"ontically" confuses me. — Ludwig V

Can Nature be actually indeterminate and not just always determinate? Is there a state where there is no fact of the matter, and thus not even properly any "state"?

What characterises the future in term of its unexpressed possibilities? What came "before" the Big Bang if the Big Bang was the start of everything, including time and space?

It could be quite useful in metaphysical discussion to have this dialectic of the vague and crisp as then you can see how the actuality of reality is always somewhere on the spectrum that thus exists in-between. Nothing is either completely determinate or completely undetermined. And this offers a different metaphysical frame for how we imagine Nature.

We shift from talking about yes or no absolutes – such as determinism – to graded relativities. That gives us more options that might better fit what we see. To exist can always be some mix of the definitely constrained and the radically free. As in chance and necessity.

Interestingly enough, Wittgenstein has some interesting things to say about vagueness of concepts. ... Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? — Richard B

Bertrand Russell took this line in his essay on vagueness.

As a Peircean, one would point out that there is epistemic and ontic versions of the vagueness issue. Russell dismissed the ontic as bad picture of a person could always have been taken with proper lighting, the blurred face in the mirror can always be made clear by giving the mirror a proper polish.

Epistemic vagueness is not really much of an issue. What becomes the interesting issue is whether it is meaningful to describe reality itself as being ontically vague in any proper or useful sense. And a Peircean might rather think it does.

The whole of existence might be rooted in vagueness, and made dialectically crisp only to some pragmatic degree. Potentiality can be constrained into forms and so become substantial. Yet still any substantial state never fully erases its tychic capacity to surprise.

Quantum theory came along and rather illustrated that. We can renormalise the heck out of the quantum field theory representation of a particle. But eventually we must pragmatically "take the limit" and claim the exactness we can't actually demonstrate.

No, it demonstrates colour vision under selective conditions of observation. — jkop

So not like dawn or dusk? Hmm.

From a neuroscience view, the point of colour vision is not because the world is coloured. Or even because it makes vision aesthetically pleasing. It just evolved to make the shape of objects pop out of the visual clutter. We can instantly compute that an object is an object because it is all "one thing" as betrayed by its light scattering surface.

A ripe fruit pops out of the clutter that is green bush. Mammals had given up and downgraded to two cone vision as that was enough. Primates added back a third cone precisely where it would create a sharp bivalent contrast between red and green in terms of the light frequency being scattered.

Likewise the colour vision "module" in the primate brain is right where you would expect. Part of the shape decoding and object recognition brain pathway.

So we evolved not to see red but to see fruit in a world otherwise many shades of tan and khaki. Trees likewise evolved red fruit to call in the seed dispersal brigade.

That red "looks like something" – ineffable redness – is not nature's point. The point is what red emphatically does not look like. And that is green.

You can see this counterfactuality baked into the circuitry of the opponent channel process of the retina.

I find ChatGPT is less of an independent thinker, and more of a mirror or echo chamber. — Bret Bernhoft

And it has a problem in that the more data it averages over, the more it will bland out and become useless. If it starts consuming its own generated media, that compounds the problem.

So it seems sharpest at a reasonable sized sampling and grows dumber after that.

Of course, every problem has its solutions. But I was around for the AI hype of the early 1980s. Lisp and parallel computers were going to be running your corporation said ICL. IBM snickered into its sleeve as it kept on grinding ICL out of its own home market.

This is a good video on that data issue....

As I've already said, I think AIs must also be embodied (i.e. have synthetic phenomenology that constitutes their "internal models"). — 180 Proof

Yep. Does it flinch as you take back a foot before kicking its cabinet?

IMHO, these machines are still only very very fast GIGO, data-mining, calculators. — 180 Proof

:up:

For anyone interested in why large language models are being forced on us for free, here is the business case back story. AI sells more hardware and operating system licences.

This has been how the computer industry has been thinking since IBM leased mainframe systems in the 1970s. Get the customer on an escalator of data bloat. Promise huge bottom-line productivity improvements and rake in the cash as the customer keeps coming back for more CPU and memory as they chase the productivity mirage.

