Oh? I like to waste my time in exactly that pursuit. — Moliere

I’m suitably impressed.

The custodes custodorum problem is fraught with infinite regress and is therefore fundamentally unsolvable. — Tarskian

In general I would say your maths training leads you astray about the real world. More statistical theory might help you on how effective solutions are good enough. You don’t need exact precision.

I covered that in my shrinkage example. Corruption only needs to be kept within tolerable bounds. Like all social problems. Same goes for the upright citizens. We only need people to be averagely virtuous in their conduct for things to work.

First, it's still debated to this day, whether psychology qualifies as a science. — Metaphysician Undercover

I did specify social psychology. I agree that psychology in general seemed a science in disarray when I studied it in the 1970s. Apart from psychophysics, it was basically so crap I switched to biology. But then Vygotskian psychology reached the West, social constructionism picked up where symbolic interactionism left off, the positive psychology movement began to form. And I had moved on to cognitive neuroscience and paleoanthropology anyway.

So I found my way to the science of value. I never waste time on the dross.

but it has been argued that Wittgenstein was very much influenced by Peirce, — Metaphysician Undercover

Indeed. But what then did he add?

When the people of Israel left Egypt, they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years living as nomads. Even the tabernacle was mobile, so that it could be moved from place to place.

Oh wow. I wasn’t expecting your ideology to be quite so narrowly based.

Why should I be interested in everybody else's problems? Are they even interested in mine? — Tarskian

Sure, sure. One can always live on the fringe as an option. Or seek to flee it too.

Digital nomad or migrant worker? Individuals can always be individual. Hierarchy theory is about the larger balance of a system that has to be a scalable combination of its freedoms and constraints. That is where the political debate begins.

If I could, I would reprogram myself around the morality of the original hunter-gatherers but these guys could not write. So, they did not transmit a copy of their moral rules to us. That is why I make do with the nomadic shepherds. — Tarskian

But we know quite a lot about hunter-gatherers. And what reliable sources are you using when it comes to nomadic shepherds? Any cites?

Every system can be gamed. If it can be gamed, it will be gamed. — Tarskian

And every system can be policed. That is what hierarchies are supposed to be doing if they are properly organised.

Hierarchies are just how nature plumbs its entropy flows. They are essentially neutral. Humans have simply turned economic and social hierarchies into something we can consciously construct. Scale neutrality becomes something we thus also have to maintain by good political design.

That is why anti-oligarchy and anti-monopoly policies exist. Breaking up the blockages with a bit of vigorous intervention.

Or not, if a good system is becoming a failing one.

What about this as a better way of framing it for modern times? The globe is busy self-organising itself in terms of these new mobility possibilities.

The emerging hierarchy is influencers at the top, then the digital nomads, migrant workers and state-collapse refugees? Some travel by super yacht, others by rubber dinghy.

First of all, colonialism is about forcing your views onto the indigenous population. You are not in that position as a digital nomad or nomad capitalist. You just need a place where the ruling mafia will leave you alone. It is not about oppressing others but about avoiding getting oppressed yourself. — Tarskian

Exactly what the colonisers shipping out Europe said by the boat load. They looked forward to no longer tugging the forelock at home, enjoying the welcome of the free and noble savages in the lands without yet the corruptions of civilisation.

Of course, illusion collided with reality with often genocidal results. At least the digital nomad can feel they are not importing their disease and cannon. Just their Melbourne cafe culture and sleaze.

I perfectly understand the allure of being a digital nomad. My comment is that this nothing new. Pick up sticks and head for where your relative poverty becomes relative wealth. Plenty of pensioners do exactly the same thing.

The political question is what do we think about it if we extrapolate the trend - the trickle becoming the flood? Do we still think it such a wonderful thing? Does it successfully scale?

Get to that question and you have a political position to advance here. At the moment you are just describing running away from problems rather than fixing problems.

In the end, all morality emanates from the laws of the Almighty. — Tarskian

Well that’s a point of view. But also the kind of appeal to transcendent principle that any hierarchical order is going to need to make to bring everyone under the one social system.

That is, religion has long served this precise social function. And sadly religious institutions are also famously corruptible. A constitutional society seems better. But the US is an example of how that can eventually go if it doesn’t keep its power balancing mechanisms politically up to date.

Karl Marx did not erase hierarchical order. His communists merely created another one. — Tarskian

Marxism failed as communism. But it fared better as social democracy. Russia and China had to make big jumps just to become industrial powers within a single generation. Europe was already a bunch of wealthy industrial powers - due to their colonial systems and technological might. So the basic issue of what kind of societies they wanted to be was at least in play in that regard. They were various versions of constitutional monarchies and so pretty high tech as social hierarchies.

As @frank notes, even then it took world wars and depressions to break up the wealth accumulations and tip the balance back towards the “ordinary folk”. So not exactly a well planned approach to bringing the balance back towards a more Gaussian wealth distribution.

Political power itself cannot be abolished. It will always exist because that is simply human nature. — Tarskian

Hierarchy is simply nature. It is the pattern that self-organises to distribute anything in scaled fashion. Your circulation system is fractal so that all your cells can live “each according to their ability/each according to their need”.

