All it takes is one sufficiently bad leader/administration and things will be over - for any civilisation. — Agustino

I agree Trump is a good test of civilisation's current level of foresight and resilience. But surely you can rely on the CIA to arrange an accident for the sake of the prevailing neoliberal elite?

Right - so if human beings statistically have a tendency towards immorality, that means that given technology, their immorality will have much greater consequences now than ever before, because it too will be amplified. This pretty much suggests that we're going to end all of human civilisation in nuclear war. — Agustino

OK, back to seriousness.

Is war immoral? Or just not a very helpful expression of the natural imperative towards productively competitive behaviour when it is taken to a globally damaging level.

It is not immoral to defend yourself by blowing up your own species and planet. Just a rather impractical way of achieving the flourishing co-operativity that is the basis of any long-run persistent social identity.

So again - seriously now - Houston we have a problem when the nation that controls half the world's military power can vote in one person of doubtful decision-making who apparently has ultimate say over whether the red button gets pushed.

Trump has surrounded himself with generals. So maybe we can rely on a military putsch in extremis. Although some of those generals seem as much bad decision makers (the technical term is "bonkers") judging by background reports.

But in the end, the world has managed to avoid nuclear war, while also collectively waging war on the various causes of pandemics.

Now I am far from an optimist about the human capacity for wise self-governance. But that is simply because - as with the Roman Empire - we may again have outstripped the technology of governance which we have currently put in place.

However - and I'm pretty involved in the detail of what governments do - humans also show an impressive ability to respond intelligently to what they actually understand as threats that must be faced. We could easily fix climate change if we could manage to overcome conservative habits and take the problem seriously.

I fail to see how naturalism would fail to note the inability to alter man's character, — Agustino

Naturalism - as in the sciences of psychology and anthropology - notes the great maleability of human character.

Of course, some outliers may have some kind of biological stubborness or conservative propensity. They are rigid for neurobiological reasons (just as others might be "too flexible, too liberal".

Yet you only have to look at the average behaviour of immigrants - such as I believe yourself? Just how quickly does a Korean become an American, especially if they arrive young and are allowed to mix freely with their new native environment.

Not only this. If you read accounts of the fall of Rome from historical sources you will see a multitude of factors among which loss of discipline, and loss of motivation which permitted them to be defeat by barbarians. — Agustino

Yeah sure. There are lots of ways the symptoms might present. But no serious (scientific) historian is going to talk about a loss of motivation when it is instead a loss of cohesion, or the senescence of habit, that removes the possibility to act.

If you're referring to Guns, Germs and Steel, I've read it and I'm not impressed. My reading of history shows that these weren't the main factors. The main factors were always social - in the evolving social mentalities. Baghdad at the height of the Islamic golden age lost its virtues - people became like today - many academics, many scientists, lots of musicians, a flowering and promiscuous culture, loss of motivation amongst the youth, a very extensive compassion, an anti-military hippie kinda culture etc. Then it collapsed. — Agustino

Yep. If it is a choice between your own bias-confirming scholarship and the actual scholarship of scientists who have to go out and confirm their ideas empirically, then surely we are all going to agree ... with you.

Don't you see how ridiculous this sounds?

The point I'm making is that understanding such lifecycles does not help prevent them at all. — Agustino

That's a sweeping claim.

All earlier examples of social collapse (as evidenced for example by Jared Diamond) were societies that didn't understand their natural basis sufficiently.

So your sweeping claim is yet to be empirically tested.

You think technology can overstep man's morality. But it can't. — Agustino

Technology is a tool for amplifying human action. The moral issue (in terms of a naturalistic perspective) is that we've let technological possibility also make the choices for us too much. So "utopia" would be about striking a better balance in actively choosing the actions we ought to amplify, not simply plug our traditional values (like an eye for an eye, eat until you burst, or whatever) into whatever is the lastest technical possibility.

Too much good and people lose motivation. — Agustino

I know it is your thing to play the conservative. But again, I have outlined the grounds on which I am founding a view. It is the one supported by science and philosophical naturalism. So just repeating your own paradigmatic assumptions in reply is otiose.

The Roman Empire didn't disappear because of natural disaster and pandemic - it disappeared due to internal reasons. Internally it became unstable. Why? Because of depravation and loss of moral values - loss of the virtues. — Agustino

Anthropological bollocks. It over-ran its ability to control an empire. It ran out of new grain fields to occupy.