In fact, some kind of intuition of logical principles might be innate. Maybe even animals. — boundless

Yep. Animals can induce or form associations. They can tell the difference between one, two three and many. But deduction, like the counting, or learning grammatical structure, is something no other animal but humans can turn into a fluid skill. So we can make something of that. The mindset behind logical and physical accounts of the world has some neuroantomical basis. We evolved this basic habit of thought that is recursive. We find it easy to think in a nested hierarchical fashion. A calculus of distinctions.

We likely evolved this first over a million years of tool making/using, and then this was further solidified by the development of articulate speech. We needed to think in terms of sequences of construction. Hold a rock and chip it into a desired form. Face the world and turn it into a “who did what to whom” narration.

So there is a pragmatic ground to how we might think reality is optimally decoded. A grammatical instinct. A semiotic system of rules and words, relations and relata, syntax and semantics. A habit of mind that proved itself by its sturdy usefulness over a million years. Even though it was not about the world but about our being able to impose ourself in a mechanical fashion - action sequences leading to desired results - on our world.

Thus there is a ground. But it is neither something of the world or even of our minds. It is a propositional attitude that arose from a semiotic modelling relation with the world. It is neither a pure realism or a pure idealism. It is something that cognitively worked. A tool using hominid could structure its world with a hierarchical order. A grammatical sapiens could impose a further level of still more consciously-distancing narrative structure,

We see then the ancient world where causality continued to have a human-centric narrativism, The animistic and magical thinking where the landscape is alive with spirits and powers. Even at the time of the Hesiod, the Greeks were equally comfortable with causal explanations that “the gods did it” as some more naturalistic account of why a storm blew up or sickness took a child.

Then we get to Anaximander and the first systematic naturalism. We have dialectical reasoning that develops into a variety of causal accounts such as hylomorphism and atomism. We have geometry and arithmetic becoming formalised by the constraints - the closure - of proofs.

What was a logic and causality of narration becomes a logic and causality founded in number rather than words. And this in turn becomes dialectically divided as science and maths. The grammar of physical nature and the grammar of pure ideas.

So yes, logic and causality seem to speak from different spheres today. And we are as comfortable with that as those of the Hesiod era were comfortable mixing the registers of mythical and animistic accounts with more physical and naturalistic accounts.

It seems to work that there is structured speech about the real physics of the world and the true or valid arguments of the mind.

And yet dig down. It all starts and ends in the pragmatism of the semiotic modelling relation we have with the world. What works - and thus what we believe in - is our ability to impose an imagined structuring order on our lived reality.

The foundation of logical and causal thinking is this uneasy thing that is neither properly a realism or an idealism. It is instead a system for constructing dialectical structure - nested hierarchies or recursive pattern - that can fashion the world into ways that conform with our desires.

We use models of logic/causality to constrain nature mechanically. It started with tool-making, then society-making, then civilisation and technology making.

And we are left uneasy - some even claim a foundational crisis - as it is all kind of both weirdly intuitive yet also neither clearly of the world or of the mind.

But, on the other hand, even understanding the concept of 'usefulness' relies on understanding logic. What do you think? — boundless

Self-referentiality is not an issue for a self-organising system. Circularity creates problems. Hierarchies fix them. The disjunction of the dyad becomes the conjunction of the triad.

Let's say that, indeed, logical principles are a 'reflection' of an intelligible structure of the world. How could one 'prove' this view? — boundless

I am taking the Peircean approach here. Truth is what a rational process of inquiry arrives at in the limit.

We hazard a guess, take the risk of assuming a belief, and then discover the pragmatic consequences of doing that. We systematically doubt what we have assumed until we reach a point that further doubt has become useless. Moot. A difference that no longer could make a difference in practice.

Proof seems a really big thing. But it is only important to the deductive phase of Peirce’s three stages in the development of a state of reasonable belief.

