If your point is that we don't doubt our conceptual frames, we only doubt within the constraints of those frames, then of course I agree.

And also, as humans, our conceptual frames are socioculturally expanded. We are involved in some grander language game. Joshs born Aztec is very different from Joshs born in, say, 1970s Ohio, or 12th Century India.

But do you now agree that sociocultural multiplicity – that pluralism, that degree of social freedom – is still the product of pragmatic constraints? That it is a way of life that works in the usual organismic sense of being able to repair and reproduce the fabric of its being over some longer run? As a set of habits, it has proven itself properly tested against a larger ecological reality?

So to claim plurality as itself "natural" can only be true within the framework of pragmatism.

One could of course claim that plurality is natural as there is something else that transcends the pragmatism of being an ecologically-constrained organism. For example, a target beyond "this world" in the shape of a divine imperative or some moral absolute.

But is this the argument you are making? And if not, are you content with an ecological constraint on the freedom of our language games and ways of life?

We can try stuff out within those limits? We can do our best to imagine ourselves a better world by more deeply understanding the world we were already thrust into with some set of genetic habits.

We probably do agree this far. Except a lot of those with a utopian concern for the current state of human society don't really seem to want to factor in the environmental constraints on the expression of our social freedoms.

I would argue for example that social justice becomes a nice to have when the question is how do we avoid ecological disaster.

That is why I focus on the "superorganism" analysis of the human condition. The one that places our collective trajectory in its larger thermodynamic context. Our everyday choices must be seen to be making pragmatic sense within that long-run conceptual frame.

Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world. — Joshs

So how does that impact my position given that I've already been explicit that I am rejecting Cartesian representationalism – the ontology that permits all representation to be misleading – and instead promoting a Kantian/Peircean enactivism? A modelling relation view where our beliefs only have to be "near enough for all practical purposes or observable consequences".

We are already intimately and actively embed with a world, which means that we are always thrown into beliefs, practical forms of meaningful engagements with our surrounds. — Joshs

And so? Didn't I say that Peirce started to get things right by beginning over from that givenness and then carefully examining its logical structure.

We don’t just test to confirm already anticipated events, we also anticipate beyond what is confirmed and true, in the direction of not already foreseen possibilities that may shift our conceptions. Reality isn’t something we simply aim to explain, but to participate in constructing in new directions. — Joshs

Again, I just shake my head as you describe the Bayesian Brain at work. We come at the world armed with all the habits of anticipation that were found to be required to cope with that world. As babes, our phenomenology is just a blooming, buzzing, confusion. From experience, we learnt to pragmatically organise this into a known world behaving in predictable ways. Like little scientists, we formed the stories and lived by their consequences, continually growing and learning, updating our habits of belief to the degree that practice required.

You are not saying anything I wouldn't say here. But you are avoiding the point I made. And that is that your pluralism relies on the claim all knowledge can be doubted, while my pragmatism says it is only unreliable belief that needs to be adjusted.

Your pluralist project appears to be reassert the very Cartesianism you would claim to reject as an enactivist. To retreat into the privilege of "personal phenomenal experience" at the expense of the broader social level enactivism offered by a pragmatist epistemology – Peirce's community of reason – seems a very backward move to me. Or certainly, self-contradicting.

Circular innit? — Lionino

Dialectic. Broad as opposed to narrow. Synthetic as opposed to analytic. Meta-theoretic as opposed to applied.

If we believe we can ground this reason in the sovereign epistemology of realism, — Joshs

But don’t we - even at the meta-epistemic level - ground it all in pragmatism? A chair is real enough to take my weight.

Your quote aims at the usual fashionable social “good” of pluralism. But that seems to be “reasonable” only as an epistemic claim based on an endless capacity to doubt. Pragmatism instead is a positive alternative in being based on a willingness to believe - and then test. Belief becomes an inveterate habit if it keeps passing the test. And that same evolutionary credo explains reality as a whole.

So all this talk about struggles and boundaries seems only to come from a presupposition about pluralism and its need to overcome totalising discourses, particularly ones such as pragmatism which seem intolerably successful. Just too good to be true.

But let’s first address the actual epistemic difference that separates those who claim there is always going to be a reason one can doubt - hence all possibilities remain forever in play - and those who instead say being reasonable has to be founded in a willingness to hazard a guess and live pragmatically with its consequences. That is the one best way to proceed when it comes to knowledge.

What are you an expert in? — Ludwig V

Synthesising expertise.

Yes, they are. — Ludwig V

It seems you think you are the expert after all. And you have only just heard of Turchin's work. Probably not even read the paper yet. :up:

Add a huge reservoir of data and progress depends upon interpreting what it all means. — jgill

And that is no different at the level of fundamental physics. Maths gives us the topological simplicity of particle physics as a SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) structure. And yet then we have to have all this other stuff going on to effectively break this symmetry.

Like strong force confinement to preserve some remnant of SU(3) from complete self-annihilation – quarks bound up into protons and neutrons. And a Higgs field to break the SU(2) electroweak symmetry in a way that leaves three massive gauge bosons, plus a massless U(1) photon that could spend the rest of eternity radiating and redshifting the Universe towards its eventual heat death.

So we can have the pure forms from the mathematical arguments. But if the maths is just geometry and topology – a mesh of spatial relations – then it already explicitly leaves out its "other" in terms of the time/energy that breathes life into its equations. It is no surprise that something extra – a little condensed matter physics – has to be added to the brew.

Cosmology had its fundamental symmetry models straight from Sophus Lie. But it took a lot of effort to figure out exactly how those symmetries got broken in the real world by emergent topological effects such as the asymptotic freedom of the strong force, or the way the electroweak force was cracked by "eating" the Higgs field.

Time and energy – the statistical thermodynamics of a cooling~expanding Big Bang – needed to be added to the story so as to deal with "a huge reservoir of data and interpreting what it all meant".

And I suspect Rouse would consider Peirce’s view of the scientific image as an epistemologically-based first philosophy: — Joshs

Of course. He wound things right back to raw phenomenology so as to get going again on a more solid epistemic basis. That is how he could then commit so wholeheartedly to an ontology where the Cosmos is the evolutionary product of "the universal growth of concrete reasonableness", its laws "the development of inveterate habit".

How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.

