to statistical mechanics to give you decoherence theory. More generally, deterministic local physics gets fixed by global information holography. The goal is for a unified physics that puts both aspects of a systems approach together in the same theory - ie: quantum gravity.

So yes, an unconstrained set of micro variables will have nonlinearity. And a purely bottom up mechanics is going to suffer a lack of scaling because of that. We are very used to physicists complaining their theories produce infinities that somehow in reality must get cancelled away. Step back from the microscopic and things explode.

But already physics tames that in various ways by adding in the emergent correlations that would act to suppress the nonlinearIties. The problem is that these constraints are still mostly kluges handcrafted to deal with a particular situation.

On the other hand, we are happy to accept global optimality arguments in science. Biology is comfortable with natural selection as the global invisible hand suppressing nonlinear variety. And condensed matter physics is now mathematically pretty mature.

So I don’t think that my view is radically out of line with Smolin’s. I agree that the fundamental laws alone - the ones that describe the universal microscopic degrees of freedom - can only be half the story. You also need those universally emergent macroscopic constraints that then suppress and shape those freedoms wherever they might occur.

So this is the four causes Aristotelian story. And as has been a point of difference with you in the past, I am saying that finality has to emerge via development. Global constraints are what become fully realised at the end of time. At the beginning of time, they exist only in a potential or latent sense.

This makes belief an odd kind of post-hoc thematisation. — jamalrob

Or it simply lifts things into an importantly different register.

At the animal level, we are embedded and embodied in our habits of understanding. Language turns that into the someone who is believing some state of affairs. It translates the biological situation into one that is displaced from some actual place and time, some unalterable history, into one that now lacks those constraints and so gains new freedoms.

So it in about there being a troubling lack of secure foundations for theories of truth. The whole bleeding point of the language turn - in Homo sapiens history - is to create a foundation for rational thought.

And a big part of that is the social construction of the self as the believer, doubter, or whatever-er.

If we have to build this fiction too, this idealised observer and knower, then that is central to any epistemic discussion.

The sort of uncertainty that is confined to philosophers. — Banno

So when you go to watch the cricket, you complain that all the bloody chaps on the field are not playing rugby?

Really, could this thread have less point?

Doubt is so important to belief that we must manufacture it. :up:

Not quite the beginning, as I understand it - just a moment after. — Wayfarer

It depends what you want to believe about time before it got going. It sounds like you want to start the counting of the Planckian moments from zero rather than one. :)

And the fact that the Universe did then develop in such a way to give rise to stars>matter>life, is the subject of the well-known anthropic cosmological argument. The fact that some physicists promote the idea of a 'multiverse' to avoid that very implication speaks volumes in my opinion. — Wayfarer

You mean that if your metaphysics is of the unconstrained kind that will spawn cosmic infinities, then the anthropic principle is the only constraint you have got left to wield.

The multiverse is not used to evade anthropery. Anthropery is used to make the multiverse feel respectable.

'Completing the metaphysical project' assumes that a biological intelligence, which has evolved as a consequence of adaptive necessity, is able to arrive at some general conception of truth or reason, which may be entirely unconnected with it. I don't see any scientific reason for that assumption. — Wayfarer

Hmm. It's more a conclusion. On the face of it, the thought we can completely understand existence seems implausible. In practice - if you hang out with the science long enough - it instead becomes remarkable how much we can understand in a deep mathematically inevitable way.

That is why I have come to favour talking about animals in terms of expectation and frustration of expectation rather than belief and doubt. — Janus

That makes sense.

And this kind of thread only goes 1000 posts as it is designed not to accept that kind of sense. :)

That's right, it's only a part of knowledge. But is there any belief apart from fallabilistic knowledge? Or to put it another way, don't we say that we believe rather than say that we know, only where there is some doubt? And is it not the case that doubt is relevant only in the context of fallibilistic knowledge? — Janus

Language takes belief and doubt to another (semiotic) level.

It is personal and unvoiced in animals. It may be there as part of cognition, but it not present in some depersonalised and metacognitive sense.

Then along comes language and belief~doubt can be socially constructed to achieve cultural purposes. There is a medium to make its cognitive mechanism something explicit and communal.