So it had a brilliant social formula - for its time. But then fell apart because it over-ran what its hierarchical organisation could contain.

So it arose on things like speed of communication, coherence of action. And fell apart after the social technologies involved could no longer cope with the scale of the task.

Except that pandemics and the like aren't the biggest danger. The biggest danger is within man's own heart. — Agustino

Pandemics are definitely ranked by national governments as the biggest actual threat they face (on the timescales/consequences that matter most to them).

See a standard indicative national risk model....

I think people are actually more dumb than ever before on average. Sure, they have more knowledge than ever before, but certainly not more intelligence - too much comfort dulls down their intelligence, and all that is left is mere knowledge. — Agustino

The Flynn effect is well known by now.

But you are arguing from your own personal vague definitions of intellect and morality. As a naturalist, I aim higher. If nature is in fact intelligible, these are things we can properly define and measure. They are not just matters of opinion.

On the contrary, pessimism succeeds as it recognizes sentience to be "unnatural" and ill-equipped to deal with the oppressive forces of nature. Instead, sentients have to pretend reality is different than it actually is. To be sentient, then, requires one to live in a fantasy. Everyone has their crutch. — darthbarracuda

Yep. That would be the counterfactual that my position makes possible as its antithesis.

And history shows sentience evolves.

So your pessimism loses if that is what you believe is its proper basis.

(And if you believe in suicidal penguins, aren't you taking evolutionary continuity to a much greater extreme than I would ever argue for?)

But there are various variables that influences the number it rolls, which we simply are unable to see. We assume symmetry, but how precise is that symmetry? — Jeremiah

Nature doesn't produce dice. Only humans do. However they still illustrate the essential principle of how to understand randomness or spontaneity in nature.

So you are making the standard Laplacian complaint that, in principle, complete knowledge of nature is possible, and so all future events can be calculated from determinate microphysical laws.

Well firstly, we now know that Newtonianism in fact fails at the limits. Quantum mechanics says existence is irreducibly indeterministic - and that ontic claim can even be phrased epistemically in terms of this being due to the fact we can't ask two different (non-commutating) questions of reality simultaneously. Like where are you exactly/what is your momentum exactly?

And complexity theory shows that the very idea of calculation is also self-limiting in this fashion. Because calculation is a digital way of describing an analog world, there is always round-up error in any attempt to model real world events.

No computer could ever specify the initial conditions of a calculation to an infinite number of decimal places. And if error compounds exponentially while the calculation proceeds in linear time (polynomially), then error must swamp any claims to accuracy in a few steps if it is describing a non-linear or chaotic event (one with less constraints than the kind of regular dynamics that Newtonian mechanics was designed to describe).

So we know that this idea of a mechanically deterministic universe is itself an idealisation. It is not the "natural state" of nature. Newtonian physics describes the world after it has reached the limit of a process of symmetry breaking and thus spent its many degrees of freedom. It is the world in as determinate state as it can get - yet not actually determinate, as quantum physics and complexity theory reveal.

Anyway, back to dice and how they illustrate this.

We make dice as perfect and symmetrical as we need them to be. Which in turn means we are matchingly indifferent to imperfections that are beyond what might affect our purposes in having a die.

What we want is a die that a thrower can throw in a fashion which leaves them with no way of telling what number will roll. So it must spin easily (bevelled edges) and yet fall flat on one face (break the symmetry of spinning) without favouring any one outcome. So if you are really concerned about dice being fair, you buy machined dice. You pay extra for the engineering and certification.

You insist on certainty that the die will break symmetry in a way that is entirely spontaneous to you.

But if you wanted to insist on that level of spontaneity in terms of nature itself, then you would have to get down to harnessing some kind of quantum noise or quantum emission process. Even nature doesn't know when an atom will decay - just that it has a completely exact and predictable poisson distribution. (The propensity to decay remains constant in time - which tells us something deep about the constraints that form nature, that is, our particular Universe.)

For all we know the cycle of the moon, or the time of the day could affect the number it lands on. So is it our inability to see all the variables and how it plays out that makes it unpredictable? — Jeremiah

When it comes to dice, we could in theory measure these further variables. But until gamblers start troubling casinos with such high tech approaches to beating the house odds, no one has reason to care.