A reasonable person is going to find a reasonable universe – the Kantian point. But then also, a reasonable universe is going to eventually find itself inhabited by minds that can echo its reason. That is how Peirce closes the loop with his pragmatism.

This is a good summary....

Peirce’s cosmological metaphysics is perhaps the most interesting of his metaphysical writings. Where his general metaphysics discusses the reality of the phenomenological categories, his cosmological work studies the reality and relation to the universe of his work in the normative sciences. The cosmological metaphysics looks at the aesthetic ideal (the growth of concrete reasonableness) and its attainment through growth and habit in the universe at large.

In Peirce’s cosmology, the universe grows from a state of nothingness to chaos, or all pervasive firstness. From the state of chaos, it develops to a state in which time and space exist, or a state of secondness, and from there to a state where it is governed by habit and law, i.e. a state of thirdness. The universe does this, not in a mechanistic or deterministic way, but by tending towards habit and a law-like nature through chance and spontaneous transition. This chance-like transition towards thirdness is the growth of concrete reasonableness, i.e. the attainment of the aesthetic ideal through the spontaneous development of habit.

Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology has left many commentators uneasy about its relation to the rest of his work. His development of it during his own life time led some of his friends to fear for his sanity. Indeed, Peirce’s turn towards cosmological metaphysics is often attributed to a mystical experience and crisis of faith in the 1890’s. In truth, Peirce takes his cosmological work to be the logical upshot of the normative sciences and logic, which show the nature and desirability of the growth of reason. Cosmological metaphysics merely shows how the growth of concrete reasonableness occurs in the universe at large.

Actually, my main interest is philosophy, which involves being interested in everything and having limited expertise in anything. — Ludwig V

Not sure that is how it works. Seems it ought to require being expert across all fields.

So thank you for drawing my attention to this. I did tell you that I am not in principle opposed to these approaches. This one is much better than the other one because it seems capable of dealing with the data without unduly distorting it. — Ludwig V

But they are not different approaches.

Nevertheless, theism tends to be averse to the notion of fundamental flux, — Leontiskos

Hence the “God of the gaps” issue. My position argues from the point of view that even chaos can’t help but self-organise itself into some form or order. Chaos negates itself. Therefore order emerges.

For this reason theistic semioticians like John Deely relate to Peirce in an entirely different way than they relate to scientists bound by modern thought. — Leontiskos

Yes. When learning about Peirce as a group of biologists and complexity theorists in the 1990s, the Peircean scholars making sense of his vast volume of unpublished work were mostly theology researchers. Deely was one.

But considering the idea that the most effective possibility will win out, are we saying that what is known in a prior way to be most effective will in fact win out, or is "most effective" being defined as whatever ends up winning out? — Leontiskos

It depends how much information we have about the situation. If you know that the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism is the simplest possible chiral form, then it is not a surprise that the Big Bang did not stop evolving until it arrived at that final simplicity.

If you know that the chemical reaction with the most bang for buck on the planet Earth is the redox reaction of carbon-oxygen bonds, then it is no surprise that life on Earth kept evolving until it not only could harness this reaction but even set up the planet to have its Gaian balance of oxygen and carbon.

So the basic entropic race drove the Cosmos towards an ultimate symmetry breaking simplicity, and Life, as the negentropic response, was driven towards its maximum negentropic advantage.

The goals existed in dialectical fashion. And they forced Nature through a whole set of unlikely hoops so as to arrive there.

Mechanistic science avoided the whole problem by turning a blind eye, but once teleology is admitted the idea of an ordering Intellect or Mover becomes more plausible. — Leontiskos

Science earnt its keep by being the epistemology that delivered a mechanised world. Teleology could take a back seat as technology was the pragmatic point. Humans existed to supply the point of a world of machines.

But when it comes to now incorporating telos into science, the mathematical inevitability of topological order or dissipative structure is how that is happening.

That could be seen as a thumbs up for Platonism, divine immanence, idealism, or whatever. Or it could be seen as the arrival of a structuralist understanding of Nature that rides on the back of stuff like Lie groups, thermodynamics, path integrals, and Darwinian selection.

His point is that a ‘best possible image’ is always going to be relative to commitments and material practices which are contingently formed through indissociable interaction between the world and our purposes. — Joshs

That’s still just epistemology.

[ It is hard to reply given you say nothing about your expertise or interests here. But if you want an example of what a mathematical and systems approach to history looks like, Peter Turchin’s group is a good example. He was an ecologist turned historian.

This is the recent summary paper of their work - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn3517

Here, we have proposed a general approach for studying historical processes that combines the use of nonlinear dynamical systems, large-scale historical datasets, and a systematic statistical testing of alternative causal hypotheses. Our approach has allowed us to compare quantitatively all major theoretical approaches to the evolution of human social complexity within a single framework and to lay the ground for more nuanced and precise theories to be rigorously tested in the future.

Our analysis confirms that increasing agricultural productivity is necessary but not sufficient to explain the growth in social complexity. Furthermore, analysis indicates that this increase was not driven by factors associated with either functionalist or internal conflict theories. Instead, external (interpolity) conflict and key technical innovations associated with increasing warfare intensity appear to be the primary drivers of state growth, along with the growing population and resource base provided by increasing agricultural productivity.

Our analyses help clarify why a mechanistic model that privileges warfare and military revolutions (63) and agriculture (64) has offered compelling, if provisional, interpretations for what drove the rise, spread, and equilibrium levels of social complexity in Afro-Eurasia in the ancient and medieval periods, as well as worldwide during the early modern period.

Although factors such as infrastructure provision, market and monetary exchange, and ideological developments do not appear to play a significant causal role in propelling subsequent advances in social scale, hierarchical complexity, or governance sophistication, they likely are integral elements that support and maintain the results of that growth, which would account for the relationship observed between these factors in previous scholarship.

Here is how I explained that in a similar thread using the reality of organising an actual army...

That's how hierarchy theory works. It is about the dialectical interaction between parts and wholes. And the two have to complement each other for the structure to persist.

So the whole - the global scale of the system - has to provide the constraints that shapes the right kind of parts. And the parts have to have the right kind of shape to meet the goals of the whole. The parts, in all their freedom, have to be acting in ways that re-construct that whole, in other words.