So as usual in any debate, views founder on accounting for the emergent discontinuity while maintaining also the underlying continuity. Once we were animals. And now we are still animals - but linguistically structured all the way down in a fashion that makes a big psychological difference.

LSD flashback. Banno meets Timothy Leary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hah no. Just a flashback to undergrad cognitive science.

Even then it was astounding that Fodorian language of thought nonsense was such a bandwagon. An embodied or semiotic view - what Banno seems to be calling externalism - was already obvious.

But you did have to scratch around to connect the dots on that.

On the general issue of how to view laws, John Wheeler was articulating a quantum information approach very nicely back in the 1980s.

This is a good short paper - INFORMATION, PHYSICS, QUANTUM: THE SEARCH FOR LINKS
John Archibald Wheeler - http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf

And the longer version - https://what-buddha-said.net/library/pdfs/wheeler_law_without_law.pdf

The opening statement for instance...

“Every law of physics, pushed to the extreme, will be found to be statistical and approximate, not mathematically perfect and precise,”

So the tricky bit here is that an emergentist approach to physical reality must take a constraints-based approach where the Cosmos arises due to a suppression of its freedoms. This makes the Universe a fundamentally probabilistic exercise. If we zoom in on the "ground of being", we discover only increasingly uncertain fluctuations. There just isn't anything fixed and definite in the way that a story of eternal natural laws operating on fixed initial conditions would seem to demand.

So that appears to support SX's political desire for a PoMo metaphysics of radical contingency. There is nothing God-given about how things should be. The laws themselves dissolve into quantum mush as you put them under the microscope.

However that is half the story. The other half is about the order that must arise if a chaotic mess of fluctuations is also in interaction. If there are correlations between events, then patterns will emerge as organising regularities. And mathematical models - of probabilistic ensembles - show the inevitability of the emergence of this kind of global or macroscopic order.

There might be no law, no limitations at the microscale, but laws or limits are what emerge in predictable fashion at the macroscale. A classical determinism is what finds its full expression as a fact of a process of development.

Breaking a symmetry is just the first step. Once a system has started down that road, it is going to keep going to the end (what is to stop it?). And so the macroscale limit is a system in a state that is fully broken - asymmetric in a fully homogenous fashion. Or one that has arrived at its final resting equilibrium state, as they say.

So modern physics has an emergentist ontology where reality is about "laws" that develop in a succession of increasingly more particularised global constraints. And what characterises a natural law, as opposed to some local "non-holonomic" constraint, is that it applies everywhere equally in the Universe.

But also - the new thing - is that this cascade of symmetry breakings unfolds in time ... as the Cosmos cools and expands. So the ontology is developmental and not existential. We can talk about particle mass before the electro-weak symmetry breaking for example. But that is also a somewhat meaningless concept because before that transition, there was no effective Higgs field to quantify that mass - make "massive" particles actually subject to the gravitational effects of being heavy or light.

Thus laws about massive particles - ones that have to fly along at less than light speed, with all the further symmetry-breaking implications of that - are both universal ... now ... and also merely emergent ... back at some particular time. Early on in the Big Bang, those further constraints were both a mathematical inevitabilty but also only latent as a potential. As "the law", they did not yet exist.

So this Peircean approach - a Cosmos that evolves a regularity of habits due to the inevitability that to exist involves the necessity of a univocal or global intelligibility - is at the heart of a modern scientific approach to Creation.

And Wheeler - back in the 1980s - was pretty clear about the pan-semiotic direction things needed to go. The ground of existence is a relational network of interactions. Quantum information. The questions reality can ask of itself to give itself classical definiteness ... and then the limits to that which are the source of all the quantum "weirdness".

This report reviews what quantum physics and information theory have to tell us about the age-old question, How come existence? No escape is evident from four conclusions:

(1) The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any preestablished continuum physical law.

(2) There is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum.

(3) The familiar probability function or functional, and wave equation or functional wave equation, of standard quantum theory provide mere continuum idealizations and by reason of this circumstance conceal the information-theoretic source from which they derive.

(4) No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy.

Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.

the 'fundamental laws' are, ironically, more exceptions than rules, limits cases and not paradigmatic ones. That the fundamental laws of physics are taken to be paradigmatic of science - and that people are so taken by promises of 'theories of everything' - speaks more to the vampirism and the hangover of unconscious and powerful religious impulses than it does about the real life practices of science. — StreetlightX

Again you go too far and try to assimilate philosophy of science to a social agenda. Let the facts speak for themselves here.

The fundamental laws are fundamental because they take us back to the beginning. If the Cosmos evolved, there has to have been an initial state of high symmetry that then became the current succession of increasingly broken symmetries.

So physics has found - as a central fact - that our Universe appeared in a "Big Bang" and is heading for a "Heat Death". All the individuation we see is the result of symmetries that got broken. These symmetries have the force of mathematical necessity. We found them first via mathematical reasoning. Later it was realised that Nature itself had to be bound by this principle of self-consistent intelligibility and a generalised least action principle.

If science thus fills a hole left by theistic metaphysics, it is because it has shown there was indeed a creation event that was deeply mathematical. The order we see could not have failed to be the case as the simplest form of order that could have developed.

Of course there are a lot of gaps in this story still. Ideally a theory of everything would be able to explain the value of all the initial conditions constants as mathematical necessities. The strengths of the various coupling forces are "accidents" so far as current understanding is concerned. But it is also reasonable speculation that those constants are also mathematically determined by the exact detail of complex symmetry breakings.

So really, scientific excitement about theories of everything which reveal existence to have inevitable mathematical-strength structure is not misplaced. Our descriptions of the fundamental structure of nature is quite the opposite of talk about exceptions. The ontic structure described in terms of symmetry models is as real and central as anything could be. With luck, we will find there could have only been only the one Cosmos at a fundamental level. And that would make it a univocal metaphysics in which exceptions become impossible.

Yes. That outcome might also delight those with a different social or philosophical agenda to your own. But so what?

Unless you believe scientific inquiry ought to be constrained by a quasi-political agenda - making things come out right for pluralism, social constructionism, political correctness, or whatever, at a fundamental physical level - then the science should be left to speak for its own metaphysics.

That physics should have discovered the Cosmos was in fact created, and that its development was already pre-ordained by mathematical-strength principles, is just something philosophy has to get used to.

It is not about filling a hole left by religion. It is about completing a metaphysical project initiated by the Ancient Greek metaphysicians even before the theocrats came along and started nicking their ideas in an attempt to legitimate their various brands of Church.

So either nothing is mindful or everything is mindful. And those two options exhaust the choices?

Well nope.

If instead you are saying panpsychism and eliminative materialism are pretty equivalent in their degree of essential incoherency, then maybe yes. :)

So do you reject panpsychism as not even a coherent theory? Can we be clear on that.

Good lord! The 1970s just flashed before my eyes.

Nonetheless: I think one can grant Cartwright's point - that the laws in general are 'untrue' in the vast majority of cases - without for all that claiming that the laws themselves are 'false'. — StreetlightX

Still an attention getting move more than a reasonable stance. But then outside of philosophy of science, many might think science tells the transcendent truths of reality.

It's a difficult one. :)

In the second sense of truth is basically this: are the laws otherwise than what we have discovered? The answer is no. It is true that F=ma, and not F=ma^2. On the other hand, it is not true that F=ma accurately and precisely describes the bahaviour of most moving bodies. These senses of truth are not in contradiction, because they bear on different domains, or rather, they attempt to respond to different questions (It is an accurate description vs. Is the law otherwise than stated?). The strangeness and unease which might accompany Cartwright's insistence on the 'untruth' of the laws stems from conflating - in a way Cartwright does not - these two uses of truth. — StreetlightX

I don't think that is it at all.

The point - as you said - is that laws are simply descriptions of prevailing constraints. They don't need to be exception-less. Indeed, if reality itself is inherently probabilistic at a fundamental level, then they couldn't be. The laws themselves could only capture the strong probabilities of a Universe that has been around long enough to develop a history of well-regulated habit.

So a law like F=ma is a limit state expression. In an ideal world with nothing to individuate the circumstance, it would apply. But every actual situation is a mess of some particular local history. There are all sorts of other causal influences that could impact on the behaviour of things - create the apparent exceptions.