Power is a vague term, but it can be more precisely defined. US dollars per barrel of oil is a good metric these days, just as horsepower was a while back, or bushels of wheat.

Political power perhaps ought to mean the ability to get good things done. To be able to command resources with capital. In practice, it has been corrupted by adding the rider of “…for me, and my gang”.

So sure, we can have political power without also having its corruption. Or we can at least - pragmatically - minimise the corruption to some statistically tolerable level.

That is the way technocratic policy makers indeed think from long experience of trying to make political systems work. You can’t catch all thieves, but you can run a business that puts on a customer friendly face and so profits even while having to manage its annual “stock shrinkage” number.

Most of what actually happens in “power” circles - in well-run social democracies or corporations at least - is so mundane and commonsense that there is no doctrinal debate. The small stuff takes care of itself. The big stuff? Well that can be left til tomorrow.

Freedom from harassment by the oligarchy is possible. It takes effort to achieve it, but in my opinion, it is definitely worth it. — Tarskian

Wow. You realised you describe the age of Colonialism so well. Just the same model in today’s world. Pack up your bags and settle in some land inhabited only by natives you fundamentally need not care about. Take it from there.

just want to riff on this idea of hierarchies being inevitable, and whether democracy manages to address hierarchy at all, or is just a re-invention of the same. — Moliere

It is quite accurate that nature organises itself with hierarchical complexity. That began right from the Big Bang. It is the natural pattern of all Nature. It is the logic of organised being that can’t be escaped for reasons that hierarchy theory as a mathematical science makes clear.

So the thing when it comes to politics is to recognise the fact and use it to your best advantage. You don’t want to waste time trying to erase hierarchical order. You want to understand it well enough to use it to achieve your goals.

In general, democracy embodies the ideal of some fruitful balance of local competition and global cooperation in a society. Fruitful can then be defined in various ways. And that’s where choices start to get made.

If you want democracy that delivers eternalised 3% GDP growth, then that is a very simple thought that can indeed scale to organise a whole society. If you want that growth to be “fairly distributed”, then that becomes more complicated to ensure.

What even is fair if you, as a society, have decided to pursue growth over stasis (or even a well managed decline, as in Green politics)? Stasis would be have a Gaussian distribution of wealth as its ideal. Growth would be powerlaw.

Then how do you deal with oligarchy and other forms of wealth accumulation and corruption. Political power is going to accumulate in powerlaw fashion as well unless your economic system is run in a way that is independent from your political system.

So could you have a Gaussian constraint on wealth accumulation coupled to a powerlaw distribution of wealth? Getting tricky to manage. To do so would require having your society entrained to some kind of strong transcendent principle about billionaires returning their money to society in a counterbalancing generational fashion and not leaving it to their kids or self-agrandising but ineffective foundations.

So understand the naturalness of hierarchical order and you can start imagining the big picture choices that have to be made so as to tune the hierarchical order that is going to emerge no matter what social course you decide steer.

Always better to drive with a hand on the steering wheel. Make hierarchical complexity work for you.

If we were able to divide the world into subject and object, internal and external, private and public, and to put colours firmly in the subjective, internal, private zone, then all would be good for many folk here.

But colours are demonstrably a part of the objective, external, public world. — Banno

A flick through the pages will show many arguments directed towards me as if I had maintained that colour is nothing but an objective, external, public notion. That is not what I have been maintaining, so those arguments miss the their target.

I have not offered a substantive account of the nature of colour. I do not need to, in order to show the poverty of the scientistic view. Indeed I think there is reason to doubt that any theory of colour will be complete. — Banno

Congratulations for finally spelling out your position. Not sure why it had to take so long.

The simple way it fails is that there is everyday talk about colours and then there is scientific talk about colours. The first requires no real philosophical clarification. The second absolutely demands it – precisely to head off a collapse into everyday lumpen realism and its evil twin of everyday lumpen idealism.

In our everyday linguistic practice, even animism is quite acceptable. We can complain about how it only ever rains on the days we have off, as if the weather operates with malign intent. No one is particularly confused by this kind of mixed message talk. It can seem both true and false at the same time while also doing the intended job of sharing a viewpoint about how life itself can seem unnecessarily against us.

But in philosophy of mind, you have to start being more rigorous. The confused ontic commitments of everyday social chatter have to be brought to the surface and given a hard working over.

What is missing from all your posts as far as I can tell – given their normally sketchy and evasive tone – is recognition that human psychology is socially-constructed in a way where we are all taught to objectify ourselves as subjective creatures. And that is just how the system semiotically works. To live in linguistic communities, we must become our own narratives. We must have a running story of "our private self" that stands in fruitful contrast to the "other" that is "the real world out there".

So the "big mistake" you are trying to correct with all this beetle in a box guff is not the bug but the feature – at least so far as everyday community life is concerned. It is a division we must participate in creating for there to be this thing of socialised humans doing their human social thing. The creation of a private realm that makes sense of there being a public ream, and vice versa.