We start with the abductive guess. An idea about an explanation. Then we apply a process of deduction that is rigorous in terms of being closed for entailment. We break down our intuition into a set of specific logical expectations. This formal encoding of a proposition - if A, then B, or however we might phrase it - proposes a consequence we can then measure in terms of what actually follows. We can inductively confirm the proposition to the degree that it isn’t being contradicted.

But in order to accept a view or another, it might be needed to be shown that such a view is better than others (or a skeptical approach on the issue). — boundless

If the semiotic modelling relation has been working for life and mind since its biological beginning, and a semiosis founded in number is merely the latest instantiation of this natural story, then that would be a pretty grounded tale I would have thought.

One that is neither stranded in realism or idealism but founded in a lived relation that humans have with their world.

Perhaps a sharper way to put it. If logic is meant to structure our thoughts and causality to structure the world, why should they not correspond in this way. Why not the pragmatic constraint that optimises the value of both?

The definition of pragmatic is found in the limit of inquiry. When further refinement is agreed to be pointless. A difference that would make no difference.

Every hates effective theory. But what if that is just the nature of both physics and logic? As we discover in our own good time.

Not a very adventurous reply.

Because, e.g. in order to establish if something is useful you need to have criteria to establish that it is useful, i.e. coherent with the concept of 'useful'. — boundless

What else leaves us satisfied but that something works. It achieves some goal. It is consistent with our aims.

So sure there is a circularity here. But we know how to approach that. Is it impossible to say anything about what we find to be useful about a logic as opposed to a logic that we think of as patently useless?

We routinely apply this constraint to physics. What makes it impossible in logics? Especially given as we do it routinely. To the point that we think we know what has practical bite and what is verging on abstract nonsense.

Also, practical consequences are empirical facts. — boundless

Empirical facts are measurements. So epistemic facts really. Numbers on dials ready to get fed into formulas.

Physics might not be that physical, just as logic ain’t that unphysical when you get down to it. It is a bit of a social construction to claim that logic is some free choice abstract from reality, or indeed an inhabitant of Platonia.

I think that they do have something in common. In order to formulate the concept of 'causality', I think you need entailment as a prerequisite. — boundless

And vice versa. Did logic not arise from causal reasoning about nature? The concept of atomic actions? The concept of transformations but also closure?

How could both logic and physics be idealised in the language of number - of equations and variables, of operations and values - unless they are both birthed from the same deep concept? Global constraints coupled to local degrees of freedom. The dialectical intersection of necessity and chance.

Or structures and morphisms if you must. :wink:

IMO: logic has no ground at all. — boundless

Why not ground logic in its practical consequences? Like science.

That way entailment and causality might start to look like they have something in common.

:kiss:

Getting things back on track, you will remember my semiotic point was how language had to evolve to the point (and I mean culturally evolve more than neuroanatomically) where it could sustain a new kind of social Umwelt – the mind that sees its landscape as its world. Every creek, every hillock, freighted with cultural meaning.

Here is a good article that touches on this in terms of what you argued about the San and click languages being somehow a sign of unbroken antiquity.

Human History Written in Stone and Blood – American Scientist

You can see that there was a sharp transition around 70kya. Blombos cave marks early evidence of symbolic culture.

But then if this was neurological, then why was it swiftly followed by a collapse back to cultural simplicity so soon after? Brains didn't devolve. So it had to be a social structure collapse.

The coastal package produced a population boom and so powered a growth in tribal complexity. You had a widespread trading economy emerge in the manner I described. A complexity of language and thought that organised the landscape into an extended network of human contact.

But perhaps the climate changed. Social interactions frayed and populations shrank back to isolated gene pools. Southern Africa was pushed into a lower level of hierarchical development. It only came back again when the "out of africa" mob returned with the level of linguistic and cultural sophistication to fire up things once more.

So the anthropologist has to speculate on the available evidence. But this is the kind of considered story that emerges. The real Rubicon is the way language transforms the experienced world into a shared fabric of social relations.

If you don't have the population, you don't have the interactions that produce the structural complexity. And language is going to be matchingly simplified when it is no longer useful in everyday life.