So the human situation shows directly that randomness is about how much we have practical reasons to care about constraining the physics of events. We don't let gamblers drop dice. They must roll them properly.

The difficult mental leap - the one I've argued for - is to see that this principle is true of nature also. And quantum physics is the best argument. Nature can only ask questions of itself (hey little particle, what's your exact location/momentum?) to a limited degree of precision. And yet this doesn't really matter on the general scale of things.

Quantum fluctuations only disrupt nature on the tiniest or hottest possible scale of being. The Universe itself is now so cold and large that it is pretty much entirely classical in practice. There is infinitesimal chance of it doing something "quantum" like winking right out existence, or fluctuating into some other bizzare arrangement.

So indeterminism is basic to existence. And yet existence has become a place where everything is more or less as good as determined.

The question then becomes, why do humans still find randomness useful? Why do we invent ways of introducing chance back into the world of dull mechanical routine?

Obviously it is because we enjoy creating zones of freedom in which we can pit our wits. Games of chance are a way to practice our skills at strategy and prediction against "unpredictable nature". And so the kind of randomness we are really modelling there is the unpredicability, or non-computationality, of complexity.

We can try to calculate the future. But also such calculation is impossible. Which is where the pleasure and pain of being lucky/unlucky comes in.

But what if we select something at random out of say 10 possible choices? Then we know what we are gonna get; we are gonna get one of the 10 possible choices, but it was still a random selection. Is that saying we have simply removed the decision form our hands, and allowed variables we can't see to make the selection? — Jeremiah

Yes, you are describing epistemic uncertainty - something we have got mathematically and mechanically good at "manufacturing".

And then the deeper issue you want to address is ontic uncertainty - the randomness of nature itself.

And as I say, we can either rely on our own actions to result in our desired level of uncertainty (as i insisting gamblers roll dice properly, and don't bring moon gravity measuring devices with them into the casino). Or we could try to harness uncertainty by tapping into nature's own level of physical indifference. We could get down to quantum level processes. Or step up to uncomputable non-linear or chaotic processes.

Of course, people will still insist that at the bounding extremes of nature - the micro-physical and the macro-complex - Newtonian determinism must still reign.

But that is simply old-hat physics. We know that at the limit, things are actually different. The physics of the classical middle ground - the computationally simplest possible physics - no longer applies.

I think we're talking about something different - I'm talking about the fact that no society can be eternal - societies grow and die, and necessarily so. — Agustino

There is the long-run issue too. But a "perfect" society - that understood itself in these organismic terms - would understand such lifecycle issues and thus know how to guard against them.

The necessity of rise and fall of negentropic structure in nature is due to a three-stage natural sequence of developing organisation. A system develops from immaturity to maturity to senescence.

In the beginning it burns bright and grows fast because it knows little and so is highly adaptive. Young bodies heal fast because they grow fast.

Then you have the mature phase where there is a steadier balance between stability and plasticity.

Then comes senescence which is in fact the highest state of adaptedness to an enviroment. The cleverness of youth has been replaced by the wisdom of age - a collection of habits that have the best fit with the world.

But the drawback of being so well adapted is the rise of a matching brittleness. Now if something big and unexpected happens - a perturbation like drought, war, disease, climate change - the system is so locked into one way of living that it can't adapt to the new situation. That is what leads to the inevitability of collapse.

But a self-aware society - one informed by the science - can strive to maintain itself in the mature stage of development. It can avoid becoming too stereotyped or over-adapted as part of its "perfect way of life".

I'm not saying it wouldn't be difficult. But in fact modern society does a pretty good job at planning for pandemics and climate resilience. It is exactly this kind of organic lifecycle thinking which is starting to be applied (if perhaps not nearly quick enough to actually save our particular neoliberal/globalised/fossil fuel based "utopia"). :)

Now you (the individual) can be a sage all your life. But the whole lot of mankind can never be sages - there's always a tendency towards what is low. — Agustino

But this is the point I query. You are saying that perfection is defined by the statistical outlier - perhaps the freakishly athletic, intelligent, beautiful, empathetic, or whatever.

No. I'm arguing that perfection is defined in terms of the whole society, and thus its averages.

So who could argue with a modern society that is producing ever smarter, fitter, better-looking and civilised folk - on average?