Think about an army. You need soldiers that act like soldiers and generals that act like generals.

That is the soldiers need to be good at acting on the ground in ways that produce a functional army. They must have the right habits to deal with the here and now of any combat situation.

Then the generals in their field headquarters need to be good at acting in ways that also produce a functional army. They must make the broad command decisions that shape the local combat situations as they will likely pop up during battle.

The hierarchical organisation works because it has a global view which gives shape to the local action. And the local action has enough of a view - enough of its own creative freedom - that on average it produces the kind of result which keeps the army rolling.

The notion of a hierarchy has gathered a lot of negative connotations. No one wants to get told what to do. No one wants to be on the bottom rung of anything.

But if you want a system that is intelligently adaptive, then it needs to have this kind of organisation. It needs to be able to apply its intelligence over multiple scales of being, multiple spatiotemporal horizons of action.

If the balance between the local and global scales are right, then the right outcomes will result. The local scale will continue to construct the whole, and the whole will continue to give coherent form its own parts. The system will survive and function, locked into a dynamic of mutual benefit.

And part of the dynamic is that there is internal mobility. Privates can get made generals. Generals can get busted to privates.

Or at least this is part of the democratic ideal we instinctively understand as being a smart way to operate.

Then further...

An army has to meet its purpose. So there is a Darwinian selection principle that produces the constraints which an army - as a human institution with regulations, history, a social memory - embodies.

The army exists as an idea in the minds of all its participants. So that makes it seem like an idealist fiction.

And yet every private quickly runs into the reality of the army way in a brute and direct fashion if they so much as twitch a nervous smile or leave a speck of dirt on their boots.

The mechanism that generates the constraints is the system as a whole in action over its long-run existence. Or what Salthe would call its cogent moment scale.

Constraint is the great weight of historical accident that builds in Darwinian fashion and acts on every local degree of freedom within a system. It represents the past in terms of what it intends to be its own future.

And then to evolve - being a natural system - it must also be slowly changed by its experiences. So even in armies, the system of constraint gets modified to make it better adapted to its current environmental challenges.

One day you might find women, as well as men, being trained to be unthinking killing machines.

So general evolutionary principles generate the constraints. And at the simplest level, the Darwinian competition is to just exist as a stably persisting process or functional structure.

And more generally...

A telltale fact from hierarchy theory is how wholes act to simplify their parts. Wholes refine their components so as to make themselves ... even more easy to construct.

Take a human level example of an army. For an army to make itself constructible, it must take large numbers of young men and simplify their natures accordingly. It must turn people with many degrees of freedom (any variety of personal social histories) into simpler and more uniform components.

So wholes are more than just the sum of their parts ... in that wholes shape those parts to serve their higher order purposes. Wholes aren't accidental in nature. They produce their own raw materials by simplifying the messy world to a collection of parts with no choice but to construct the whole in question.

Even the Cosmos had to impose simplification on its parts so as to exist. To expand and cool, it needed particles to radiate and absorb. It need a pattern of events that would let a thermal unwinding happen.

That is why you get order out of chaos. Reality needs to form dissipative structure that has the organisation to turn a sloppy directionless mess into an efficient entropic gradient.

Turn a full soda bottle of water upside down and it glugs inefficiently until a vortex forms and the bottle can suddenly drain fast and efficient.

Wholes make their parts by reducing degrees of freedom and creating components with little choice but to eternally re-construct that which is their causal master.

Not to mention...

The systems view is a triadic logic in which you have a dichotomy or symmetry-breaking, and then the hierarchy or triadic state of organisation that fixes a stable relation between those two complementary poles of being.

So very simplistically, a rabble of warriors make a fighting mob. Then the organised thing of an army can develop as the mob starts to divide into leaders and followers. You get the emergence of the dichotomy of infantry and general. Each complements the other in that the infantry acts in the immediacy of the now - the best choices in the heat of battle. The general then acts with the long term view.

This local~global hierarchical division brings stability and coherence. We can speak of the army as an organism, and even an organ system as it develops specialised branches like a reconnaissance force, logistics, artillery.

You even get a thermodynamic divide. The soldiers are the entropy - the grunt energy. The general is the information - the abstract information.

Or alternatively...

Constraints would have to arise immanently from the world they also limit. So the constraints are what get constructed.

The obvious analogy is that armies need to be composed of soldiers to really exist. So armies recruit young people (those with the most degrees of behavioural freedom or plasticity) and mould them to fit. As a set up, the army exists because it has narrowed human variety to produce some interchangeable set of near identical military parts.

And then all those soldiers, acting together in ways that manifest their highly specific military properties, reconstruct the very system that made them. Good soldiers become drill sergeants, captains and generals. Good soldiers take their soldierly habits even back into civilian life. So soldiering perpetuates soldiering.

Thus there is a synergy of the local and global in which a limitation of variety creates the components that are then able to self assemble into systems that keep churning out said components.

Strong reductionism of course just presume components exist already formed. Thus anything they collectively construct is an accident without purpose. However a holist or systems view says components - the kind of regularity that gives us the many similar parts that could have a collective behaviour - must be deliberately shaped.

Contingency has to be limited for there to be these parts. So already their existence is dependent on the reality of some global reason for being, and even an idea of the form of the part that would be necessary to the job in mind.

Continuing the theme....

A key part of the holist position is that the top down causality is something real because it shapes the parts.

So where does sand get its shape so that it might compose a beach? How does it get roundish, smoothed and graded by size? What higher constraints lead to the formation of every particle of sand.

Holism stresses the hierarchical fact that parts are made to fit the whole via development, an approach to a common limit. Parts become in fact parts as their initial irregularity or degrees of freedom are regulated so that they become as identical as matters in the construction of the whole.

An army needs to take raw recruits and turn them into soldiers. Young men with irregular natures must be regularised so they can function as parts of a fighting machine. And once a soldier, always a soldier.

It is this fact about holism - the parts themselves get developed by the whole - that make supervenience and determinism bunk in a systems logic context. Or rather, the parts can be deterministic only to the degree the whole has an interest or concern in making them that.

Grains of sand are still irregular rather than exact spheres. They only need to be roughly spherical and reasonably small to meet the Second Law's goal of maximising erosion. To produce perfectly round and perfectly matched grains would require self-defeating care.

