The basic point I would make is that colour is not entirely in the mind of an individual, but also functions at a social level. — Banno

Claims that the dichotomy of private/public is undeniable.

The broader methodological point is that philosophical dichotomies such as subject/object. subjective/objective, internal/external, private/public are difficult to maintain on close examination — Banno

Then denies the dichotomy of private/public can be the subject of a claim.

Sounds legit. :up:

It goes by a great many names. Here is a sample.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_distribution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Bejan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

That's the bit of human nature I'm targeting I think we have lots of reasonings to excuse social dominance, but for the most part it's our chimpanzee side which gives rise to such reasonings rather than the purportedly enlightened side. — Moliere

So then your target isn’t really hierarchical order but some notion of social injustice.

If we step back to understand hierarchical order as a pure form, we can see that it is a distribution system. It is a way to distribute power, information, entropy, whatever, in an evenly balanced fashion across a closed and cohesive network of relations.

So it is fundamentally about equality. But the complex kind of equality where the total flow of the system is divided up in a fractal or scalefree fashion that maximises its throughput.

A landscape is drained of water by forming a fractal network of trickles, streams, rivers and deltas. World aviation is organised into remote grass airstrips, small rural airports, large city airports, major international hubs. The mathematics of this is precise. A fractal distribution system has a log/log or powerlaw scale of size. That is how a geography can be efficiently covered so every drop of water or wannabe flyer gets an equal chance of participating in a well-organised network of flow.

There is no limit on free action even when all the actions are in competition. The network adapts so that statistically it services the available flows in an evenhanded fashion. If demand increases for the rural airstrip or drops for the global hub, then that node in the network can grow or shrink accordingly.

So in the pure form, the hierarchy is about a democracy of scale. A network composed of networks with any possible scale. Whatever works best to optimise flow for the entire system in question.

In a society, we would want everyone to have enough to eat, a bed to sleep, a voice in any decision making. These are goods to be distributed evenly. But then a real world civilisation is not going to end up giving everyone the same meal, the same bed, the same degree of being listened to.

A rural airstrip is not going to have a VIP lounge, or customs officers, or nonstop flights to international destinations. A global hub becomes its own vast hierarchy of terminal facilities and job functions. If you want a weather report at the grass strip, you look up at the clouds. At Dubai or Chicago, there are teams of meteorologists with hi tech radars, monitoring stations and computer models.

Is this difference in airport facilities intrinsically unfair? Even artificial rather than natural? If you want to fly, the whole world has become efficiently organised to allow anyone to hop on a plane from anywhere. But to do that basic thing, it also means that the nodes in the network have to themselves become hierarchically complex to the degree they fairly do their part in servicing this globalised flow of individuals.

If you are talking politics and decision making, the same applies. One can get all upset that democracy organises itself into interest groups and institutions. One can start bleating about the ruling mafia, the oppressive state. One can dream of a world where in effect everyone flies off their own grass airstrip and there are no giant planes taking off from their giant airports.

But there are perfectly natural reasons why societies, as human flow structures, will seem unequal as they seek to deliver equality. And if you don’t understand that, you can’t actually focus on where a hierarchy might be performing poorly in striking that optimal flow balance. You just want to pull the whole system down, or live outside its bounds. You have no proper theory of how it works and thus no real idea of how to fix it.

Wasn't that because Von Neumann, who was an associate of Claude Shannon, suggested to him that he adopt the term 'entropy', noticing that it was isometric with Bolzmann's statistical mechanics interpretation of entropy? — Wayfarer

Yep. That’s where it started. With a conceptual similarity. But then an actual physical connection got made. Folk like Szilárd, Brillouin, Landauer and Bekenstein showed that the Boltzmann constant k that sets the fundamental scale for entropy production also sets a fundamental scale for information processing.

Computing creates heat. And so there is an irreducible limit to how much information a volume of space can contain without melting it. Or in fact gravitationally curling it up into a blackhole.

In a number of such ways, information and entropy have become two faces of the same coin connected by k, which in turn reduces to c, G and h as the fundamental constants of nature. Reality has a finite grain of resolution. And information and entropy become two ways of talking about the same fact.

I don't grok this. — 180 Proof

I’m talking about holography and horizons. Volumes of spacetime can only contain finite amounts of information because information has a finite grain. Or in entropy terms, a finite number of degrees of freedom.