And IQ scores, life expectancies, plastic surgery and PC values certainly seem measurably on a steady rise in recent world history.

Of course, we could also say that there is an ever increasing polarisation or inequality about such outcomes. The dumb seem excessively dumb these days. The fat excessively fat. Isis may exceed the past in terms of thinking barbarity.

Yet still, natural science allows us to quantify that also in terms of complexity theory. There are two primary statistical attractors in nature - the bell curve of the central limit theorem and the scale free or powerlaw distribution of log/log growth. So rightful levels of inequality, and excessive levels, can be clearly defined in those terms.

My point is that we now have a sophisticated understanding of natural systems and the reasons that drive them. We can model these things in mathematical detail. So the claims of pessimism can be quantified - so long as it is first agreed that humanity is indeed a natural system and not something else, like a failing divine creation or a fall from Platonic grace.

There will not be, and more importantly, cannot be a utopia on this planet. — Thorongil

There is no dealing with it at a social level, I agree with that. No perfect society — Agustino

But that still leaves the natural philosophy argument that "perfection" involves only a constraint on variety in pursuit of some global goal. So the goal could be achieved "perfectly" - as in some system level flourishing measured in natural terms, like growth or entropification - and yet individual variation in terms of achieving that goal is not a problem. It is not evidence of some imperfection or failure, but a necessary feature of it being a natural system we are talking about - the "requisite variety" that underpins adaptive tracking of said goal.

Now human society may have sufficient freedom to decide it wants to pursue loftier global goals - like happiness, freedom, creativity, religiosity, military prowess, or whatever. Within the constraints of physics and biology, it can self-define its own cultural utopia.

Yet still the same systems logic applies. The cultural system needs variety to actually be capable of tracking its goal adaptively.

So pessimism fails because it expects reality to be unnatural. Or supernatural. Perfections and utopias are defined in ways that are brittle and mechanical, not fluid and organic.

Randomness can be described equally well as either epistemic uncertainty or ontic indifference. We don't know which number the roulette wheel will roll. And the design of the roulette wheel has a symmety that makes it indifferent as to which number it rolls.

It doesn't make sense for you to classify x as the unknown unknowns and then start to tell me about all the known unknowns that constitute x. Besides which, even knowing there could be unknown unknowns constitutes the pragmatic beginnings of knowledge.

So in dividing knowledge this way - into y and not-y - you remain completely in the ambit of scientific reasoning as practiced by Peirce.

That experience happened in 1892; he wrote "A Neglected Argument" in 1908. — aletheist

But he does rely on that kind of direct experience of the divine - that firstness - in making the neglected argument. Yet a "community of minds" approach to pragmatic inquiry would logically require everyone to have the same kind of experience in repeatable fashion under the same conditions. And I'm pretty sure no amount of musement is going to see me finding theism an idea too wonderful not to believe.

So I do take the sceptical view here. I would look at Peirce's madcap business dealings and other evidence of his apparent unworldliness and poor social judgement. As a pragmatist, he could be very impractical - or just so brilliant that, like a lot of mathematical thinkers, he couldn't fit into the everyday.

Of course the neglected argument needs to be considered on its own merits. I'm just rationalising why Peirce could also write something I find so weak.

This is a popular claim in some circles, but it is refuted by Peirce's explicit and emphatic statement in three different drafts that he did not mean by God something "immanent in" nature or the three Universes of Experience, but the Creator of them and all their contents without exception. — aletheist

You may be right. You have made a particular study of this and I have skipped over it because life is too short.

But I don't see how this argument can possibly be consistent with the actual pragmatic/semiotic philosophy that Peirce produced. A does not lead to B. And that is what always most impressed me about Peirce - the completeness of how his central scheme connected up.

With all due respect, this is nonsense. Peirce was no doctrinaire Christian, but he was quite clearly a theist, and there is no evidence to suggest that he was intellectually dissatisfied with that position. — aletheist

But that is why I wish he had stuck with an atheist version and arrived at a through-going pansemiosis.

Newton, Einstein and plenty of other intellectual heroes all believed in God. But that helps my own case. The logic of nature still can speak through even when blinkered by personal theism. The method of scientific reason is that powerful.

So sure I wish Peirce was an atheist as the result of his style of reasoning. But also it doesn't matter. Peircean metaphysics is interesting to me primarily as it forsees the way modern science has to go.