So we have an evolutionary account that has to include reaching a critical mass in terms of populations and the intensity of social interactions. The crucial shift from living as a band to living as a tribe as I said.

Neuroanatomy isn't even under a selective pressure for a tribal mentality given that even Neanderthals struggled to exist as more than very thinly spread bands of about 10. Grammatical speech and the symbolic thought it enables are a precursor step – a good reason for why sub-Saharan Africa started to see this sapiens offshoot gathering some steam from 200kya.

But then comes the population density to properly spark the human transition to being a socially constructed animal. We mixed in numbers and so formed hierarchical networks across "owned" landscapes. We fought and traded so needed kinships structures and genealogy stories. Chieftains and agreements. Raiding parties. The trading of goods, wives and slaves.

Becoming political and economic creatures created the population growth that fed back into even more intense political and economic activity.

Anyway read the article as it puts the click languages into the larger context of what was going on in the world. Click phonemes may seem all cool and weird, but they don't really tells us anything about archaic language. They are not some primitive linguistic feature as far as I can see.

like a well-researched 1200-word comment — Jaded Scholar

:lol:

So yeah, please feel free to disregard my comments, go back to sleep, and I hope you enjoy living the rest of your life in your comfortable, unchallenging, dream world. — Jaded Scholar

Again, where do you think you get this right to insult me without making any attempt to engage with me?

It seems kinda contrary to what you are saying. — Lionino

Perhaps if you haven't properly delved into what I said.

Going further, the phrase "fully modern syntax" ("syntactic structure" does not make sense, it is like saying wet water or dark black) doesn't seem to refer to anything. — Lionino

You could start by Googling Everett’s G1/G2/G3 classification of grammar complexity if you are truly interested.

It is relevant to the OP in that Everett follows Peirce in arguing for an evolution of language where indexes led to icons, and icons moved from signs that looked like the referents, to symbols where the relation was arbitrary.

(I mean did you read that Mithen article you linked to? He just goes astray in thinking the icon/symbol step came before some more general neural reorganisation, which was likely as not itself nothing more that an example of genetic drift than anything that suddenly made sapiens rationally superior.)

Or Luuk and Luuk (2014) "The evolution of syntax: signs, concatenation and embedding" which argues like Everett that word chains become recursive.

The point is not particular whether the Peircean developmental path is right, even if it is logical. The point is that people's whose job it is are quite happy to think that syntactical structure must have evolved to arrive at its modern complexity. Out of simple beginnings, richness can grow.

(Is that woke and diverse enough for the thought police out there?)

But in seriousness, ↪apokrisis's arguments kind of rubbed me the wrong way from the outset, because they contained a kind of derision for the notion of homo sapiens not being superior to non-sapiens — Jaded Scholar

So you project some woke position on to a factual debate? Sounds legit. I shouldn't be offended by your wild presumptions about who I am and what I think should I.

But even in if that happens to be true, I think you are doing a great disservice to how clearly you see humanity, and reality itself, if you let yourself be comfortable attributing this to something innate about homo sapiens, instead of something much, much more circumstantial, that we are simply lucky (or belligerent) enough to be the beneficiaries of. — Jaded Scholar

Jesus wept. This is so pathetic.

It would be kind of silly to think there is only one difference. — wonderer1

It is silly of you to say that until you can counter that argument in proper fashion.

As is usual in any field of inquiry, we can fruitfully organise the debate into its polar opposites. Let one side defend the "many differences" in the usual graded evolution way, while the other side defends the saltatory jump as the "one critical difference" as the contrary.

To just jump in with "that's silly" is silly.

Considering all the bird species able to mimic human speech, it doesn't seem as if you have thought this through. — wonderer1

Yeah. I mean what can one say? You've reminded me of being back in the lab where we slowed down bird calls so as to discover the structure that is just too rapid for a human ear to decode. And similar demonstrations of human speech slowed down to show why computer speech comprehension stumbled on the syllabic slurring that humans don't even know they are doing.

Do you know anything about any of this?