So at the Heat Death, it all just stops. The information represented by the energy density of the Big Bang has reached its eternalised de Sitter state of being cooled and spread out as far as it could ever go. The Universe is a bath of blackbody radiation. But with a temperature in quantum touching distance of absolute zero. Photons with a wavelength the size of the visible universe.

(There are a few issues of course. Like how to account for the dark energy that ensures this de Sitter state where the cosmic event horizon does freeze over at this finite maximum extent. So it is a sketch of the work in progress. Lineweaver is a good source.)

'Platonizing' information and/or numbers (as 'concept realists', 'hylomorphists, and 'logical idealists' do) is, at best, fallaciously reifying. — 180 Proof

Yet the holographic principle in fundamental physics says it means something that the same formalism works for information and entropy. At the Planck scale, the physical distinction between the discrete and the continuous dissolves into its own identity operation.

There is something deeper as is now being explored. Reality is bound by finitude. Which would be a big change in thinking.

But I gave you that example. You failed to respond to it. And I can understand why. You have no real argument to make in terms of any evidence you can present. You cannot rise above empty slogans.

Anyway, imagine arriving on the shores of Australia to either be faced with the rich social complexity of its indigenous people or instead some actually random and atomistic collection of folk dumped out of the average international airport at a busy time.

Do you think you might notice a difference? Could you put a finger on what it was? In what sense would the critical distinction you might detect fail to meet a proper systems definition of hierarchical order?

These were the questions you were seeking to evade by pretending you hadn't been asked them.

But don't worry, I am not holding my breath for a coherent response. :up:

The reality is that there are no gangs that specialize in this crime, simply because other types of crime are much more profitable. — Tarskian

It is almost as if crime believed in the statistical utility of risk/reward equations.

This life strategy acknowledges the very limited or even inexistent ability of the individual to improve his current political environment while emphasizing his very real ability to simply choose another one. — Tarskian

Dignify it how you like. Arbitrage is arbitrage. The issue is the strength of the presumptions you use to motivate your life strategy model. The interesting social science question is "does it scale?".

In the end, individuals can make their free choices. And the world is that which emerges as a consequence. The consequences of some particular choice being scaled to the level where it is a general choice then begins the feedback response. The choice being made may come to be regretted once everyone seems to be trying to do the same thing as you,

Of course, then you are free to switch to another course – to the degree other options remain unconstrained.

So there is no mystery or heroism here. It is just human civilisation evolving and learning. Until the wheels suddenly fall off as all the risk/reward calculations turn out to have been predicated on living in Mediocristan rather than Extremistan.

It is morally superior because it encourages the individual to do something about the problem instead of endlessly complaining about it. — Tarskian

Ah. Moral superiority. How hierarchical. How heroic.

"Do something" meaning "escaping having to do something". What you leave behind is beyond redemption. You just give up on it. And this defeat is inverted – by forming a network of the like-minded – as some digital nomad tribal victory.

I mean I perfectly understand the self-interested rationale you give. I just don't see that it can be glorified in political science terms unless it truly scales.

And to scale would turn it into ... a hierarchy. The tribe would become large enough to have its own clout. It could start to change the world around it to better serve its needs. It would develop a political voice. It would get laws changed to suit its preferences.

Already, in waving the banner of a new tribe, you are playing the very game you seem to want to claim you are escaping.

So fine. Digital nomad. It's a way of life available to you. It will either mesh well or clash badly with the larger hierarchy of the civilised world. Lessons will be learnt. Adjustments made. Same old systems logic applies. At least until the wheels properly fall off.

Your personal SMV (Sexual Market Value) is very location dependent. ...
Instead of congratulating this man for successfully solving his problem, they will argue that he is taking advantage of these naive Guatemalan women. WTF !? — Tarskian

It is clear that you hope to shock with this kind of bro-speak. But it has kind of lost that initial shock value it might have had. One dimensional thinking leads to a one dimensional life.

Again, no point bothering me until you understand hierarchies.

I could explain to you of course. But you don't want to be put in the position that would reverse the little hierarchical power dynamic you hope to construct here.