Sure, and so do I. — aletheist

If your essay gets published, send me a link. Its been a long time since I read the neglected argument and you may have ideas how it makes better sense in the context of a metaphysics of semiotic self-organisation.

Abductive reasoning is always reckless! But as you say, then comes the deduction and induction which justifies it as the right thing to have done.

And the honest truth is I need to be pushed.

I'm basically so lazy I need to be made to justify my views by plunging back into the literature to make sure I actually understood what I thought I knew.

So there is a method here - even if it grates on some.

I make dangerously bold statements knowing that I'll really look stupid if I get the basic facts wrong. I make the stakes very high for myself so as to give myself no choice but to go do the homework and make sure I'm right.

But that's enough explaining. Everyone knows this is the internet and that naturally polarises people so they either excessively agree or disagree - and take it all completely personally either way.

If you want threads on the biophysics of substance or the thermodynamic imperative, I could start providing those again. But be careful what you wish for. ;)

Hey, you go on a philosophy forum and not just your arguments, but your premises too, get picked apart. Get used to it.

You made the assertion that science just systematises commonsense. I provided a counterargument. Now apparently I'm guilty of not just sitting here nodding in encouraging agreement???

I find myself tediously re-explaining the same things to you. Good job I enjoy rehashing the same story in various ways. :)

Firstly - at this level of metaphysics - the question of how could something come from nothing already faces the problem of being nonsensical and incoherent given that there is in fact something.

Nothingness could never be the actual state of affairs. It is bad enough that, logically, nothing can come from nothing. But also, it is a brute empirical fact for would-be nihilists that existence exists. And so talk about nothingness as something "actually possible" is redundant.

So that leaves metaphysics having to move on to more coherent lines of questioning.

Perhaps existence is just a brute something - accidental and eternal. There is no logic to it all - even though that is in utter conflict with the fact that the Universe is so strongly intelligible. Intelligible to the point that it conforms to the simplest mathematical forms we can imagine as being self-evidently true - such as the lie group symmetries which exactly explain by force of necessity why the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces have their particular observed character.

So it could all be brute eternal somethingness. Yet even that is in strong contradiction to the tightly mathematically constrained Cosmos we observe. And of course, a Cosmos that was also born as a "Big Bang" symmetry breaking or phase transition some 14 billion years ago.

So we move on - if we are logical - to the further, and most ancient, of metaphysical tales. It was possibility itself that was the symmetry that got broken by actualisation. A state of vague everythingness had "no choice" but to produce the regularities that would actively suppress the wild chaos - the undirected dynamism which made it a vagueness - and leave behind the orderly state of dichotomy (constraints and degrees of freedom) which we observe all about as scientists.

And why was this foamy apeiron stuff there? Where did it come from? — darthbarracuda

Stuck record. The fact that you still have to talk about Apeiron or vagueness as "a stuff" shows you are presuming a substance ontology and just don't get hylomorphism. You need to keep thinking harder.

Why this outcome? Was it inevitable? — darthbarracuda

Yes. The argument is that the Comos is the product of mathematical strength necessity. If you are going to break a symmetry, you wind up with only a single simplest way of doing that - like the circular U1 of EM I cited.

But another great advantage of a Peircean, or emergent constraints-based view of actuality, is that it explains chance too. The contingent, spontaneous or accidental is all the kinds of possibility which escape constraint. If a possibility is not being actively suppressed (through self-cancellation, as described) then it not only can happen, it must happen.

And again, this is exactly why quantum mechanics turns classical notions of the causal machinery of the Cosmos on their head. If a particle can self-interact, it must self-interact in every way possible. And using QM, we can sum those contributions to account for physical phenomena - like the magnetic moment of an electron - to a ridiculous number of decimal places.

So the idea that existence involves the suppression of possibility - and what can't be suppressed like that, is then exactly what exists - couldn't be more certain according to our best experiments.

That's the story at the fundamental quantum level. But the same logic applies to the development of Cosmic complexity - dissipative structure like life and mind in particular.

The general constraints in this case are encoded in the (still classical and mechanical) laws of thermodynamics. So no material system can exist that is not entropy producing on the whole. It is absolutely forbidden. The possibility is utterly suppressed.