I'm fairly confident that you aren't in a position to prove that the mutation leading to ARHGAP11B wasn't a critical step on the path leading to human linguistic capabilities. — wonderer1

I can see you are fairly confident about your ability to leap into a matter where you begin clueless and likely have no interest in learning otherwise.

you aren't in a position to prove that the mutation leading to ARHGAP11B wasn't a critical step on the path leading to human linguistic capabilities. — wonderer1

I can certainly have a good laugh at your foolishness. A gene for cortex folding ain't a gene for grammar.

By 50kya, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Australoid had diverged. — Lionino

Yep. I mentioned the "out of Africa coastal foraging package" – the explosive move that swept across the globe from about 60kya. Helped perhaps by changing climate as well as a newly evolved mentality.

Oh Banno. There really is no violin small enough to serenade your self-portrayal as the eternal victim of these exchanges. Comedy gold.

Your problem is that I win national awards for my writings on these issues. I publish books. I speak at conferences. You just sit there fuming. Thinking I give a shit.

Too much shouting for this time of the morning.

"Mabel! Call the plumber. It's back again!"

What do you mean by "grammatical speech"? — Lionino

Speech with a fully modern syntactic structure.

I take it from what I have read over the years. — Lionino

On the other side of the extreme, the theories that suggest speech showed up 50k years ago are absurd as soon as we look into palaeoanthropology. — Lionino

I will treat this as opinion until you make a better argument. This is a topic I've studied and so listened to a great many opinions over the years.

The story of the human semiotic transition is subtle. Sure all hominids could make expressive social noises as a proto-speech. Even chimps can grunt and gesture in meaningful fashion that directs attention and coordinates social interactions. A hand can be held out propped by the other hand to beg in a symbolising fashion.

But the way to think about the great difference that the abstracting power of a fully syntactical language made to the mentality of Homo sapiens lies in the psychological shift from band to tribe.

The evidence of how Erectus, Neanderthals and Denisovans lived is that they were small family bands that hunted and foraged. They had that same social outlook of apes in general as they lacked the tool to structure their social lives more complexly.

But proper speech was a literal phase transition. Homo sap could look across the same foraging landscape and read it as a history and genealogy. The land was alive with social meaning and ancestral structure. The tribal mentality so famous in any anthropological study.

It is hard to imagine ourselves restricted to just the mindset of a band when we have only experienced life as tribal. However this is the way to understand the essence of the great transformation in pragmatic terms.

Theories of the evolution of the human mind are bogged down by the very Enlightenment-centric view of what it is to be human. Rationality triumphing over the irrational. So we look for evidence of self-conscious human intelligence in the tool kits of the paleo-anthropological record. Reason seems already fully formed if homo could hunt in bands and cook its food even from a million years ago, all without a vocal tract and a brain half the size.

But if we want to get at the real difference, it is that peculiar tribal mindset that us humans could have because speech allowed our world to seem itself a lived extension of our own selves. Every creek or hillock came with a story that was "about us" as the people of this place. We had our enemies and friends in those other bands we might expect to encounter. We could know whether to expect a pitch battle or a peace-making trading ritual.

The essentials of being civilised in the Enlightment sense were all there, but as a magic of animism cast over the forager's world. The landscape itself was alive in every respect through our invention of a habit of socialising narration. We talked the terrain to life and lived within the structure – the Umwelt – that this created for us. Nothing we could see didn't come freighted with a tribal meaning.

At that point – around 40,000 years ago, after sapiens as an "out of Africa coastal foraging package" had made its way up through the Levant – the Neanderthals and Denisovans stood no chance. Already small in number, they melted into history in a few thousand years.

The animistic mentality was the Rubicon that Homo sapiens crossed. A vocal tract, and the articulate speech that this enabled, were the steps that sparked the ultimate psycho-social transformation.

Ligotti in his book called pro-natalists as part of the "Cult of the Grinning Martyrs" — schopenhauer1

why would you misconstrue a reasoned ethic with a cult, whereby people blindly believe unreasoned ideas and charismatic cult leaders? At least be apt with your derisions. — schopenhauer1

Err. Contradicting yourself much?