(How much did you wager? How soon can I expect payment? :razz: )

Still nothing being said to back up your claims. Just some annoyed mutterings as you depart the scene. :up:

How many hierarchies have you formed? — NOS4A2

Yep. You really don't understand hierarchies in any theoretical sense. Hence the idiot response.

I'll just note how you failed to back up your claims with evidence. Case dismissed. :up:

But there's a lot of hype around information as a kind of fundamental ontological ground, kind of like the digital geist of the computer age. — Wayfarer

So part of what I was pointing out is how information theory cashes out the counterfactuality of logic in actual logic gates and thus in terms of a pragmatic entropic payback.

Numbers seem to live far away in the abstract realm of Platonia. Shannon information was how they could be brought back down to live among us on Earth.

Algebra with real costs and thus the possibility of real profits.

Can you unpack that a bit? — Wayfarer

It is easy to assume things are just what they are. But that depends on them being in fact not what they are not. That should be familiar to you from Deacon's notion of absentials if not from the three laws of thought.

Counterfactuality secures the identity of things by being able to state what they are not. And that is what a bit represents. A and not not-A. A switch that could be off and thus can in fact be on.

Numbers are places marked on a line. The assumption is that their value is ranked from small to large. So already the symmetry is geometrically broken in a particular fashion. But that asymmetry is secured algebraically by identity operations. Adding and multiplying. Adding zero or multiplying by 1 leaves a number unchanged. Adding or multiplying by any other value then does change things.

So the counterfactuality is a little more obscure in the case of the numberline. The question is whether a value was transformed in a way that either did break its symmetry or didn't break its symmetry. The finger pointing at a position on the line either hopped somewhere else or remained in the same place.

Information and numbers then have to move closer to each other as we seek to employ atomistic bits – little on/off switches – as representations of algebraic structures. To run arithmetic on a machine, the optimal way is break it all down into a binary information structure that can sit on a mechanical switching structure. Just plug into a socket and watch it run, all its little logic gates clacking away.

So counterfactuality is the way we like to think as it extremitises things to the point of a digital/mechanical clarity. The simplicity of yes or no. All shades of grey excluded. Although you can then go back over the world and pick out as many shades of grey as you like in terms of specific mixtures of black and white. You can recover the greyness of any particular shade of grey to as many decimal places as you like. Or at least to whatever seems acceptable in terms of your computational architecture. The gradual shift from 8-bit precision to 64-bit was pricey.

I have never had any security problem related to Bitcoin. — Tarskian

Perhaps Sam Bankman-Fried should call you as a character witness then?

You would obviously feel it an outrageous violation of the bitcoin bro code that a ruling mafia in the form of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York got him grabbed off his comfy couch in the Bahamas.

I mean bitcoin is just so secure. Who needs these exaggerated systems of security to secure the security of your securities once they have been adequately digitised and block chained?

It is not as if you could ever need the protection of the state when some gang ties you up in a chair and starts hacking your flesh until you give up the key to your digital wallet.

So sure, it is possible to live the transient life of a digital nomad. But it ain't some kind of alternative politics or superior moral order. It reflects the freedoms that are available in a world that has now growing equally complex and multifaceted in its hierarchical order.

For you to arbitrage the world in this fashion – optimise your self-interest in terms of not paying taxes, finding the least regulated communities to work remotely from, gloat about the naive local women, etc –
requires a world with that variety to arbitrage.

Got a passport? No ties? Fungible skills? Well you are good to go.

And big deal. The world only has to hang together slightly more than it falls apart. It's a simple statistical game after all. Although things do start to get slippy as your expectations of a return move from a no-interest stasis to an exponentialised no-limit growth.

Political hierarchies are not natural but artificial and conventional. — NOS4A2

Evidence? Where in history is a human society not hierarchically ordered? I mean how could we even recognise it as a "society"?

Imagine pulling up in your colonial ship on the shores of Australia or America and finding just ... a crowd. Imagine the contents of Dubai or Singapore airport being dumped there as the native population. Everyone is just part of a sea of individuals with no structure of relations. And somehow that atomised existence has been the way this population has lived for centuries.

Wouldn't that just seem completely alien? Quite unnatural? Pretty much impossible?

So where is your evidence to support your assertion.