And yet "on the whole" is a constraint that doesn't care if you gain a little negentropy for yourself by wasting a suitable extra amount of heat. You can do what you like within that limit.

And if something is possible, it must happen. Biological complexity doesn't just do the least amount of dissipation it can get away with. It just grows - like bacteria in a petrie dish - at headlong exponential rate until it bashes it head up against the limits of the possible under the second law.

You're still implicitly avoiding the question of Being: why does anything exist? Why something, rather than nothing? We can always ask "why"? — darthbarracuda

In fact I am explicitly demonstrating the logical hollowness of the question you keep insisting on asking.

You can always keep asking "why?". You certainly do that. But you are just asking the same old incoherent and nonsensical question based on bad metaphysics.

What do you make of Peirce's theism? It was unconventional, to be sure, but he still explicitly affirmed the reality (not existence) of God as Ens necessarium and Creator, most famously in his article about "A Neglected Argument." — aletheist

Difficult one. I see his theism as firstly a product of his environment. His family and the Massachusetts of that time was intensely religious. US academia was notorious in resisting Darwinism, atheism wasn't tolerated in John Hopkins faculty, etc, etc.

Also - as his career and state of mind disintegrated in later life - there was financial incentive to sound more theist as that was his last hope of publishing income.

And then his neglected argument was a very poor paper - quite un-Peircean in its lack of rigour. I don't want to blame the drugs and the mania, but his moment of ecstatic transport on entering a church at a particular low point may be both an important personal phemenological sign for him, yet clearly the weakest kind of evidence for the kind of scientific pragmatism he espoused.

So I discount the neglected argument as an argument.

For sure, if you contemplate the very fact of existence - both personal and cosmological - it does have to evoke some strong state of response. To exist is ... such a surprise ... once you also have a scientific point of view in which you know pretty much how complicated and arbitrary it all is, yet also full of direction and organisation.

But to then cash out that abductive sense of generalised awe as "God" seems such a cop-out. Calling existence divine or mindful - the much vaguer hypothesis of immanent pantheism - you could get away with. And that was more what Peirce, in his religious unorthodoxy, was really going for.

But in my view, if he had been less culturally influenced, and more faithful to his own metaphysical insights, he would have stuck with a strictly atheistic and anti-Cartesean pansemiosis. Even the mind and the divine would have dropped out of the equation so that existence would be understood to arise directly out of the generalised sign relation - formal constraint on material possibility that is the evolutionary "growth of Universal reasonableness", and nothing else.

So Peirce's actual metaphysics is holistic. He stood against the mechanicalism represented principally by Descartes (and the dualism of mind and matter this then forced an old school theist like Descartes into). Peirce was adamant that reality involved finality - a mind-like organising drive that emerged from material chance to produce an existence of stable habit.

And he argued this from science - as in his Monist articles. He already saw where thermodynamics was going in terms of self-organising complexity.

So the philosophy which argues rigorously is all to do with semiosis and providing a scientific view of teleology as immanently self-organising habit - existence as matter and sign.

Yet Peirce then does weaken - through both cultural constraints and personal needs - to pen some bad stuff about traditional transcendent creators.

If you read his objective idealism as a metaphorical pantheism - because. after all, actual full-strength pansemiosis is a really tough proposition to wrap your head around - then you can focus on his strong writing and ignore his weaker "crowd pleasing" efforts. Semiotics just doesn't lead to any conventional notion of a creating God.

But on the other hand, if you were the theistic scholars searching for pantheistic arguments by clearly the smartest philosopher of modern times, then Peirce could seem a god-send. Theists don't see the science that grounds pragmatism/semiotics - the fact that Peirce was arguing for a scientific organicism against the prevailing scientific mechanicalism. They hear some sympathetic ramblings that "put the scientific atheists in their place".

Of course, anyone would say I read my own biases into Peirce. But I can't find a strong logical argument in his writings for jumping from semiosis as an atheistic explanation for how existence can develop finality, to any normal notion of a divine creator, or even some kind of luminous, panpsychic, immanently divine, universal mind (as that kind of psychism falls straight back into the trap of treating "mind" as a dualistic Cartesean substance, and not a sign relation - a structuring process - at all).