I mean does natalism even feel it must rally around some charismatic leader? Does it even have to explain itself to the general public?

The straw man was that you implied that antinatalists are trying to (politically) impose policies on people, — schopenhauer1

So you agree that you are ignoring the OP as given and simply seizing yet another opportunity to burden me with your personal hobby horse project? I must suffer as you have suffered with this pointless philosophy of committing suicide but only by proxy. Negating life so as to remove that chore from the next generation in advance. Somehow that thought becomes a solace.

This is yet more sidelining the ethical issue into some vague descriptive one. — schopenhauer1

Vague? Is that the best you’ve got? But enough antinatalism unless you can actually make it relevant to the OP as it was set out. Show some self-discipline here.

Not necessarily. Neanderthals had language, and they split from us 500k years ago. — Lionino

So you know they had grammatical speech? What evidence are you relying on.

I know this is a topic that folk get emotionally invested in. It seems unfair for Homo sapiens to draw a line with our biological cousins. Especially as we mixed genes with anyone who happened to be around.

But the evidence advanced for Neanderthals as linguistic creatures often goes away over time. For example, a finding of Neanderthals with advance tool culture becomes more plausibly explained by sapiens making a couple of brief unsuccessful first forays into Europe before a third is suddenly explosively successful and Neanderthals are gone overnight.

It doesn’t matter to the vocal tract argument whether Neanderthals had it or not. But the evidence leans on the side of not.

Even if people (aren't enlightened yet) to be full-fledged ANs, they are at least seeing the material conditions of the present and future to be such that it wouldn't be worth bringing more people into it. It's AN-adjacent, even if not full-AN. — schopenhauer1

So a cult? But passive-aggressive?

So you proposed a bit of a strawman here. Antinatalism is not a political policy but an ethical one — schopenhauer1

How could it be a strawman when my OP is about ethical precepts that can scale as political organisation?

l. That is to say, the fishermen blocking you to get to your car is an example of a positive project (fishing) getting in the way of your negative right. — schopenhauer1

Another way of talking about the competition-cooperation dynamic. Except you prefer to see constraints as imposed burdens in this cruel life we are forced to live, etc.

Perhaps more isnt so different after all. — Joshs

Yep. Different was more in the case of Homo sapiens. :smile:

A step up the semiotic ladder. The brains of Neanderthals were bigger (simply because of their bigger frames). But their vocal tracts not redesigned to the extent that can be judged.

There had to be brain reorganisation too. A new level of top down motor control over the vocal cords would be part of the step to articulate speech, as might be a tuning of the auditory path to be able to hear rapid syllable strings as sentences of words.

So the human story is one of a truly historic leap. The planet had only seen semiosis at the level of genes and neurons. Now it was seeing it in terms of words, and after that, numbers.

recognize that More is Different and that humans have more cortical neurons than any other species, and thereby have a basis for recognizing a uniqueness to humans. — wonderer1

The human difference is we have language on top of neurobiology. And the critical evolutionary step was not brain size but vocal cords. We developed a throat and tongue that could chop noise up into a digitised string of vocal signs. Only humans have the motor machinery to be articulate and syntactical.

Exactly when homo gained this new semiotic capacity will always be controversial. But the evidence says probably only with Homo sapiens about 100,000 years ago. And the software of a complex grammar to take full advantage of the vocal tract may have come as late as 40,000 years ago judging by the very sudden uptick in art and symbolism.

I don't think philosophy gives ready answers to these, instead going in circles or into dead-ends. But the world seems to, and simply. — tim wood

I think you have to give a role to chance in all this. Especially in the modern world where the life choices are so many. A favourite teacher could tip a decision on career choice. At every point in life you might have gone some other way.

So balance in a physical sense can just mean a state of poised criticality. A random jitter always able to be tipped towards some other basin of attraction.

One could really work to find some life balance in a purposeful way. And one can also be bounced about by life in a resilient fashion. Psychologically, these would seem like different strategies and so you would aim for some sensible balance of those too.