(And if you start talking about how networks beat hierarchies, hierarchies are just networks of networks – networks with nested hierarchical scale. Networks that are actually optimised in terms of their freedom of connectivity. )

Not quite where the thread started, but imho yours a good place to close - I'm not going to improve on it. — tim wood

You raised an interesting question that I haven't properly dug into. My focus has been on the more macroeconomic issue of nation states and their colonial empires. So the US experience only starts to matter for me when it entered the world stage as the Euro empires began to falter. :smile:

I think ultimately the difference between information and numbers is only pragmatic. — hypericin

Both piggyback on the logic of counterfactuality. And that in turn leads to the deep difficulties folk have in believing in a continuum that can also be broken into discrete parts. Logic seems to fail right at the point where you seek its own origin.

So a string of bits or the numberline exist in the happy world where we can just take this paradoxical division between the continuous and the discrete for granted. Continuums are constructible. Don't ask further questions. Get on with counting your numbers and bits.

So yes, a 1D line can be understood as an infinite collection of 0D points. And then you can start mechanically imposing any concept of an ordering of the points on the line that takes your fancy. The syntax can become as complex and hierarchical as you like. An analog reality can be encoded in string of digital data points. A Turing machine with an infinite paper tape can in principle represent any more complicated state. Counterfactuality is the true atom of Being.

Yet this happy conception may work pragmatically, however its deeper foundations remain suspect. So there is that to consider.

I wonder if it just evolved as organic sense to them, or if they had some examples in mind? — tim wood

I think it was just commonsense once the big leap towards treating society as a designable machine for delivering desired ends became a thing with the Enlightenment. Madison and Bentham both arrived at the same conclusions around the same time. You just had to start thinking about nationhood in technocratic rather than conservative terms to see the advantages of a hierarchically organised liberalism.

So once Europe became organised as sovereign states, there was competitive pressure to move to state structures that could mobilise their populations to best advantage. Rational political science arose out of that need. Change eventually happened.

The systems principles have then been articulated with increasing clarity as a result of experience. The 1930s “hierarchy of norms” approach of Hans Kelsen is an example of that.

In general, the Anglo world does philosophise in terms of the mechanical, and so the pure systems science view doesn’t come through that well. Feedback is understood in the sense of release valves to stop boilers exploding. That kind of thing.

But German philosophy - the Naturphilosphie tradition - is rooted in a holistic organicism and so is more fertile ground for proper systems thinking. You see that then coming through in ecology, ethology, sociology, etc. The idea of nature indeed having a driving force of self organisation.

So there is a reason the feedback story might not instantly have come to mind as a first principle. The Anglo world is adverse to the general idea of holisism, while the Germanic tradition is strong on it.

Yet either way, a hierarchy of norms becomes generally accepted as the most rational social model of justice. You don’t want society to be a brittle machine. You want to plant a seed in fertile soil and watch it grow strong and resilient. Capable of adaptive change and dynamical self-balancing.

In his book, "Black Swan. Impact of the highly improbable.", Nassim Taleb says that there are two situations to consider, mediocristan and extremistan. — Tarskian

Err yeah. Complex systems 101. The difference between normal and log distributions.

You cannot protect a system from attackers who seek to exploit its vulnerabilities by means of statistically good enough solutions. It won't work. — Tarskian

It works all the time everywhere in life.

Of course if you think in only rigid absolutist terms, this will be hard to accept.

No amount of hierarchical complexity can seal off this kind of vulnerabilities from attack. — Tarskian

In less than three years, Klyushin’s cybersecurity scam amassed more than $93 million.

Who in everyday life even knows or cares about such a chickenfeed scam? Did the stockmarket needle even register a flicker at the news? Was some gapping breach in the walls of capitalism created from which it could never recover?

Just like supermarkets write off shrinkage so as to keep their staff and not chase away shoppers, so capitalism in general just has to bank a steady 3% per annum on capital and everyone will agree, good job done.

In fact, it is enough that just one low-ranking bureaucrat, who is apparently just some seemingly unimportant cog in the system, leaks the wrong information to the adversary, for corruption to start snow balling. You can imagine the damage if people higher up the ladder decide to start making money from their power, and they routinely do. — Tarskian

Driving your car causes inevitable wear and tear. Does that mean you put it in a glass box and never drive it?