Science understands this aspect of the human psyche. We have social psychology that can tell us exactly how it all works. Self-awareness, autobiographical memory, socialised emotions, the "faculty" of creative imagination or of rationalising reason – these are not things in need of a neurobiological explanation but a social-constructionist explanation. These are ways in which the neurobiology of mind has become extended by Homo sapiens making the semiotic step to being also the new thing of linguistically–structured lifeforms.

If we clear that little issue out of the way – which is the level a lot of your "philosophy" gets stuck at – then we can get down to the more basic issue of what the neurobiology has to say about sentience, awareness, consciousness, etc. The more difficult "hardware" level issues of accounting for the phenomenology of "being a mind".

So the problem ain't scientism. The problem is failing to divide the general problem of "consciousness" into its separate semiotic parts.

Set some example case like "why does red look like red", the first thing we ought to do is reply that well, there is this simple socially-constructed level to that story, and then there is this deeper neurobiological level which seems to be what you are actually interested in here.

And clearly, Wittgenstein is not a great place to start if we want to move smoothly into that deflationary science-based approach. Anglo logicians had no clue about the evolutionary structure of human cognition.

Whereas Peircean semiotics would be precisely a good place to start. It was highly influential to the development of social constructionism in the early 20th C and had become equally as relevant to the neurobiology by the late 20th C.

So sure, you can set things up that you are here to fight the good fight against scientism. For you, humanism or whatever has to come first. And any dialectical framing of the metaphysical issues – this dividing into subjective vs objective, etc – has to be already a wrong step because ... well, Hegel was a silly old fool.

My criticism of this is that it is a stale position that talks past what is of relevant philosophical interest.

The phenomenology of colour experience can't be deconstructed simply as linguistic analysis. Although sure it is worth doing that properly, and so appealing to the relevant social psychology there.

But then what folk are really bothered by is that the firing of neurons is supposed to generate these ineffable feels somehow. And the question becomes how is science – as the not so everyday linguistic community – best explaining that.

Rehashing Wittgenstein might help a bit with the social constructionism perhaps – at a stretch. But it is quite unequipped for the neurobiology. And trying to draw a boundary around the whole topic in terms of the "pragmatics of everyday linguistic communities" is a sad defensive tactic.

There is no reason not to do philosophy of mind properly. The answer to bad metaphysics is well organised inquiry.

but how many people in Teruel or Jaén would give for some of it! — javi2541997

I wondered what the problem might be in Spain and found out that Jaén is a weird story of building a whole new tram network in 2010 and then mothballing it – apparently because of some competition dispute with the local bus company, then a change in regional government who felt the subsidies were too expensive.

This seems another illustration of the general problem for sane transport planning. The world is torn between the individual solution and the state solution.

Everyone would prefer to be driving SUVs on empty highways, leaving their steeds in a free parking space, and then enjoy ambling about in some quaint walkable neighbourhood whose street map was laid out in medieval times.

Meanwhile traffic planners are trying to push through highly engineered mass transit and multimodal retrofits that give some hope of a greener approach to a more liveable urban future.

The first dream is literally insane. The second demands societies willing to make 20 to 30 year financial commitments in a world that is changing at a faster rate than even that.

You say that the public transport of NZ is a 'laughing stock'. Well, I invite you to come here and go to Extremadura or Jaén where there are no trains. — javi2541997

The city Amadeus complains about in fact took inspiration from Seville’s “tactical urbanism” approach to start rolling out a rough and ready cycleway network in 2015. It was never going to get funded for a properly engineered separation of traffic modes - such as getting cyclists out of bus lanes. So it decided to just plunge in and get it done how it could.

In just a few years, Seville had seen cycling jump from 0.5% of trips to 7%. It was a huge change but also one that felt realistic and achievable for Wellington.

This budget approach finally got funded in Wellington’s long term plan in 2021. A goal of 166km new cycleways in 10 years. But already a change in shade of government has seen that funding trimmed.

More contentless ranting.

I take it you're an asshole cyclist — AmadeusD

And I take it you're an asshole, full stop.

FTR, I hate New Zealand. It's an awful country in almost all ways except landscape. — AmadeusD

So why live there?

Nothing you have said makes any sense.

This is really getting into the weeds but the NZ context is that bus lanes are being created by taking out roadside parking and the margin of the road where cyclists would normally pedal.

So from a cyclist point of view, they are being asked to share with buses rather than the other way around.

National multimodal transport policy 10 years back was anticipating a transition to the building of separated cycleways and a lot of that was being built under previous governments, helped by the fact the Green Party was part of the coalition.

You seem to be under the impression NZ is going to magically become rich in the next few years. — AmadeusD

You think roads and carparks are cheap national investments? Do you think that countries get rich by not being focused on the long term economics of their infrastructure investments?

Where would NZ be economically if it hadn't made its big push with dams and electricity grids in the 30s. Or the earlier very rapid moves into rail systems, tram systems and coastal shipping?

Do you know anything about NZ's actual past or present, let alone how badly it is handling its future?