Could be a mild case of it, I'm an audio engineer, but I was more referring to anechoic chambers where supposedly you can hear the sound of your nervous system because it's so quiet — Noble Dust

A true fact .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoacoustic_emission

Spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAE)s are sounds that are emitted from the ear without external stimulation and are measurable with sensitive microphones in the external ear canal. ... The relationships between otoacoustic emissions and tinnitus have been explored. Several studies suggest that in about 6% to 12% of normal-hearing persons with tinnitus and SOAEs, the SOAEs are at least partly responsible for the tinnitus.

Haven't I explained this to you before? If everything tries to happen at once, most of it will be contradictory and so will self-suppress its own existence, cancel itself away to nothing.

You are familiar with Feynman's path integral approach to quantum mechanics, and the least action principle of physics generally? You understand what cosmologists mean when they talk of the Universe as the result of collapsing the universal wavefunction?

Emergent order is basic to modern physical thought. As is the idea of things starting in a state of "maximum indeterminism".

Physics still hasn't managed to crack the quantum gravity issue to general satisfaction - explain spacetime via a wavefunction collapse of pure quantum possibility. But it sure is widely accepted that being able to explain time as an emergent regularity has to be part of any real unifying Theory of Everything.

...to me it's common sense knowledge that visits to the healer, with the culture's beliefs and expectations built into the encounter, sometimes make people feel better even if the healer's potions are made of sugar or wood pulp. — mcdoodle

But what is the source of this "commonsense" understanding of magical thinking? It can only be that you are benefiting from a tradition of scientific rationality.

So you are talking about a sense that was decidedly uncommon outside of a scientific metaphysics.

What science does is take such common sense knowledge and systematise the study of it, — mcdoodle

You invert the causality for reason of polemics. It was the systematic study of nature that has resulted in naturalism (rather than supernaturalism) becoming widespread commonsense in modern society.

Medical science for a long time had a physical, physiological bias, and resisted scrutiny of what have become known as placebo effects. — mcdoodle

Doctors are the most mechanical of thinkers. I found it quite horrifying as a biologist to start doing neuroscience and be exposed to what seemed the most primitive thinking about natural causality.

So yes, medical science does have a particular problem. It is after all a discipline that earns it keep by "fixing things". And treating the body or brain like a broken machine is the simple place to start on when you don't really understand the complexity from a deep biological point of view.

However again, even medical science is science in that in the long run it will be pragmatically self-correcting. So paradigm shifts are possible, and will happen if they deliver better outcomes.

Indeed there seems to a new phase of bright young researcher-practitioners who are trying to bring first-person accounts into the frame. — mcdoodle

Yep. A good doctor in the front line knows it is about dealing with people holistically. And modern medical training gets that too.

So your argument boils down to there being a problem with Scientism and an overly-reductionist, overly-mechanical, approach to understanding nature. And it is easy to agree that that mindset has become widespread - especially in popular culture.

But actual scientists are rarely that dogmatic. Even that arch-reductionist, Francis Crick, replied that he pushed his more wacky hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness simply in the spirit of putting up ideas that others could actually knock down.

And my position remains that all phenomena - including ethics and aesthetics - are expressions of natural principles, hence comprehensible by the methods of scientfic reason. Which to be precise, is the triadic cycle of abductive creative guessing, deductive theorising, and inductive confirmation, as outlined in Peircean pragmatist epistemology.

So indeed, one method to rule them all. :)

However Apeiron doesn't seem to answer anything either, since it doesn't exactly explain why anything started at all. — darthbarracuda

But Apeiron - when understood as primal chaos - says that everything is already happening. It doesn't need starting, because it is already an infinitely rowdy state of dynamism. What it needs is taming. It needs settling by the emergence of stabilising regularities.

Of course we then also modify the rather substantial understanding we would have of this ferment of fluctuation. We have to see that time itself is part of the emergent order. So the chaos is a chaos of possibility rather than actuality. A chaos of form and direction as much as matter or reaction.

So the whole notion of "starting" becomes vague when talking about vague beginnings. There is no "before" before before itself becomes an actuality in being a meaningful distinction in terms of talking about "after".

Personally, I discount Aquinas as he latched on to what was most wrong about Aristotelean metaphysics - the idea of the need for the further thing of an unmoved mover.

Self-organising organicism officially starts with Anaximander's story of the differentiating and integrating Apeiron. So in the beginning was vagueness, not a divine first cause.