Shit happens in the real world. The aim of a system designer is to constrain the unwanted to the point that it doesn't matter, not to where it doesn't even exist.

You are being a perfectionist in a world where averageness is quite good enough as a baseline for action. And indeed a world that can't escape being average anyway as that is just statistics for you.

Philosophy has corrupted the minds of the young. Again. — frank

Nope. That is just Banno trying to rewrite ancient forum history to console his still hurt feelings. :grin:

None of that is to deny that Mt Everest is - let's see - 8,849m — Wayfarer

The more important measure in everyday humans terms is that Mt Everest is numero uno. The peak that stands above all others.

But others might protest that is not the metric that encodes the greatest skill, the greatest effort, or whatever else ought to be given prime importance due to some socialised context.

Science might indeed offer you a least socialised metric in terms of metres above sea level. All other aspects of being a mountain – such as being a tectonic bulge rising and falling over eons, or a fractally complex feature that is of some average roughness, hence easier or harder to climb – are allowed to fall away in that particular view.

It might be the measure that is pragmatically useful at a really general level of physical description based on spatial distances at temporal instances. Kind of like, you know, Newtonianism. :up:

So generally you are right. Folk philosophy does tend to make that primary vs secondary property distinction. And it is sort of there in the data. Hue discrimination seems somehow different even as a neurocognitive act than object recognition.

The perfect sphere of a ball set against the messy fractal scene of a typical natural landscape just kind of pops out as being "that kind of Platonically perfect object that we form as an ideal object".

The backdrop has scale symmetry – a fractal averageness to it. The ball has its rotational symmetry – an abstract symmetry that only comes into view once we get all spacetime relativistic on Nature's arse. That makes a ball a rather striking thing even on our back lawn. It is clearly "out there" even if it is also about as Platonic an object as, well, a square.

Then hue discrimination comes from the other pole of neurocognitive decoding. We can say it is about wavelength – as if a frequency of light is the key that flips the detector switch in a cone receptor cell and our brain suddenly feels that "redness".

And yet really there is huge complexity in the neurology to even start the discrimination. The round football is striking against the fractal garden backdrop. But hue discrimination has to build a whole contextual hierarchy of contrast to get to where it wants to go.

Just as a taster, consider how the three cones are already set up at the retinal level to construct both the visual sameness and the visual difference that gets the game going. Same information cut both ways in dialectical fashion so as to have any hat to hang the processing on – extract some difference that makes a difference as it has become the signal that stands proud of the noise....

Most animal species have the capacity for color vison, and in all known cases it is based on detecting light with two or more photoreceptor classes that differ in the wavelength sensitivity of their photopigments. However, having more types of receptors does not necessarily confer a higher dimensionality of color vision.

Most humans have three classes of cone receptors maximally sensitive to short (S), medium (M), or long [L] wavelengths, and thus normal (or, more aptly, routine) color vision is trichromatic. Encoding color further depends on the neural machinery for comparing the relative cone responses, for example to determine whether the L cones or M cones are more excited by a light spectrum.

These comparisons begin in the retina, in post-receptoral neurons that receive inputs of the same or opposite sign from different receptor types, and are carried within three “cardinal” mechanisms with distinct cell types and pathways, named for their projections to different layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus.

Cells in the magnocellular (M) pathway sum the L and M cones’ signals and are the substrate of our luminance sensitivity (L+M). Chromatic information is instead carried by two cone-opponent cell types that receive opposing signals from the L and M cones (L-M, the parvocellular or P pathway) or from S cones opposed by both L and M (S-LM, the koniocellular or K pathway).

However, these mechanisms describe only the initial steps of color coding. There are major further transformations of the cone-opponent signals in the cortex, and different transformations may arise at several different cortical stages. Moreover, even within the retina, there is a possibility that color percepts are carried within pathways that combine the cones in different ways than the cardinal mechanisms

With the football in your back garden, it seems to tell its own tale. If it appeared only this morning, perhaps a neighbour booted it over the fence. There seem to be no low level behind the scenes type neural processes going on. If the football is easy to see and explains itself, this is because you understand the intellectual type stuff about rotational symmetry vs scale symmetry. It is your choice whether to take an everyday lumpen realism about balls on lawns or to get mystical about Platonic strength forms.