Same with soldiers. They only need to approach an acceptable average.

So because the parts must be shaped to fit, perfect determinism is an ideal and in fact there always remains an irreducible uncertainty or indeterminism at the local scale on which any system is being composed.

This has turned out to be true even of fundamental physics of course. The indeterminism of the quantum is irreducible. And that means everything that wants to build itself up from that ground can't be clockwork determinism. It can only be clockwork on average.

Well here again is your starter from your own source…

We have seen that anarchists abhor authoritarianism. But if one is an anti-authoritarian, one must oppose all hierarchical institutions, since they embody the principle of authority. For, as Emma Goldman argued, “it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretence, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination.” [Red Emma Speaks, p. 435] This means that “there is and will always be a need to discover and overcome structures of hierarchy, authority and domination and constraints on freedom: slavery, wage-slavery [i.e. capitalism], racism, sexism, authoritarian schools, etc.” [Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, p. 364]

Thus the consistent anarchist must oppose hierarchical relationships as well as the state. Whether economic, social or political, to be an anarchist means to oppose hierarchy. The argument for this (if anybody needs one) is as follows:

“All authoritarian institutions are organised as pyramids: the state, the private or public corporation, the army, the police, the church, the university, the hospital: they are all pyramidal structures with a small group of decision-makers at the top and a broad base of people whose decisions are made for them at the bottom. Anarchism does not demand the changing of labels on the layers, it doesn’t want different people on top, it wants us to clamber out from underneath.” [Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action, p. 22]
Hierarchies “share a common feature: they are organised systems of command and obedience” and so anarchists seek “to eliminate hierarchy per se, not simply replace one form of hierarchy with another.”

Etc, etc….

I will briefly note again why this is silly. Hierarchy theory in the systems science tradition is at pains to show how constraints are the reason there can even be freedoms.

Until you understand why this is, you just can’t understand what it means to be a self-organising natural system. You are stuck in some mechanical paradigm and not talking about nature as we find it in the real world.

Are you too disinterested to try to say what you mean in your own words? Or even cut and paste from your source?

I might as well point to the internet and say my answer lies there. You make zero effort.

You might like to think about the history of economics. For a long time, it clung to mathematical rigour. But now the limitations are being recognized and different, more humanistic approaches are being developed. — Ludwig V

But that was because economics lacked the larger constraint of a historical perspective on social order. It was concerned with the plumbing of markets in a pure sense and not with why trading and debt systems are characteristic of Homo sapiens since we got going with the hierarchical tribal structures that turned landscapes into customary narratives of foraging.

Economics too is being pulled into this new cross-disciplinary exercise of applying the lens of dissipative structure to an understanding of why our historical arc of development has been what it is.

I simply point out this is something that is happening in current academia. If you want examples, they are abundant.

I think I'm qualified to talk about social structures, in a philosophical way. Is that not a basis for a conversation? — Ludwig V

The systems view is now moving from thermodynamics and biology to social science and human history. It claims to add mathematical rigour to the conversation. And I endorse this move.

See for example - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-47681-0

Not all naturalist thinking is limited in this way. Joseph Rouse’s radical naturalism is one example of alternative paths that are being taken by new materialists. — Joshs

But Rouse’s concern here appears epistemological whereas I was talking ontological commitments. Rouse wants to place the scientific image within some wider pluralistic space of materialistic images. I am instead asking about the best possible version of that scientific image. What would it be like to bring our scattered scientific understandings of the world into one coherent image of natural being?

A difference would likely be that the image in our minds has to be so abstracted and mathematical that it restructures our own habits of thought. We would be “picturing” a dynamical pattern of growth and symmetry breaking. Our understanding would be more kinesthetic in being about the movements of forms coalescing in spaces. A holistic geometry of relations rather than just some kind of cause and effect narrative.

If you are thinking in terms of pure structuralism, everything drops away except a stabilising architecture of relations - the constraints that produce the freedoms that compose the constraints in the one single triadic web of action.

And there you would have it. How reality hangs together according to what science has discovered. It’s deep structural logic. The symmetry that imposes itself on all possibility.

Getting to that level of the scientific image is what anyone who really “gets” the geometry of nature right in their heads is doing. But it is not then an easy thing for people to share and compare. That is one reason I would always offer Peircean semiotics as an anchor. And systems science in general. The dynamical structure of nature is a form not to be seen as if from the outside but something to become a lived and embodied experience.

It has to be an image in the internalist kinesthetic sense of always knowing which way to move so as to flow with the flow of the natural structure.

You are right that hierarchical structures can be found beyond the context of the social and indeed, the ethological. — Ludwig V

But I am talking about hierarchy theory as a branch of science and not in that everyday sense.

Hierarchical models have been appearing in increasing numbers in scientific papers in recent years, but without any fully developed reference on these forms. In this paper I aim to remedy this lacuna. My focus is on biology, where both forms of hierarchy have been used, but I have included references from all fields where I have discovered attempts to use these forms.

But I am more of a classical theist, and the classical theist won't generally address naturalism on its own terms. — Leontiskos

And maybe I am not your classical naturalist. If you take structuralism seriously, matter isn’t really very material when you get down to it. Even Aristotle’s prime matter or Anaximander’s Apeiron are a little too substantial. Plato’s Khôra isn’t right either but has something to recommend it. Somehow the material principle must be reduced to the purist notion of a potential. As in perhaps a Peircean vagueness or quantum foam.

Form is also only expressed as limitation. The inevitability of symmetrical simplicity. The standard model of particle physics keeps pushing until it finds someway to wind up at the ground zero of U(1). The universe in its final state as a bath of holographic blackbody radiation.

So as a metaphysics, neither matter nor form appear very “real” in any substantial sense. Reality seems derealised in a way that neither naturalists nor theists would think about things. It is all a lot more tantalising.

So then what is the counterfactual case for Tychism? For the idea that Logos is a byproduct of chance rather than a fundamental reality? — Leontiskos

Tychism pairs with synechism. So you have local fluctuations and global continuity. The systems science story of hierarchical order. Each of these conceptions grounds the other. They are really each other’s inverse by logical definition. Chance and necessity as the opposing limits defining the actuality we find sandwiched between these two limiting extremes.

Logos and flux would be another twist on the same thought.