You want public infrastructure as good as it used to be? A proper three waters upgrade for instance? Wellington might want that you think. Not the current story of both centralising the decision and then pushing the cost and delivery back onto local government. The ratepayers who won't understand why suddenly they are getting charged for water when so little is being done to fix their own network.

NZ could have just got on with its big infrastructure investments like Auckland light rail, Lake Onslow pumped hydro, the new Cook Strait ferries it had already ordered. But instead short-termism rules. Voters are encouraged to think that public finance should indeed be run like a house-hold budget. Money can only be printed by banks to inflate house prices.

Cyclists are some of the least respectful people I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with on the political front. — AmadeusD

You seem spectacularly uninformed about the country you live in. Talkback radio level. Why would your views deserve respect when they are so lacking in content?

The general idea of setting up bus lanes in NZ cities is to prepare main commuting routes for eventual conversion to light rail networks. Or at least some kind of rapid transit corridor. It reserves the road space that these projects will need.

In the meantime, anything that encourages more cyclists and bus passengers, less motorists in SUVs, is a step in the right direction so far as urban planning is concerned.

So it is all part of the plan to reinstall the rails and cycles that were the dominant transport mode just a century ago. But the car lobby will be the reason governments get nervous and keep pulling the plug.

Although now even a light-rail and cycleway cancelling government is having to resort to congestion charging. Small cities like Christchurch, Queenstown and Tauranga are starting to get commute times to match the legendary traffic snafus that already 20 years ago had spoilt Auckland as a place worth living.

It's utterly insane that cyclists are legally allowed in bus lanes. — AmadeusD

Why? Bus drivers are at least professional and trained to be attentive. They are not texting or day-dreaming like the average car commuter. What's the problem?

Here in NZ, cycles are legal on footpaths — AmadeusD

Erm...

It’s illegal to ride a cycle on footpaths unless you’re delivering mail or the cycle has very small wheels (wheel diameter less than 355 millimetres). As well as people walking, footpaths can be used by people on push scooters, e-scooters, skates, skateboards, and other similar ways of getting around.

https://www.nzta.govt.nz/roadcode/code-for-cycling/paths-cycle-lanes-and-bus-lanes

That's odd. I thought it took two to make a fight. — Ludwig V

That was my point. Left and right used to be about social and economic policy settings. A debate over the right national system. Now it has shifted to identity politics. Are you siding with woke or MAGA? Personal crusades. Should you even be allowed to exist with those views within a shared social system.

Of course, when I'm driving, I get annoyed at the pedestrians and other cars that are in my way. When I'm walking, I get annoyed at the other pedestrians and cars that get in my way. — Ludwig V

So motonormativity is in fact a generalised modern impatience. A reflection of accelerationism in a society addicted to faster/cheaper/more.

What is being rejected is a reduction of colour to mere percept, because doing so fails to account for the use of colour terms in our everyday lives. — Banno

And the problem here is this bogus notion of "our everyday lives". As humans we are semiotically organised across at least four levels of reality encoding. Genes, neurons, words and numbers. At least four levels of "language" are involved in constructing our "everyday mentality".

So much is assumed by this idea of there actually being this thing of our "everyday lives". It reeks of the social privilege that it claims to transcend.

I want to say that the person devoted to some variety of Scientism labors under a strong fact-value distinction and claims that any sort of normative or value-laden predication must be false, and that the phenomena in question are then ultimately arbitrary. — Leontiskos

Agreed. And an excellent definition of Scientism. Semiosis aims to be a science of meaning. And so it assumes that anything we value as an idea or habit must have pragmatic value as "a way of life". Even if it doesn't meet the approval of Scientism.

But as I argued earlier, semiosis is balanced precariously between idealism and realism. It is having to make its own case as something beyond either of those two monisms. The thing that is different in its triadic structuralism.

My bold claim is just how quickly this project has been progressing these past 50 years.

Ecological and evolutionary arguments can show why things like color are not arbitrary. But then as a theist I hold to a more fundamental teleological reality, which also points towards a diverse and multifaceted world. — Leontiskos

OK, theism would be our sticking point then. I doubt I could have had a more atheistic upbringing. :smile:

But pursuing that line would be futile unless you were defending some point where a deity must intrude into the workings of nature. If God is unnecessary for consciousness, fine feelings, or the Platonic necessity of mathematical patterns, then where is His role in causality?

Natural philosophy can push the need for divine cause pretty much completely out of the picture. Especially if even the Cosmos is a Big Bang evolutionary story – the telic inevitability that comes with it describing a natural thermodynamic arc of an ultimately hot and small event falling endlessly into a heat sink – a Heat Death just as ultimate – of its own creation.

Once the entire history of the Universe is reduced to the dialectical simplicity of a "great inversion" – the hot/small halving and doubling its way to the cold/large – then any divine intervention or finality is really pushed to the fringe. Efficient and final cause are now the start and finish line of the one larger "motion" of a mutualised symmetry breaking.

The Planckscale as the supposed efficient cause – the triggering quantum event – is also just as much the final cause in that it is indeed as hot or energy dense as it is spatiotemporally small. And the same applies at the Heat Death when the Planckscale is just inverted to become 1/Planckscale. The de Sitter vacuum state of being as large as it is cold and devoid of energetic potency.