But with hue discrimination, there is a massive amount of preprocessing to create the same kind of "its just obvious" pop out contrast. To have the immediate and primary impression that the football is blue with yellow stripes and not red with green ones.

At the end of the day, it if pops out, it pops out. Our neurology is doing the job it is meant to do. We can be lumpen realists speaking in everyday language about thoughtlessly inhabiting a cosy familiar world of medium sized-dry goods. The whereabouts of our pending luncheon the only concern.

However the immediacy is an illusion. The reality is the phenomenal complexity of an acquired neurological habit. We must each build hue discrimination for ourselves as bodies that develop neural pathways via processes of growth and pruning. We must get wired for colour as a pragmatic interaction we form with the world as we find it.

That's the look of surprise you see starting to form on the newborn's face as it emerges. Nothing makes sense. And yet within a few months, it really starts to fall into its comprehensible patterns. Footballs that are red. Redness that is not just about footballs.

The average strength of the wall of a besieged city does not matter. Only the weakest spot does. — Tarskian

And the weakest spot would be by definition the least average? Dude, plug your brain in.

You can indeed use statistical calculations to control the damage caused by hurricanes. You cannot do that, however, when it is about human adversaries. — Tarskian

Again, just stop and think a little deeper. This is why defence systems are hierarchically structured. You have a static frontline and then a mobile reserve. One just has to last until the other gets there.

Human attackers of course understand the principle from its other side. And that is what drives the hierarchical complexity. It has been the same ever since walls started getting built and attacked at the dawn of agrarian empire building.

So do you mean actual linear cities - like the disastrous Neom project - or those with a natural fractal hierarchy that maximises the efficiency of its flows?

One is very mechanical in conception - although repetitive segmentation works well for worms and other creatures of the simplest design. The other is the organic or ecological form that nature would seek to impose on any complexly organised structure. Like our mammalian bodies or actual cities that are functionally organised into organ systems.

As a system grows large, it must have a large brain at the centre of its distributed nervous system, a large pair of lungs at the centre of its gaseous exchange system, a large heart at the centre of its blood circulation system, etc.

A worm has small and simple versions of all these things. A tube just needs its entrance and exit. The centre of a worm’s various organ systems take up very little more room than their periphery and so a segmented design is good enough. The same as a strip mall along a highway or straggle of houses making the initial settlement along a new rail stop.

But to become complex and well integrated requires a more messy looking break up into functional geographies. Cities with universities, malls and abattoirs. Cities that have many large functional centres as well as the finer mesh as each of these functional centres spreads its own regulatory flow network across the wider collective body.

London for example had a problem that its supermarkets were getting ever larger and so spaced out, and yet road congestion was getting ever worse. This was literally the issue when I thought enough was enough. My routine had become driving to the supermarket before it opened on a Saturday morning or just not go at all.

But go back now and tiny supermarkets are run by the same chains on every corner. A hierarchy of supermarket size fixed at least that one problem.

So arterial arcology may sound linear, but that is different from segmented and speaks to the fractal principles of hierarchical design. Which is standard wisdom in urban planning - if only voters and politicians would allow them get on and implement it.

In NZ, there is another illustrative example. The case to retrofit a light rail network was financially justified as it would immediately make the housing along the path a more attractive corridor. An easy way to revitalise now aging inner suburbs. But it didn’t fly as no one likes change and good ideas can always be delayed to some other year.

Some 20 years later has come the crisis response. Central government has slyly slipped through laws to just tear up local council urban planning. Carefully organised building regulations - those with a hierarchy of protections that were eagerly voted for because of NIMBY self-interest - have just been vapourised. Now the elegant villa in the tree lined street can suddenly find two three storey apartment blocks - made of shit panelling and with a concrete pad for half a dozen cars - looming over it within a year.

One way or another, the hierarchical imperative of nature is going to impose itself on our architectural forms. The only question is how much in control of the pace and the consequences do we want to be.

Every person then under not a passive obligation to merely obey the law, but a radical obligation to evaluate and to act to correct its flaws, usually by legal and lawful active participation in government at whatever level is possible, in whatever way is available. — tim wood

Yep. This is in fact just how self-organising systems work. They require a constant interaction between their global constraints and their local freedoms. It has to be a two-way thing so that the overall system can continue to evolve and adapt. It is the basis of being an intelligent organism in the most general possible sense.