As I read the Wikipedia article on Tychism I find that much of it seems to be in sync with theism and not opposed to it. — Leontiskos

Well Peirce lived in a very theistic times. There was plenty of social pressure, and advantage, to frame things in that light. And I don’t think a semiotic metaphysics in general could come across as clearly opposing an immanent kind of idealism or divine principle as - as I argued - it shouldn’t either stand for anything like an orthodox material account of Nature. It is poised in some metaphysical space of it own that sees both classical materialism and classical idealism as suffering from misplaced concretism and not tuned into the subtleties of Aristotelean hylomorphism as an argument.

In many ways Darwin has become our keystone to interpreting the world, and think this may be due more to a vacuum than to careful thinking or observation. — Leontiskos

Well evolution is a pretty robust logical concept. How would you even prevent it happening in the sense that given a variety of possibilities, the most effective - in what ever sense that means - is going to win out.

Why else is physics so tied to the principle of least action? The path integral says every quantum event is a sum over a whole universe of possibilities. That’s a pretty dramatic application of Darwinian competition in its physicalist sense.

Having lived there is about a fact. — Tarskian

No, I meant that you are delusional in claiming to be well travelled, unlike me.

I had lived in four countries and visited another twenty or so by 12. We used to visit a nice crab restaurant in Johor Bahru.

Unlike you, I have lived for some while in these countries. — Tarskian

Indulge your illusions if they give you comfort. :up:

Einstein had a great deal of difficulty doubting his own theory because his metaphysical parameters did not admit of the possibility that his theory could be wrong. — Leontiskos

But the facts forced him to change his mind. A cosmological constant was added to his equation of state. He remained uncomfortable, but so what.

The issue didn't really become a crisis until measurement showed the Universe lacked the critical mass to be in fact expanding. But then measurement also showed that there was then this "dark energy" as a new contribution to now guarantee its eternal expansion.

So whatever Einstein might have wanted to believe about anything was irrelevant as he had framed a theory with deductible consequences and thus inductively confirmable measurements. Pragmatism in action.

It is all the more impressive that such an epistemic method worked despite the deeper intuitions of one of the most brilliant ever thinkers. And that a "humble priest" could have played a part in correcting him.

Similarly, if the naturalist thinks that the only possible argument for theism is a god of the gaps argument, then it seems to me that it is the paradigm that is controlling his conclusion more than the data. — Leontiskos

Again, a pragmatist asks only what use is this belief? Does the belief have observable consequences? If not, it is not even a theory capable of being wrong. So it is up to the theist to deduce the consequences of their theory such that they stand counterfactually opposed to some clear alternative and so measureable on that explicit basis.

Even the null hypothesis would do as that alternative – the statistical case that there is some effect to be discussed rather than just some random noise in the data. So what difference does your version of a God make in this natural world? What difference would His absence make? What effect are you making claims for in a suitably counterfactual fashion? Where is then the evidence in terms of at least some statistical reason for a pause for thought?

The (classical) theist responds that this is a fine argument except for the fact that God is not and has never been conceived as an object within the universe. Internalism is a non-starter for the theist. It's not a matter of adjusting supernatural claims, but rather of attending to the actual claims that have been with us for thousands of years. — Leontiskos

Of course the theist might take refuge in transcendence. But why would any rigorous epistemology go along with that? Once isn't a pragmatist because one dislikes truth. One is accepting – as this thread underlines – that we are epistemically bounded in being that kind of creature which models its reality rather than "experiences" its reality in some kind of direct and brute fact fashion. Internalism just is our epistemic reality.

Which is why Peirce's arguments for also an ontological internalism – a pansemiotic metaphysics of immanent creation – becomes such an appealing alternative.

And that seemingly wild proposition has become only ever more believable as the facts in favour of ontic structural realism, topological order, dissipative structure, quantum field theory, etc, keep spilling out of the scientific mainstream as its latest "well no-one saw that one coming, did they?" surprise.

More pointedly, the question of whether the metaphysical structure is or is not a brute fact is not adjudicable within a naturalistic paradigm, but it does not thereby follow that it is not adjudicable. — Leontiskos

When one metaphysics endlessly has to retreat in the face of scientific advance, and the other metaphysics instead keeps looking scientifically sounder by the day, I would say history is indeed passing its judgement on the beliefs of humans.

And because of this the god-of-the-gaps paradigm of the modern naturalist matches the theological paradigm of the modern fundamentalist, which ensures that these two camps seldom talk past each other. Both are working with a similar conception of God. — Leontiskos

Am I operating in that paradigm? As a pragmatist, I would say not. If you can show me the effect in some controlled fashion – show it isn't just nature being random – then I would say, well let's start investigating that as a class of cause.

So Peirce of course had to presume something as a starting point. He "believed" nature is essentially tychic. Rooted in true spontaneity.

But then the logic of that is that absolute spontaneity can't help become what is now thought of as "order out of chaos". The pansemiosis of dissipative structure theory. Or the path integral of quantum field theory.

If everything is striving to be the case, not everything can then be the case as most of it becomes self-cancelling. Order emerges in topological fashion as all that cannot in fact self-cancel away.

This is a summary of ontic structural realism. This is how relativity comes to encode spacetime as global Poincare invariance and quantum theory comes to encode spacetime's material contents as local "chiralised" gauge invariance.

The Big Bang is the tale of infinite dimensional possibility being broken by its own dimensional symmetry breaking. Absolute spontaneity reducing itself to a Planckian residue of just three spatial directions organised by exactly those global and local symmetries that could not in the end be completely cancelled out of existence.

The Big Bang starts at the point where nearly all free possibility was wiped out. And that then resulted in a hot seed of dimensional structure – a fleck of energetic order – which took off towards its own form of self-cancellation or temporal inversion in expanding and cooling its way to its own Heat Death.

So as a cosmology that provides a metaphysical alternative to transcendent theism, it is pretty detailed. It relies on mathematical strength arguments about Lorentz boosts and Lie groups. It demands all the mathematical machinery of general relativity and quantum field theory. It raises a whole set of factual issues about "the missing critical mass" or "quantum weirdness".

As I say, one metaphysics runs to escaped being eaten up by scientific advance. The other is instead the product of that scientific advance. What Peirce proposed as an epistemic logic is also indeed panning out as an ontological logic. Both in the science of mind and the science of the cosmos.