Newton's laws of course themselves presumed an already constrained world - one that was geometrically flat and where energy scale did not affect the picture. New even more abstract laws were framed to allow the Newtonian cosmos to be viewed as now the special case - flat rather than curved, with its tendency to fluctuations suppressed by it having become so classically cold and expanded.

So the truth-telling is about a hierarchy of constraints. What it gets right is how much of the backdrop that gets taken for granted as the frame of reference is itself turned into a model with fewer constraints and so a need for more symmetry-breaking measurements.

Science is an art that balances the two kinds of information - the modelling and the measuring, the laws and the initial conditions. There is no truth to be discovered so much as that we have to make some pragmatic trade-off which works.

So I disagree with your account in this regard. What you are saying amounts to having to decide if an "accurate description" is to be found in the theory or its measurements? Clearly, the accuracy is a combination of some appropriate level of trade-off. It is how the two work together in practice. This is what needs to be emphasised.

Both cost us an effort. We want to strike the balance that describes the world with the least information. And while you can write F=ma on a t-shirt, do you want to have to measure the state of every individual particle to know what is going on in a complex system?

So "untruth" is really only ever "unefficiency". Even a really bad theory could be acceptable if we are willing to treat every exception as something to be individually explained by some excuse. That's how religion deals with the irregularity of miracles, or psychics with the erratic nature of their forecasts.

In other words, this harking on about truth or veracity shows the grip of another age. We should be more use to pragmatism by now. However that in turn - in being based on a hierarchically-organised constraints-based logic - stands against certain other philosophical leanings.

It is just as wrong to say laws are merely convenient descriptions as to say they are actual truths. That way lies an argument for strong social constructionism.

Pragmatism has to stand in the tricky space between these two extremes. Laws may be just descriptions, but they are also optimal in some way that actually reflects the hierarchical and constraints-based facts of the world. The structure of existence is out there. The exceptionality of nature is being suppressed by its own accumulating history. And science - as an epistemic structure - works best when it adopts the same logic.

There's a point to be made about how this very nicely captures a Wittgenstienian take on truth - in which truth is what we do with it - but that's perhaps for another thread. — StreetlightX

Exactly what I fear. All this is slanted towards the support of strong PoMo relativism. Out goes the baby with the bathwater as usual.

But I made sure to label the pain I am concerned with as "torturous" pain. — darthbarracuda

Yes. So pain that is "meaningless" as a spur to action as you are adding that there is no means of escaping its source.

But doesn't that shift the "evil" to whatever it is that makes escape impossible. So it is not the pain as such. It is the torturer - and the degree to which you would assign moral agency to that entity.

I find it impossible to not see something like, say, the Holocaust, or an antelope being hunted for sport, as anything but evil. — darthbarracuda

OK. But you see how you have shifted from pain being bad to the sources of pain possibly being reprehensible. And so likewise the remedy shifts.

Can we do something about Holocausts and antelope being hunted for sport? Of course. So is the evil an irredeemable aspect of existence itself? You are not showing that.

This is what I'm complaining about. You don't seem prepared to make a proper argument. You talk about the effect as if it has no cause - no reasons. You attempt to close down a proper discussion by calling the pain itself an irredeemable evil. And then from that faulty premise, you will draw the familiar anti-natalist truths.

That torturous pain, an unconditional evil, — darthbarracuda

What make a pain an evil exactly?

I agree pain ain't nice. It could be the most unpleasant thing ever. But why an evil? I presume you aren't just being hyperbolic in your language but can justify this apparently transcendent and rather black and white judgement.

From a biological point of view, a little bit of pain or suffering is a necessity and even a good. It's a normal part of life. We have to evaluate how things are in our relation with the world.

But aren't you introducing a false step where you talk about pain as simply an evil? You are now making an ontic leap from an issue of relativity - pains which are a useful biological signal that eventually become useless signals when we are finally trapped in the jaws of a lion or a mangled car wreck - to a claim that pain just is ... an unconditional evil.

The biological view would be the bad of pain is always conditional on the realistic possibility of an action that would bring its relief. You seem to have abandoned that naturalism. So do you have an ontological-strength justification or are you merely being rhetorical?