So all causality appears to be wrapped up in this physics. It is pure internalism. No divine hand needed either to light the blue touch paper, nor call time in a final judgement.

Of course Scientism struggles to articulate this as a story of the Big Bang because it is so bad at recognising final cause. The principle of least action and action at a distance are still a bit embarrassing to talk about, even if they are essential to normal physics.

But Natural Philosophy encourages the idea that the Cosmos is a Darwinian event, and even a structualist story – in particular, a dissipative structure story. And I like the idea that pansemiosis is another way of labelling the physics of dissipative structure. Although it responds just as well to other labels like systems science, infodynamics, hierarchy theory. Plenty of folk quietly feeling the same elephant.

But anyway, that would be my next challenge. Where does any divine cause seem needed in a Cosmos that keeps seeming to be explained in the terms of a self-organising structure of relations?

If it can be shown that the Cosmos is not just some random thermal event, but instead the self-organising story of a world managing to exist because it constructs the very heat sink upon which its existence is contingent, well where is even a God of the gaps a necessary character in the collective narrative?

Motonormativity, a term coined in a recent study, describes an unconscious bias in favour of cars and motor transport generally. It is the automatic prioritization of the needs of cars over the needs of pedestrians and cyclists, which results in an inability to make impartial judgments. Curiously, the study found that even non-drivers harbour this bias. — Jamal

While I might strongly agree with the general sentiment about cars having taken over and social pushback being required, it also has to be pointed out the perils of this kind of woke framing of the situation.

I've a big interest in green politics and so in transport reforms. And what is plain is how the car lobby simply expresses a thermodynamic preference. Petrol and tarmac lets us all individually rocket at great speed to anywhere we might wish to go. It is a huge liberation of the human spirit. A tremendous adventure. Cruising around in cars and legendary road journeys were the stuff of my youth, when you could get a licence at 15, the roads felt empty, and speed radars were only just being invented.

So it is quite natural that - if it is possible – blatting about irresponsibly is one of life's great joys. Then faced with that, transport planners and urban authorities know that giving free reign to this luxury good is very bad in a world limited in its ecological and social capital. We need a long term plan to get this genie back in its bottle.

And it gets very frustrating that the gap between what seems obvious commonsense and popular preference just grows exponentially. The planners at first though rationality would prevail, then that if they started to build cycleways, pedestrian precincts and walkable neighbourhoods – pushing them through local politics in increasingly sly fashion – that people would suddenly wake up to this new better world and thank them, demanding much more of this kind of thing much faster.

But now the experts have had their sensible plans thrown back in their faces by the market realities so many times that "motonormativity" would be a new way of framing matters. The unwashed public is guilty of the moral sin of not just an irrational preference, but this is a bias – a decision – so socially internalised that their culture must be remade from root. The experts are justified to go even harder in a crusade that doesn't merely seek to persuade or cajole or entice, but socially shames and stigmatises. Any level of action becomes possible once the moral right is clearly on your side and not on theirs.

Again, I completely sympathise with the side that can see the sense of rolling us all back to a more sustainable world. But also the move to this kind of moralistic framing – motonormativity as the code word for a defective mindset – is a problematic political position.

It sets the state against the individual when really the real opponent is the wider political and economic settings that prevail in a society. Someone is building all those fast cars, promoting the notion of open roads and infinite parking. Someone is stopping the true social and environmental costs being factored into the price of participation.

If you build a world where capitalism has no social brakes, then you get the world that deserves. Impatient drivers and frustrated transport planners are a tiny part of that larger story.

And the criticism concerning wokeism is that it is a turning of individuals against individuals by harnessing the amplification of social media. The polarisation of society into competing online mobs obsessing over finer and finer social distinctions. A diversion of political energy away from the larger story of how we all have to cooperate to share the one planet.

The mistaken assumption that the statement is somehow reducible is leading to strange inferences in light of scientific findings. — Leontiskos

Agreed. But the semiotic position would be that "red" is reducible to some kind of sign relation we have with the world.

This ought to help clarify the stakes. The brain evolved to make sense or its world in terms that increased a species fitness. So there is no reason to think red exists as part of some wavelength frequency detection device.

But given that the brain's colour centre is sited right in the shape and contour decoding path of the object recognition region area, there is reason to believe that hue discrimination is all about the ecologically-relevant function of making shaped objects pop out of their confused surroundings.

Red is a useful sign that here is an object that now sticks out like a sore thumb as it is covered by a surface with a rather narrow reflectance bandwidth. Everything around it is kind of green, because well that is a sign that plants have their own evolutionarily optimal setting for the photopigments used in photosynthesis. And then red is the natural contrast that plants would used to signal the ripe fruit they want dispersing.

So all qualia ought to be reducible in this ecologically semiotic fashion. The logic should be clear from the environments we evolve in. Organisms are engaged in sign relations with each other, with other organisms, and with a world in terms of all its pressing threats and urgings.