Welcome to the real world! — Tarskian

But it is perfectly clear how little idea you have about what that is. You are just babbling in the fashion expected of the standard crypto bro digital nomad. Not an original thought in your head apparently. Just going with the latest meme lifestyle. Fitting in with your chosen crowd. :up:

The idea that a program or system has hierarchies, for example, isn't the same as social hierarchy. — Moliere

You can see I did in fact reply to @Ludwig V on this. So I might as well expand on where I suspect you are going wrong.

You have this notion of "power" as the social good to be distribute. And you mean power in the restricted sense of the power to dominate (as opposed to the power to submit I guess). This everyday kind of ethological hierarchical organisation – the one discussed in its genetic and evolutionary sense of the dominance-submission hierarchies found in social animals – is then sort of hand-wavingly exported to the contests of nations, the contests between capital and labour, the contests between road-hogging cyclists and cycle-dominating road-ragers.

You praise "amiability" as that expresses your distaste for being dominated, and also as a way to bypass the issue of whether you thus have submitted. The good society on this view – which seems where you are tracking – would be the hierarchical order that could deliver this "amiability" across all scales of social being. Everywhere at every level in life, the question of who won and who lost could be considered moot. Politely unmentioned. Imagined never to have been a social dynamic in play.

Well you can see the issue if humans are social animals and have evolved some version of the dominance~submission behaviours that are the "how" of how non-linguistic social animals organise their adaptively hierarchical worlds. We can't help but tell a difference between a soft smile and a stern gaze. It is in our genes. And a natural conflict arises when we live all day pretending outwardly to be smiling while inwardly frowning because serving burgers at McDonalds is after all a pretty shit occupation.

The social game there becomes trading amiability with respect. You tack on the corporate welcome, they act with the respect suited to the financial occasion.

OK. But onwards to the political science of how modern society needs to be understood. What is the social good that is actually being plumbed to deliver? How can we define that in terms that are both personally meaningful and collectively measurable?

No one really talks of society as an amiability~respect distribution system. But that is not a bad kind of balancing act. And then those who think of it in wolf pack terms as a dominance~submission distribution system seem not to have noticed that we have collectively evolved way beyond that point. Sure those instinctive behaviours are still ever present as the fabric of our lives. But the point of the Enlightenment – of a civilising and rational social philosophy – was not to amplify this genetic trait but instead suppress it, or at least harness it to its best advantage, in a new scheme of civilised life.

So dominance (and submission) is not what is being hierarchically distributed, even if it might seem like it from a narrow genetic view of a social system as a hierarchy still organised by systems principles. I.e.: still organised as a system of top-down constraints in balance with their bottom-up degrees of freedom.

A better word than amiability could be agency. Western social democracy had this vision of self-actualisation as a cultural good to be distributed evenly to all. Creating a social safety net was what ensured that every person had the same opportunities, if not the same outcomes.

Obviously then along came neo-liberalism as a corruption of that approach. Agency became such a one-sided concept that the social safety net could just be abandoned. A cost to strike off the balance sheet and so leave "everyone richer".

Social democracy of course was a little short-sighted as it never quite expanded its hierarchical reach to include the wider environmental reality of a planet taking off towards 10 billion souls who all also hoped to enjoy their new civilised agency, with its social safety net.

And neo-liberalism very quickly decided that ecological and climate concerns were yet another kind of friction on their shiny entrepreneurial schemes. The quest to monetise, and even financialise, everything. Turn the social world into a pure capital world without any accounting line for "a work force" because fossil fuels were an infinite form of manpower and AI was coming to replace even the white collar back office.

If you had to still have some dark satanic mill of slave labour and stinking pollution, well as @Tarskian keeps reminding us, there are plenty of third world countries where you can just lose these things from sight. They can't even enforce their own laws on itinerant passport holders from developed nations. If they can't clean up their beach resort nightlife, there is no way they can say no to Foxconn or ExxonMobil.

But anyway, that is how to start thinking about hierarchies as the natural blueprint for any system of disspative flow. There will always seem to be some conflict going on – as between the top-down contraints and the bottom-up freedoms. But this is just the dynamical balancing act by which the two things of stability and creativity can live together in a fruitful complementary fashion. Complexity can be constructed because it can be afforded.

The issue is to properly frame the dynamical balance that you want to apply evenly over all the levels of your hierarchy. For actual natural systems such as rivers or plate tectonics, the good is simply "maximum entropy". But for organismic systems, the good becomes some notion of "flourishing". The ability to repair and reproduce and so continue the journey towards some personal future.

Human civilisation has raised the game still higher as we now can aspire to delivering "civilisation" as the scalefree good. But then we have to start digging into that to discover what it really means to us.

Amiability sort of touches on it. Agency does too. Social capital is another term. Living as nature intends might be another slogan. We sort of know what we mean in terms of "the good life".

At least until someone comes along with another dumb one-note "good" such as happiness, or virtuousness, or being ethical, or whatever else tends to crop up in utopian fantasies of how a society ought to be run if only they were its dictator.

You really don't know Indonesia, do you? — Tarskian

So when bar owners are paying off or intimidating the local police so as to be able to fleece the rich tourists, suddenly this becomes evidence for your narrative that some societies just have laws that they can’t be bother policing. And yet the facts seem better suited to your other narrative that all the world is run by corrupt oligarchs.

I’m confused. :razz:

Are you referring to "The End of History"? — Ludwig V

No. The Origins of Political Order, Political Order and Political Decay, and the postscript, Identity, are a really great trilogy.

Are you saying that power is equally distributed in a hierarchy? Had you thought to ask those at the bottom of the heap what they think? What happens if I'm at the top and don't want to distribute power in an evenly balanced fashion? — Ludwig V

No. I am pointing out that hierarchies are the hallmark of nature. Flows are fractally distributed. Even earthquakes fall into this inevitable statistical pattern. So hierarchies don’t need to be explained. It would be deviations from hierarchies that would seem immediately unnatural - in need of some further causal inquiry.

Then I made the point that this is also true of organisms - semiotically-organised systems. Systems which add encoded information to shaping of distributed flows. If a landscape offers society a river, society can start damming it, regulating it, turning it into a system of canals, ditches, sluice gates and water wheels.