It seems likely that an ideological battle will take place on the world’s stage, pitting a “retreating” liberal democracy against China’s growing one-party autocracy, the latter of which will make increased gains in influencing and exporting its political model on developing countries, or to be copied by political parties within developed countries. — Maw

I'm not sure you've got the psychology of it quite right. The point made to me when I was meeting some of Taiwan's top China watchers - who really need to know - is that China's leaders have a greater historic fear of the potential for internal rebellion. If the people rise up, that's quite a lot of people.

So the US was founded on one kind of mythology - the endless frontier. China is instead a belief in an insular empire that had a bad century or two and now is getting back to how things should rightfully be.

Against these two identity myths, you have the realities of runaway consumerist economics and the environmental limits to that lifestyle model.

Any ideology is running smack into that as its actual challenge. And the problem is the degree to which either country can look past its past and the sense of self that has developed through that.

You mention Belt and Road. It might be interesting to check out the recent doco on Jeremy Rifkin - The Third Industrial Revolution - on that. He claims to be the inspiration for both EU and China's strategic directions on a transition to a post-carbon economy.

The US - being the big winner of the second industrial revolution - is mired in its Trumpian agenda of "making America great again". Which simply means cranking up the fossil fuel monster that is already dying on its feet. Meanwhile Google, Facebook and the rest are allowed to run riot, untaxed and unregulated in Wild West fashion.

So yes. Ideologies count. The powers are mired in their pasts. But those are colliding with realities. In the end, there is only the one planet to go around. And the second industrial era model is as good as dead. Trumpish politics can only be a blip - although potentially a lethal one.

The EU and China certainly seem to understand each other at the level of sustainable economic models. And China's historic inward-focus likely frames the talk of dominance or world hegemony rather differently. It always knew it was the Empire surrounded by a rabble. Would it matter if it China-rised the US or the EU culturally? That is likely less of an issue with the Communists having so effectively erased so much of that past anyway.

I was referring to a dichotomy of views. Apparently you haven't noticed this: — Janus

Sure, but the dichotomous alternative to panpsychism is panzombieism or pandeadism. — Janus

So, the alternative scenarios (ignoring dualistic substance ontologies) as they are usually conceived are;

matter is alive and intelligent

matter is dead — Janus

Sure, you talked about dichotomies in terms of both epistemology and ontology. So there is the dichotomy between the model and the reality. And the model of the reality can be of the dichotomies that form reality. And then - the Peircean finale - the dichotomy of model and reality is essentially the semiotic dichotomy that is also the dichotomy that constructs reality.

So it is all connected and intertwined.

But I was addressing the form of your particular ontic claim here - that reality is composed of a substance that is either intrinsically alive/aware or, instead, dead/inert ... whatever that could truly mean.

I'm still waiting for a response on that. Saying that our ontologies are just themselves alternative views is a different issue.

Or rather, what I was saying was you were adopting an epistemology that relies on LEM-derived antinomies. A metaphysical dichotomy has a different dialectical logic. So now we are dealing with the meta-dichotomy of your essentially reductionist approach - a reduction of dualisms to monads - vs my essentially holist approach, where there is the opposite of an expansion towards a triadic or hierarchical systems model in play.

And elsewhere I have agreed that reductionism vs holism is a genuine epistemic dichotomy. They are the asymmetricisation of each other. They are complementary modes of inquiry in most ways. Each goes to its own extreme - one towards logical atomism, the other towards absolute contextuality.

But that is a sophisticated position to arrive at. And panpsychism is the very opposite of a sophisticated position. Which is what would make panzombieism or pandeadism just straw men, not serious alternative ontologies.

No, Apo - belief is a point of view. — Banno

Sure. "Truth" falls out of the picture as we realise there is only actually belief and its justification. We've established that already.

But then justification - why we ought to believe - brings us to the embodiment of some reason. We have to account for the "self" that is having the "point of view".

However carry on deflecting. Let's pretend truth hasn't dropped out of the picture as a transcendent presence which is "truly out there" - freely existent and detached from any point of view.

But that is not a dichotomy as it is one thing with two mutually exclusive properties. A dichotomy would be like location~momentum complementarity where matter has both irreducibly, but being constrained in one direction has material consequences for its partner property.