It becomes a game of not having rules about rules as a rule. Sort of been my life plan anyway. Or play the game hard but don’t take the game seriously.

Criticality means being reactive but also falling into meta stable patterns. It might be a useful framing as it actually is a basic concept in explaining life and mind. Organisms have to live on the “edge of chaos” as that then allows them to be the ones that stabilise the instability by throwing biological or neurological information into the mix. Live in an energised environment and tip it in some consistant chosen direction.

This is why life is complex. It is both good to go with the flow and to regulate the flow. To not sweat the small stuff and also pay attention to details.

Being caught between contradictory impulse is itself the inherent character of the “good life”. The wife/book dilemma might only show that you are properly alive in that modern sense we humans have constructed as our dominant dynamic, the essence of our critical state. The two directions in which we must energetically swing as post Enlightenment beings.

Not saying that the modern world gives everyone this as a fact. But it does seem the image of an ideal.

:cry:

So what does that change? My systems story says there are global constraints and local degrees of freedom. Choice exists for the individual on all things. All that changes is the degree of constraint.

The tie you wear is such a free choice it might as well be random. Unless it is decorated in swastikas or something.

Having children isn’t compulsory. Your parents and friends may have views. Financial circumstances may impinge. As may fears for the future. As a decision it is complex because it does add real meaning to most lives but is also your biggest single life commitment.

This would be a reason why antinatalism seems wrong in trying to impose some global ought on the basis of a very false premise about the universality of human suffering.

Making a personal decision based on clear information about the collective future is quite a different thing.

I love the short phrases that say a lot. — Fire Ologist

Yep. You brought out the dialectical structure of the thought very nicely. :ok:

No I think “computation” is quite misguided in that direction. And what logic are we talking about? Boolean, Turing machine, floating point simulation, python? Just some kind of digitalism in general? The questioned would have to be sharpened.

You could think about where maths and physics do come close as an effort to simulate reality. QCD lattice models of the inside of a proton. What is achieved and what is glossed over might inform such a debate. But probably not.

I know digital physics is one of those popular topics. But I don’t believe that is what information - as it applies as the notion of physical degrees of freedom or entopy bits - has anything to do with computational logic.

Holography is about dimensional constraint - extracting bits from wholes. Computation is about constructing patterns from bits.

But on a technical note, "antinatalism" as you are using it is not quite how it is used in the philosophical literature in the last 20 years or so. — schopenhauer1

Yep. I joke when using it as I don't take it as a serious ethical response to the brute fact of existence.

Sure, we might want a politics that can smooth the baby production to a sustainable rate. But who wants to turn off the tap just because of "the inevitable suffering imposed on those who were never asked"?

Prospective parents are turning off that tap as the future can look pretty dire. Another reason to give folk a political roadmap they can believe in. Not simply tell them your kids are screwed and so are you, so just die now please. No point hanging on for the bitter end.

In the meantime, celebrate a world where you get to make your personal choice on procreation. At least until - in the US – the Supreme Court gets around to dealing with anomalies like you.

How could truth be possible without a formally consistent and complete system to render it as such? — Shawn

Particular truths must be constrained by general truths. Particular worlds must be constrained by general worlds. This is the common structure of both a scientific and a mathematical approach to the business of metaphysical inquiry. As Peirce made especially clear.

I could be way off, so apokrisis can correct me on his own notions, but it seems like apokrisis mentioned this kind of "indigenous" model as once in play, but that it would not longer matter as it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle as far as the runaway entropy we've unleashed since the Industrial Revolution. — schopenhauer1

I'm arguing that we don't really want to go all the way back to this kind of foraging future. That would require getting the population back down to the 300 million or so that a pre-climate change and pre-ecosystem-ravaged planet could sustain – the world of the Roman empire. Actual foraging sustained a population of about a million indigenous souls crouched around their campfires.

We are what we eat and we now eat fossil fuel. Coal saw world population explode from 0.5 to 2 billion. Fertilizer and oil resulted in a population increase to almost 8 billion by 2020. For a while, until middleclass antinatalism started to kick in, we were going not just exponential but super-exponential.