But even this mechanical constraint of nature evolves towards the same natural logic of a hierarchical organisation. If water for irrigation or hydrogeneration is the social good to be dispensed, then the fair approach is to be able to do so over all scales. Every farmer ought to be able to turn on a tap and pay the same price. Every householder should have an electric socket and pay the same fee.

In a normal world, we just unthinkingly build infrastructure in this natural way. It is clearly logical once we have reached a level of civilisation where we think of ourselves as the larger collective that is a nation. We want to be part of a society that can act as if it is indeed a single giant organism with all the organ systems of such an organism. A nervous system, a circulation system, an energy system, an immune system, etc.

This doesn’t seem overtly political. But organising a crowd into a nation is hugely political. That is what Fukuyama is good at showing. That is what political science is properly about.

Once you have this civilised framework in place, then you can start to get into the usual bunfights over the actual health of your national plumbing. Does everyone have an electric socket and a tap that works. Can everyone afford the electricity and water or has wealth become siphoned off at the top in a way that it too needs to be redistributed to the lower levels.

If the state paid for the waterworks and power stations, the accounting is pretty easy. Taxes can be used to ensure a nation’s assets flow freely in some lower bounded way. A top and bottom get - somewhat artificially now - placed on the hierarchical flows.

But once a state’s assets are privatised, the assets hocked off to predatory capitalists, then that thermostatic regulation - that wealth constraining feedback loop - is removed. You get the predictable consequences of that.

Of course there are always the arguments. Trickle down theory. The philanthropic instincts of the super wealthy. The innate inefficiencies of any state bureaucracy. One can make a case for just about anything one likes. Folk are easily bamboozled.

But if you step back like a political scientist or systems thinker, the basics are clear enough. Nature is hierarchical in its organisation for good reason. And organisms exist by echoing that in constructing their own logically coherent state of being. An organism is a distributed flow where “life and mind” is the good being dispersed with a scalefree fairness to all parts of the one collective body. All 30 trillion cells or so, not including the further 100 trillion cells of our gut biome.

So politics is about the building of hierarchically organised sovereign nations. Civilisation is the good that is meant to flow freely through them over all scales. A well plumbed society will have an optimised distribution of civilised life and mind.

It is just weird how hierarchy is a term of abuse in the anglophone world. Everyone wants to be free. No one want to be constrained. There is somehow an expectation that civilisation appears as some kind of magical good rather than as a good being delivered by a long term social investment in really smart social plumbing.

I suspect that your notion of hierarchy, when descriptive, is not the same as what I'm targeting. The idea that a program or system has hierarchies, for example, isn't the same as social hierarchy. — Moliere

If you can’t present this beetle in a box private theory of yours here, then there is nothing to discuss.

there is a key difference between saying that one has no evidence for something and saying that something does not exist. — Leontiskos

I’m not clear what you are driving at. But I have no problem if you are saying the negative can’t be proved. I can’t claim evidence against a transcendent “God did it” story. One could always adjust a supernatural claim to lie just beyond the reality that can be evidenced.

I mean scientists can posit superdeterminism as the way to regain realism in quantum mechanics. There is always a way to suggest a hidden cause beyond the reach of the evidence available.

So sure, as pragmatists, we advance by having beliefs that we seek to doubt. Einstein had his classical presumptions and because they could be counterfactually expressed, they could be shown to be wrong. Or at least forced past the bounds of counterfactuality, as with superdeterminism.

I'm scratching my head a bit because I think I've given concrete examples before, like the IWW. — Moliere

You really are a low effort sort of guy. You can't even cut and paste your example, let alone explain it in terms that are relevant as any kind of counter to what I might have said.

But here you go. This is your starter.....

The Wobblies believed that all workers should organize as a class, a philosophy which is still reflected in the Preamble to the current IWW Constitution:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

it feels as if your solution would be to (legislate?) regulate against either single-user or less-than-five-user motor transport, so that cycling and hte like can flourish. — AmadeusD

NZTA’s multimodal approach was to create safe separation to allow everyone pick the transport choice they best preferred. If you can whiz to work on a bus lane or cycle lane rather than get stuck in a car, then you would be free to do so.

Of course that serve all options carrot was going to require a bit of sly stick. Such as fuel taxes rather than fuel subsidies, a limit on inner city parking, 20 kph speed limits, and any other such measure that made motorists pay the actual environmental and social costs of their preference.

So the plan was an effort to be cunning. But the car drivers still caught on. The politicians caved accordingly.

It's an interesting question -- why did Europe like this clever idea? -- but it's not a political position. — Moliere

For goodness sakes. Read Fukuyama. All three volumes. :grin:

He analyses political structure across the world from the year dot. Read Debt as well for the economic story.

How Europe stumbled its way to its political arrangements is a fascinating tale of luck and experiment. But also of essential system-balancing structures needing to be found.

Can you give me criteria for what a concrete example would need to fulfill? — Moliere

Do you ask to hold someone’s hand every time you need to cross the road? Clearly I’m wasting my time now.

Clearly, this is no longer apt for this thread. If you care, feel free to PM with any questions, but I assume its uninteresting in the extreme to you. — AmadeusD

Just amusing but not related to the thread. On the other hand, it did point to the real world issue of why transport planning is in a bind.

I’m not claiming NZ is paradise. But in the end, I had the choice. That makes a big difference.

I think we both reject the scientistic interpretation of 2b, — Leontiskos

Hold up. Biosemioticians like Stan Salthe explicitly recognise a hierarchy of grades of telos that runs from human purpose to biological function to physical tendency. Sorry, no divine intervention involved. Just the appropriate divisions of semiosis as a system science approach embracing all four ArIstotelean causes.

So in this rendition the naturalist will posit a brute fact where the theist posits a intentional ordering, and these sorts of disputes move further and further towards metaphysics and away from science. — Leontiskos

Not really. The brute fact is structural rather than material. So developmental rather than existential.

And science has gone the same way even at Its fundamental physical level of quantum field theory. Hence Ontic Structural Realism as the recent shiny new toy in metaphysics.

Curiously, the first hit on Google initially frames the idea theologically. — Leontiskos

Yep. And science can have its modern atheistic version. One which reduces to dissipative structure theory, and so not half as exciting of course.