This is why physics doesn't answer the crucial question. And nor does treating the signs as world-independently real – actual idealistic qualia.

But a science of sign relations is possible. And that reduces what we sense and feel to ecological and evolutionary explanations.

You should look into Pinter's book. — Wayfarer

It's not even in the university library system and I doubt I will learn anything new for the $82 price tag.

You would have to summarise what he adds to a biosemiotic approach that would seem useful and new.

Pragmatism is the art of being finely balanced on the metaphysical knife edge between the competing pulls of lumpen realism and lumpen idealism.

Even as cognitive science moves itself towards that precise middle ground between the two, folk seem still able to slither away down their preferred side and proclaim victory for their chosen lumpen view.

So enactivism is being misused as the gateway drug to idealism now. And QBism apparently too.

Who or what presses these buttons, and to what end? — Wayfarer

The model does. You have your embodied self-world relation and I have mine.

At a neurobiological level that means you push your buttons and I push mine. But then at a sociocultural level of semiotic order, we get to push each other’s buttons as we argue over the acceptable community model of our collective reality. :grin:

His account often mentions, and is compatible with, QBism, which is not the realist theory in the sense that you insist on. — Wayfarer

So much the worse then. If he were more focused on the nervous system in terms of its actual mechanical interface with reality, he might instead say something more interesting about how the new discoveries in quantum biology explain stuff like how noses can read scents off chemical structures.

And that's a blatant ad hom, he's just a shabby opportunist. — Wayfarer

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then likely it is a duck. Or in this case, another ducking quack.

Recall Hoffman is a cognitive scientist — Wayfarer

Sure. But he has a book to sell, a name to make. There is a social incentive for him to angle his story so as to attract the audience he does.

And it is certainly correct that the neural correlates approach flounders to the degree it represents Cartesian representationalism – the story that the brain is somehow generating a "display" of reality.

That way of thinking about the problem of consciousness just bakes in the Hard Problem. It begins with the unbridgeable divide as its premise. A display needs someone looking at it. Experiencing it. Homuncular regress is the only option once you trap yourself into a neuroscience of "mental display".

Which is why enactive and Bayesian approaches are rooted in the notion of semiotic interpretance or an embodied relation, not in Cartesian display.

Do you see the difference? Especially now from the biosemiotic view – the one that makes good on Pattee's epistemic cut as an actual level of biological machinery – we can see that it ain't all about the "information processing taking place in the firing neurons". Our theory of consciousness has to incorporate the action taking place across the epistemic cut – the action at the mechanical interface between "ourselves" and "the world".

At some point – the point where the Hard Problem dissolves as some kind of fundamental causal issue – you have sensory receptors and muscle effectors coming into the picture.

The neurons of the central nervous system terminate in mechanical switches that are regulating entropic or metabolic flows. The energies of the world are being transduced into information – news about the degree to which the world is proving predictable or surprising in terms of the general brain model. The intentions of the mind are likewise being given effect as mechanical actions. Muscles are twitching in coordinated fashion, driven by that same self~world model.

This is the way that cognition is actually embodied. This is how it penetrates the whole body and lives in intimate contact with the actual world. Sure there is all this neural information processing. But then just as real is that there is all this mechanical interfacing going on. And that is where the rubber meets the road.

And who has that theory?

I mean we all know there are motor neurons and sensory receptors. But start looking for the neuroscientists who are getting into the detail of that mechanical interface – that epistemic cut – in the same fashion that biologists are now getting into the (staggeringly complex and hierarchically organised) interface between the body's genetic information and its frontline molecular machines.

There's no theory that explains the relationship in a principled way as far as I am aware. — bert1

As if you have the expertise to judge.

That there are circumstances in with each fails. — Banno

Fail in what way exactly? Less glibness and more precision please.

So for Hanover, "the pen is red" is not true. I think it is. — Banno

So Umwelt realism? But even this doesn't work epistemically as we have access to more than the way we talk about than just "how it all is for us". We have neurobiological talk. We have physics talk.

As linguistic communities – or rather that more general thing of semiotic communities – we can talk "objectively" not just about our socially-constructed notions of being "selves" with "experiences", but as selves that are part of larger metaphysical and scientific communities of inquiry.

Dumbing things down to beetle in a box, private vs public reference, is fine for lumpen everyday chatter in communities that are in fact rooted in the Cartesian division of "self and world". You can thank a couple of millennia of Christian scholarship for the fact you find such a socially ingrained habit of thought to be your constant default ontology.

But if we are being serious about the issue the OP raises, a more sophisticated and less sophistic metaphysics would prevent what matters from dropping out of the conversation.

I guess it has to be pointed out that "internal" and "external" are not the very same as "subjective" and "objective", and neither is the same as "private" and "public". — Banno

That's a nice little collection of dialectical distinctions. So what is general to them all? Have you thought about that or did you immediately stop right there for some reason?

Where do you see the agreement exactly? I mean, nice try....

So not sophistic enough for your taste? — Banno

Interesting way of putting it when it was your position being criticised for its sophism.

Sure you can have your own philosophical platform of "everyday commonsensicalism" where science and metaphysics just drops out of the conversation as "all us ordinary folk just agree on our language use".