The trick is in the tuning of the balance. What neural networkers call the stability~plasticity dilemma. A system with too much local freedom can learn and change fast, but what it learns then can be prone to "catastrophic forgetting" – a sudden overwhelming breakdown of accumulated knowledge structures. An adaptive system needs to be regulated by its equally robust habits – the longterm wisdom to match the immediate intelligence.

So the design of any natural system – one that can develop and evolve, repair itself and reproduce itself over time – is always of this kind. A hierarchical balance of its top-down constraint and bottom-up construction.

In the human social system, this is how a good legal system functions. It is suitably stable but not rigid and thus brittle. It is wise but listens to intelligence. It expects to still learn something new.

A slightly different way of looking at the same problem is what he added. — Metaphysician Undercover

You seem to be talking about notions of the continuum which would be a small part of Peirce’s semiotics. And you have your own ideas about how to abuse logic I fear.

Or I was thinking it might be a problem with aggression during peacetime. We turn on each other. — frank

Read Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox for an evolutionary perspective of how we are set up for social organisation. We shifted from the reactive aggression of apes to the proactive aggression of social groups.

So within the tribal structure, you are either in or you are out. And simply agreeing to kill the tribe mate that doesn’t fit is a very human response. Wrangham argues this is how we became the self-domesticated ape. This capacity for blunt and bloody in/out group assessments.

Obviously a psychology that worked well in a world of a few million hunter/gatherers needed some rejigging to turn it into the world of agrarian empires, then colonial trading empires, and now a fossil-fuelled technocracy sustaining a population closing fast on 9 billion.

But the basic dynamic is plain to see. The village all gets along until it collectively decides someone is actually “not one of us”. We are evolved to make these sudden in-group/out-group determinations at the level of a general democratic choice.

Unlike apes, we can plan violence with cool heads. And that can be a good thing when that is channeled into justice systems and police forces.

And also unlike apes, we can be instinctively empathetic and inclusive. We have that complementary side which makes us seem so tame and domesticated in a group setting. We can be good citizens as well. The other side of the coin when it comes to constructing our social hierarchies founded on their balances of competition and cooperation.

And also still, like apes, we can just be reactively violent when lost and confused. That is a further natural response we retain.

So a bit of emotional complexity there. But it helps to explain why certain social structures seem to work. They take what worked as we were evolving as tribal foragers and developed it into social algorithms that could scale economically as we gained technological mastery over the world. As we moved from simple foraging to complex agrarianism and then industrialism, now consumerism as the purest expression of Nature’s entropic imperative.

Is the current state of the world a success? Well it is certainly remarkable that it even exists. A species able to change a planet in its own image. Approaching 9 billion people and with most of its ecology transformed into factory farming.

The democracy vs autocracy debate seems a little superficial as an analysis given the reality we have constructed here. The world is a fairly robust human system for converting natural capital into social capital. And now it is suffering the effects of its own success. Where once people wandered with rumbling bellies, they now sit stuffed on their sofas waiting for the next pizza delivery. That kind of thing.

Sure in the US we witness all the drama of woke vs MAGA. And yet going from Trump to Biden only saw the US’s general economic and international policy continue on its logical self-interested course. The continuity of a direction is more impressive than the threat of an insurrection and civil war.

So my reply is that there is always aggression during peacetime. These are the basic things that a social hierarchy learns to juggle. And we humans are even adapted to be more binary about it. We exist to be in tune with a group mood, a group identity. And thus to be able to flip on a dime as a group.

Whatever you might call democracy or autocracy as a political system then has to operate in recognition that there is this natural dynamic in play. We can still design the world system. But we have to be clear about the realities that underpin it.

In spite of being the most comfortable humans in history, there's a loss of faith in democracy. — frank

When something is working so relatively well, folk can just take it for granted. Then as things start to go wrong, it can take those who have become disconnected from the realities quite some time to understand why.

Authoritarianism has become appealing for a reason, right? — frank

Yep. People like to imagine all the things they could do if they were dictator for a day. But you try actually running a country. Think of all the fun Putin and Xi are having.

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

I’m suitably impressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed. But what then did he add?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More contentless ranting.