So Model B says we should expect folk everywhere to seek to organise in whatever way works in their corner of the world. How much industrial capacity does a community retain? How defensible are its borders? What constraints does a different climate put on them? So on and so forth.

But a drastic change in circumstance is the time to be armed with some real insight into the mechanics of social organisation. The past can reveal who we really are as ethical creatures when placed in a survival situation. If we default to something, Wrangham can tell us about the kind of very basic settings which made us the highly-organised social creatures that we have the evolved instinct to be.

We "is" constrained by our genetics unless you happen to want to make the other choice and dial up Elon for a tech solution to our ingrained capacity for a cold-blooded hunter's violence that exists in fine-tuned evolved balance with our propensity for cosy campfire singalongs.

That... is highly doubtful. Definitely not a map I would follow. — Metaphysician Undercover

Good to know. :up:

One does not have to look far to find ethical stances quite divergent from those suggested in the OP. — Banno

In their details but not in their architecture. As any fool anthropologist kno'.

A religious and conservative community might come up with a grounding dichotomy such as the sacred and profane. God's eye is ever upon thee. The social constraint dial is turned up high. But in a small medieval peasant village, there isn't much mischief one could get up to anyways.

Foraging communities are likewise quite dichotomising. In a tribe, the in-group vs out-group kinship dynamic is very strong. Wrangham writes about this in his The Goodness Paradox. He argues humans are even neurobiology adapted to this way of responding. We became a "self-domesticated" species that could balance the cooperative aspects of a life based on collective hunting, sharing and child rearing with its dialectical other of a species able to engage in cold-blooded and quietly calculated murder.

Apes have reactive aggression. Humans became more polar in terms both of being able to live more closely as a group and to be proactively aggressive against those outside the group. Even an obnoxious or selfish tribe member could find themselves at the wrong end of a hunting party once that bistable switch of empathy~hostility got flipped. A socially-sanctioned assassination to restore the group equanimity.

It is worth understanding this moral reality as that is the one we may be heading back to under a Model B future. We are set up by our genes to revert to this if also forced back into the entropic status of scratching a living foragers.

The Enlightenment felt like it got it right as it drilled down to the dialectical logic of nature in its most universalised description – the dichotomous balance of competition~cooperation. But that same scientific mindset, that same application of pure reason, was also in the middle of releasing the Industrial Revolution as the next big thing after foraging and agriculture.

So we did as a species find our way into a morality that could scale. One that enshrine competition and cooperation as the dynamic duo – the two halves of the one good, the opposites that produced a unity which could scale all the way to life across a planet.

But that also set us up to ride the techo-fossil fuel train to an exponentialising future. As a political/ethical idea, it could regulate any powerlaw growth regime. And a barrel of oil is as dense and deliverable a jolt of entropification that the Cosmos could possibly offer.

The actions implicit in such a view are very different to those in either of options A or B in the OP. Yet such an approach might be quite conducive towards long-term stability. — Banno

But as I've pointed out, you haven't inquired deeply enough into how indigenous lives are actually structured, both as biology and sociology.

My own position here is based on a deep knowledge of all that.

Furthermore, regarding my previous post, it seems possible that there could be some things one can have in causality (think synchronicity or Bell's inequality locality and non-locality) that can't simply be modeled. — Shawn

That's another line of attack. To what degree can we tolerate a physics that is illogical or a logic that is unphysical?

The two have to hang together in some deep way or they both risk becoming abstract nonsense.

And there is a lot of that about, hey? :razz:

Personally I look at most of what has been said in this thread in terms of computability. — Shawn

But remember Beckenstein’s bound? Even information theory has achieved the entropic closure which seals its deal.

Additionally, as apokrisis main question, is there anything standing in the way of a direct relationship between logic and physics? — Shawn

Another line to take on the question is to note how both logical entailment and physical causality share a presumption about global closure. A grounding as in conservation laws or Noether symmetry.

Just one is closed for energy, the other truth.