But right there you are already faced with the difficulty that everyday speech in fact enshrines this odd metaphysics of a lumpen realism entwined with an equally lumpen idealism. Folk just comfortably talk about bodies with minds and minds in bodies, worlds with selves and selves in worlds.

Do you really want to shut up shop on philosophical inquiry at this everyday level and call it a day ... for everyone?

The beetle in the box is about the pragmatic limits of inquiry. But it isn't about those limits in terms of sloppy everyday commonsensicalism. It is about the hard limits imposed once counterfactually structured inquiry – Peirce's critical commonsensicalism – runs out of differences that can make a difference. Quite another kettle of epistemological fish.

So as in the case of agreeing to name red as red, despite the apparent counterfactual possibility that Bob may be "really seeing green" and Alice "really seeing blue", we can see why this possibility would come to seem an uncheckable one and thus rightly "fall out of the the conversation". There is no clear way to justify the claim one way or the other. Bob, Alice and Banno can't huddle together and compare notes in any fruitful fashion.

There is some kind of reflecting surface that has a narrowly constrained luminance property, robust under varied lighting conditions, and there are these three folk at least agreeing they would classify the perceptual experience under the one socially-constructed label. Whether the perceptual experience is really the same, and so counterfactually might not be the same, becomes irrelevant to the level at which the conversation is being conducted – the everydayness of given names to colours. Further inquiry looks blocked as counterfactuals are imaginable but not presentable.

But this is an extreme case. We can see that by how quickly things change as soon as we introduce any measurable counterfactuality at all. As in adding luminance information to the wavelength information.

You say that shade is primary red. The pure exemplar case as far as you are concerned. Bob says well it looks a tinge pink to him. And Alice says to her it looks a touch scarlet. What you see as being neither a little darker nor lighter than bang on central, they say sure, it's red. But a red that is a bit white, or a bit back. As you assert, it is not at all blue or green. But for some reason we could hope to discover, we do have a luminance disagreement that can be the subject of a discussion.

We could start checking eyeballs and optic tracts. Humans show surprising variation in their visual hardware. The colours out of two different eyes can be noticeably tinged for some. So it becomes perfectly possible to dig in deeper with the neuroscience and start accounting for that linguistic disagreement in terms of its more foundational neurocognitive basis.

Even the Hard Problemers are happy with science doing that as this is just then one of the Easy Problems science is so good at tackling. :razz:

But if everyone agrees that the fire engine over there is primary red – or even pure pink or pure scarlet, as we get very used to naming colours where about the first thing we are presented with in life is a crayon set and the expectation we will learn to speak about these sticks of wax in socially correct fashion – then our utterances lack counterfactuality. They lack explicit dialectical structure. The path to further inquiry is blocked as we assert no difference that could make a difference. Red is red just as the chair is a chair, the dog a dog, and lasagne is what awaits on the table for lunch.

So the beetle in the box story is simply about the limits of pragmatic inquiry in general. It applies to any scientific account as science demands theories expressed in the counterfactual logic which can thus be confirmed or denied in terms of the consequences that result. Does Nature answer yes or no to the well-put hypothesis?

Consciousness is not some unique problem for science. It is as bad for particle physics when faced with the apparently possibility of there being fundamental particles with no properties at all. What can one reasonably say or do to judge such a hypothesis one way or the other. It drops out of the conversation on standard pragmatic grounds.

But here we are discussing your defence of the idea that everyday language is already quite enough for you, and thus for anyone. If ordinary folk talk about minds in heads and heads on bodies with apparently no hesitations or qualms, then that becomes the agreeable metaphysics and everyone else can shut up and bog off.

Metaphysics is booted out of philosophy. Science is respected but expected to mind its own parochial concerns. Philosophy is reserved for ... well what exactly? Logic chopping and the polemics of ethics?

So yeah. Stop fobbing people off with this trite argument that the redness of red falls out of the conversation, and thus all the counterfactually grounded explanation that leads up to the arrival at such a limit also must drop out of the conversation.

That was the part of the conversation that was in fact the large discussion worth having. It was the metaphysics and the science that had already lifted the game in an interesting way.

What gives our words stability is their place in our common, shared talk of what is around us. — Banno

This may suffice for everyday life. But it would be a weird way for more ambitious communities of inquiry to organise. :roll:

But we can't check, because we don't have a consciousness-o-meter. — bert1

And yet in practice, there are procedures developed by neurologists to determine brain death in hospital situations.

To determine brain death, electrocerebral inactivity (ECI) should be demonstrated on EEG at a sensitivity of 2 μV/mm using double-distance electrodes spaced 10 centimeters or more apart from each other for at least 30 minutes, with intense somatosensory or audiovisual stimuli.

Brain scans can tell if you are thinking about tools or animals. Whether you are day dreaming or focused. Happy or in pain. Not yet an exact science and may never be, but further along than you seem to suggest.

Also you aren’t allowing for how theory would actually be structured to account for consciousness.