I found that surprising and interesting. It is interesting that it is intuitive and commonly accepted that <If the Big Bang occurred, then the universe was probably created>, — Leontiskos

The argument goes different. GR showed the cosmos is unstable. It would either have to be contracting or expanding. If contracting, it ought to have already disappeared from existence. It indeed exists, so therefore it must be expanding. And therefore have had an abrupt creation-like beginning. A creation event in which spacetime and its material contents got going on their eternalised expanding and cooling. Forever falling into a heat sink of their own construction.

I've not intimated NZ is the worst country in the world. I just hate it here. That's all. Various reason, largely biases and personal disposition. Not sure what's controversial getting you lot up in arms. — AmadeusD

So are there countries where you would be sure that you would hate them less?

What do their transport habits look like exactly? Remembering that was the OP. Is there a city where the cyclists are never rude, allowed on pavements and yet not in bus lanes. Expand on this Shangri-La.

when I read your description of society -- as a flow -- it seems descriptive and descriptive only and I cannot tell what might even be the "good" hierarchy. — Moliere

Well I only got started on the first point. How nature is in general always organised into hierarchical or fractal flows.

Then would come how hierarchies evolve from the unthinking kind to the thinking kind. When the flow is that which sustains an organism able to make smart choices at every scale of its being.

Eventually we get to the political meat - like why the combo of a constitution and a president (or even law-bound monarch) seemed like a clever idea.

Just as our brains are intelligent because they can form both long term smart habits and make more instant smart choices, so this polarity is reflected in the design of a rational political architecture. We want a constitution as our stable long term memory, our accustomed and well adapted habit. And we also want a president who can mobilise society in the moment, react immediately to novel threats and opportunity as they present themselves.

So as our brains are organised for intelligent choice, so do we want our nations to be institutionally organised. Exactly the same need and so exactly the same cognitive architecture.

However, I think we're going for something other than description. "ought" is the philosophy word, but I'm not sure it's the right word other than to convey a distinction on a philosophy forum. — Moliere

If “ought” makes philosophers feel they have a USP, then let’s see how much sense they make applying the concept. Systems science and natural philosophy have already shown is and ought to be all part of. the one pragmatic package. But if philosophy wants to slide over to romanticism as it feels the enlightenment has been giving it the cold shoulder lately…

No one has a proper theory of how to fix it, or a real idea about how it works. — Moliere

So you say. So you find comforting to believe.

But I asked for concrete examples that might support your vaguely expressed sentiments. As usual, I’m just getting more unsourced claims.

The reason that measures of entropification can be applied to information, is just because information represents a form of order, and entropy naturally applies to order. — Wayfarer

How does entropy apply naturally to order except as its negation or inverse? Just as is the relation between signal and noise in the information perspective.

I'm sure this is what leads to the prevalence of information-as-foundation in contemporary discourse. — Wayfarer

Did you read the full passage? Do you really now want to commit to the thesis that brains are just mechanical computers? Racks of logic switches? Thought reduces to symbol processing?

Those dichotomies cannot properly account for that which is both. — creativesoul

I was mocking Banjo’s abuse of these dichotomies to serve his rhetorical purposes.

The need to tease out what is neurobiological about consciousness, and what is then socially constructed, is where my semiotic approach to cognition starts.

Consciousness of course functions for us as a cohesive whole. And yet it is an integration across a hierarchy of semiotic levels. There is information encoded in forms that are genetic, neural, linguistic and numeric. These all fuse to inform the results. Perhaps not seamlessly, but adequately. Good enough for all practical purposes.

Banjo just wants to stop the conversation before it slips beyond his narrow grasp. And who really knows why.

My target is hierarchy. I know that much. — Moliere

So not good vs bad hierarchies, just hierarchy in general. Boo, hiss! Hierarchy, dude! It's baaad!

I think this is too general; at some point social systems are not abstract and do things according to what's up rather than because of patterns we've seen. — Moliere

If you could give a concrete example, it would help show if you might have a case.

However, I wonder if equating the two risks losing sight of the fact that information derives its significance from its order. — Wayfarer

Well if you are interested in processing signals, that requires you to have a model of noise. This was Shannon's actual job given he worked with a phone company with crackling long distance wires. You need to know how often to repeat yourself when it is costing you x dollars a minute. Maybe send a telegram instead.

If you know the worse case scenario – no information getting through to the other end, just random crackle – then you can begin to measure the opposite of that. How much redundancy you can squeeze out of a message and yet rely on it to arrive with all its meaning intact.

So sure. We can load up our bit strings with our precious cargo of "differences that make a difference". We can send them out across the stormy seas of noisy indifference. But if we know that some of the crockery is going to be inevitably broken or nicked, we might choose to pack a few extra cups and plates to be certain.

Information theory just starts with a theory of noise or disorder. Then you can start designing your meaning transmission networks accordingly.

So I question that equivalence - might it not be a fallacy of equivocation? — Wayfarer

It is like when folk talk about big bangs or dark matter. People latch onto complex scientific ideas in simplistic fashion.

To actually have a flow of meaning – which is what you are meaning by "information" – it has to be a flow of differences that make a difference. However that in turn requires a physical channel that transmits difference in the first place. Like a vocal tract that can make noises. Or a stylus that can scratch marks on wax.

So you start with the mechanics for making a noisy and meaningless racket. Then you can start to add the constraints that suppress the noise and thus enhance the signal. You add the structure that is the grammar or syntax that protects your precious cargo of meaning.

A number line has its direction. You are either counting up or counting down. A bit string has some standard word size that fits the bit architecture of the hardware. As further levels of syntax get added, the computer can figure out whether you are talking about an operation or its data.

So no equivocation. Information theory is the arrival of mechanical precision. Mathematical strength action.

Entropy likewise brings mathematical precision to our woolly everyday notions about randomness or chaos. It gives a physical ground to statistical mechanics. Boltzmann's formula speaks to the idea of noise in terms of joules per degree Kelvin.

And so showing me a bunch of images that I see to be red doesn't prove that colours are not mental phenomena. — Michael

He gave the game away. If you want to talk about the biology of consciousness, he is just going to confuse you by talking about its sociology. That way he gets to complain about another repetition of the same old chestnut running over 100 pages.