You are trying to say instead that matter has to have just one or the other in absolute fashion. Either it is universally alive or it is universally dead. And because we at least are alive, we can't then believe that the rest of existence can be dead. That is the panpsychic argument in a nutshell.

So technically, you are arguing by antinomy. You are insisting that the law of the excluded middle applies. That's different from a metaphysical dichotomy where the polar extremes become the complementary limits of existence.

If there is mind and there is matter, then neither themselves "really exist". All things could only tend towards one or other extreme. Neither aliveness nor deadness could be universal states in themselves. It is only their relativity that is present and real in the world.

And to make sense of that, we would have to be able to see the connection which makes that sound right. Which is pretty much the point of Peircean semiotics.

You can't arrive at a sensible pan-istic tale via a LEM argument. That is designed for reasoning about sets of absolute particulars, not metaphysical generalities. Before a binary logic of the either/or, we must begin with a justification of how the fact of binary possibility - pairs of opposing limits - could even arise within this one world that is Being. That is the critical step that you are missing and which panpsychism is set up to skirt.

The question - and it's not a small one - is what one ought believe. — Banno

Which circles the issue back around to defining this "one" that might ought to be doing anything at all.

Truth is a point of view. So that requires the two things which a theory of truth needs to account for. The facts of the matter, but also the imagined entity that would have some reason to care.

Despite being asked a gazillion times, you always go silent about this other side of the truth equation. And this seems tied into your desire simply to be able to assert truth without having to justify your "self". ;)

Sure, but the dichotomous alternative to panpsychism is panzombieism or pandeadism. — Janus

Well it can't be because we ourselves show that nature has its "psyche" bit. So the real problem for any pan-istic story is to actually enshrine a dichotomy which has some universality. Just trying to have it that everything is mindful is as non-explanatory as trying to have it everything lacks a mind. This kind of pan-ism is monadic and lacks a dichotomous distinction which would actually explain anything in terms of a mutual or complementary opposition.

So the more usual dichotomy would be between generalised simplicity and particular complexity. Mind is what you get when material structure is the least simple. Brains are highly negentropic structures, when compared to the highly entropic world in which they exist. So right there is a qualitative difference of a dichotomous nature we could investigate.

I of course argue for pan-semiosis as an ultimate metaphysics.

The difference between the living and the dead comes down to a semiotic or modelling relation. The mind is the brain modelling the world - a world in terms of a self being in it. A view which pretty much accounts for the meat of the OP. And so we can see there is a primal distinction based on information or symbol vs matter or dynamics. Mind arises as the information that regulates material dynamics in complex adaptive systems.

So we establish the dichotomy that separates the living and mindful material structures from the ones that are dead and unconscious. That dichotomy is enshrined in semiotics as a science.

Then the speculative venture - the bit that might connect everything up as a pan-istic whole - is to push this dichotomy of symbol and matter, information and dynamics, all the way down to the fundamental level of scientific description. Which happens to be where physics is at right now.

So there are rules to this game. A pan-istic metaphysics - a unity that ties everything in existence together with a nice bow - has to enshrine some fundamental dichotomy which also explains why this unity is a symmetry that is very breakable. The unity has to be a unity of opposites ... all the way down to the fundamental.

Panpsychism is failed metaphysics as it doesn't put forward such a tale. It sort of tries to at times. As with dual aspect monism. Matter is said to have both material properties and mental properties.

But this is not a real dichotomy. There is no sense in which the two are complementary and so formative of each other. It is a claim about two essentially unrelated things being housed in the same "atom". The smallest grain of matter contains the smallest drop of awareness. Nothing gets explained as there is no sense in which this brokenness is itself the breaking of a connecting symmetry. The brokenness becomes a brute and dualistic fact.

With the information~matter dichotomy on the other hand, it all arises from quantum complementarity. Physics has uncovered an exact relation between physical existence and knowledge uncertainty. The relation can be quantified or scaled in terms of the Planck constant.

So there is a way that pan-ism has to work. It must enshrine a dichotomy which expresses a fundamental complementarity that connects all the way down. It can't claim to arrive at a unifying monadism simply by pasting together two unrelated concepts, like a substance called matter and a substance called awareness (or soul, or spirit, or whatever).