The Bayesian Brain is a high level theory of biosemiosis. It covers life and mind in a general fashion as enactive modelling relations. If correct, the story would have to apply to any life or mind that appears anywhere in the universe.

To then look inside your head as a human, with a modelling relation that has an architecture shaped by both its neurobiological and sociocultural habits, is then a very low level exercise. There is the particular way mammalian brains are structured into “modules” that specialise in different aspects of the world model. There is the everyday random way that what you had for breakfast might be playing on your mind as your belly grumbles.

A scientist might have a “theory” about whether you had a typical brain architecture - and make predictions about your possible neurodiversity based on that - but a theory about random thoughts that might arise is not really what you ought to expect. The measuring process to achieve that - the control over your life and experiences up to that date - might be considered a little too intrusive for that to be a desirable exercise.

So you are coming at what science can be expected to do in a simple-minded fashion. Your demands are epistemically naive. Science isn’t magic. Theories are themselves woven into hierarchical frameworks that serve pragmatic interests. Knowledge is knowledge when it is organised to cope with the general to the degree that generality is useful, and the particular to the degree that can matter as well.

That is why - to understand the mind from a neurocognitive viewpoint - there is first so much to learn. There is no one answer to the question you have - give me a theory that tells me both what consciousness is and also why I am experiencing exactly what I am experiencing right now. A theory that collapses the general and the particular, and which is somehow then useful to anyone.

Also: are there some books that you would suggest to explore this topic? — boundless

Nick Lane’s The Vital Question is excellent. And Peter Hoffman’s Life’s Ratchet.

Lane has lots of YouTube talks on his book.

Eric Smith is great - https://youtu.be/0cwvj0XBKlE?si=X8ksxZNJjOLdjlj5

Loren Williams talks on the evolution of the ribosome - https://youtu.be/AF0VmMvE1yI?si=msA7LgpLvKx6AfYn

The area has got interesting in just the past decade as a flood of new techniques are cracking open the questions.

Seems to me that even if there may be no kind of access to a single perspective-independent view of the world, an organism benefiting from fitness payoffs will need perceptual faculties that are synchronized to and can differentiate the actual structure of the world. — Apustimelogist

Well said.

but I question whether it even makes sense to say there is only one "veridical" way for an organism to be perceptually coupled to the environment. — Apustimelogist

A biosemiotician would agree that every organism would have its own umwelt. There is as much evolutionary variety right there as we would expect. Some of us are dichromats, and some trichromats. Evolution can decide the better fit over time. And indeed, as troops of stoneage foragers, there is the argument that evolution favoured an active mix as dichromats can detect food sources from a greater distance, while trichomats do a better job at nimbly processing them up close.

But then as to a general rule of coupling, we can argue for the Bayesian Brain and its optimisation principle. The best way to be coupled to an environment is one that minimises information uncertainty about environmental constraints on negentropic action. Or in other words, to be able to see through to the behaviours that ensure the repair and replication of the embodied organism.

For example, apokrisis theory is that a system is conscious if and only if it models its environment and makes predictions based on that model — bert1

It's not my theory. I just say it is the best available theory. And you missed a vital part of it. That the modelling has a purpose. The purpose – in the broadest sense – is to build a body. Construct an organismic state. Become a dissipative structure that exists in a modelling relation with its world, an informational relation that has this particular kind of material outcome.

So this is the easy way to tell the difference between an organism and just a machine. The model and the environment are tied into this entropic feedback loop. The better the predictions, the more able the organism is able to repair and reproduce.

So this theory could in principle perhaps be used to create an artificial consciousness, and the theory would predict that the resultant creature would be conscious. — bert1

This theory accounts for why AI and Alife are such overhyped projects. It puts a finger on what is missing. The software doesn't have to earn its own keep. The "AI" is not building and maintaining its own embodied and enactive organismic state.

Some factory in Taiwan made the chips. Some dude in California plugged the server into the wall. Some utility company supplied the electric juice for as long as the bill got paid. The AI did nothing at all to produce or maintain the fabric of its being. There was no actual modelling relation in the biosemiotic sense.

If we get scifi, we can imagine AI being created that then takes over control of the human world and entrains it to its own entropic purpose. It sets the world to work building more chip fabs, datafarms and power stations. Humans would just mindlessly clone AI systems in exponential fashion at the expense of their own social and ecological fabric. Big tech would attract all available human capital to invest in this new global project.

Oh wait ... [Checks stock market. Gulps.]

the 'appearance' of 'proto-intentionality' must have been a possibility — boundless

Sure. The field of abiogenesis has plenty of suggestions on the matter. In general, one looks for a dissipative chemistry that could become colonised by some of the organic gunk it produces that proves able to function as a primitive information capturing code.

If for example a thermal vent is already producing organic molecules via minerals like greigite - rich in the same iron sulphur clusters that became woven into enzymatic reaction paths - then already there is a lot of the structure in place to get life going.

So it is not in principle a puzzle. It is putting together some particular evolutionary story that becomes the difficulty, not having a Time Machine.

Here’s a typical article on that - https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/hydrothermal-vents-and-the-origins-of-life/3007088.article