The dichotomy is thus between those who believe existence is change created against a static, eternal, backdrop and those who take the process view that existence is enduring regularity emerging out of chaotic variety.

In the beginning for one is stasis. For the other, flux.

So Aristotle got the emergent story right - how existence looks once it has developed a mature causality. But his story on causal origination was confused (or rather his writings were cherry-picked for what fitted the needs of Christian belief best).

if you're talking about a metaphorical supercomputer creating the world, you're basically talking about God. It's just a crappy metaphor. — Noble Dust

Or maybe it exposes the essential incoherence of that familiar notion of a creating God?

It seems nuts that anyone would want to create our flawed world as some kind of "interesting experiment". Why would any super-being - alien, computational, or divine - give a stuff about doing something like that?

So if the computer simulation explanation seems lame as it lacks any sufficiently high-minded motive, then maybe it is a metaphor that focuses attention on what seems lame about a monotheistic creator.

At least the ancient Greeks imagined their gods to be a bunch of binary divisions that naturally led to love, strife, and general gameplaying. And in the beginning was a chaos that god-hood brought the basics of organisation to.

I was wondering if we are forgetting a possibility that theism and atheism may converge into the same conclusion after figuring everything out about the universe. — FLUX23

The argument is over causality - what could cause existence? And both conventional theism and conventional atheism flounder in the same way. They think about causality from the point of view of a reduction to material and efficient cause. They both want to put formal and final cause in "the mind of the maker" - the only difference being atheists see that maker as a human person, theists see it as a supernatural person.

Where theism and atheism could then start to converge is by starting to understand formal and final cause in terms of metaphysical naturalism. Design and purpose would become immanent features of nature - the machinery of self-organisation.

That "full four causes" approach to metaphysics has a long tradition - starting with Aristotle. And it has flickered along in the background of thought ever since - showing up for instance in the organicism of Needham and the systems science of von Bertalanffy. Also of course, Peircean semiotics.

And you do indeed find both theist and atheist scholars having a lot in common once they start talking at this level.

But still, I think theists have much more to lose in this four causes resolution. It is much easier for atheists to give up their conventionalised notion of materiality than it is for theists to give up their conventional notion of the divine or spiritual.

Or at least, for the scientist, it is expected that their fundamental ontic conceptions will change in the light of better evidence. For the religious, the game is based on faith and being "other" to that very practice of methodological reasoning.

Yep. Sort of.

The argument would be that accelerating entropification would be the most general of all imperatives - the one rule that all existence is driven by. But constraints aren't absolute. They irreducibly have their associated freedoms. So humans - as the most complex and rationalising form of dissipative structure - can do "whatever they like" within that most general constraint.

Every material action of humans just has to be entropy producing by physical law. No perpetual motion machines allowed.

But for example, it is open that a choice could be made to produce as little entropy as possible. So one could withdraw as much as possible from the race, so to speak.

On the other hand, if you actually measure the collective material actions of humans, our entropification activities are on an exponential curve. All the evidence points at us in fact having the goal of maximising our global rate of entropification.

So a few people might form a personal goal - like having the smallest ecological footprint possible. However that so far has put no visible brake on humanity as a whole.

So the thermodynamic imperative is alive and well. Burn, baby! Burn!

Yep. It will keep on going in the wrong direction. The definition of disoriented.

And they go off in whole groups. There were 15 in the group that walked past me.

So you can believe a film-maker or you can believe a scientist. But your "video evidence" is a joke to me.

So I see a disoriented penguin in Herzog's film.

A few years ago I was standing next to a penguin researcher when a whole gaggle of Adeles came waddling past us in the wrong direction in McMurdo Sound. They looked happy enough even though the researcher said there goes another lost bunch headed towards certain death.

Animals are always wandering off because it makes sense to explore the world for new territories. Especially in a changing environment like sea ice where a randomly calving shelf can float in and block off your feeding ground that summer.

Still regurgitating his factoid?

Such a separation is only a beginning in the sense that it is the end of the old and the beginning of the new. So we must account for the old then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Being the beginning of (space)time, it is also the beginning of the dichotomy that we call old vs new, past vs future, change vs stasis.

To talk about things as they were "before" the time there was a "before" is nonsensical. Or at least, only a logic of vagueness - which talks about things "before" the principle of non-contradiction applies - can make sense of such a statement. :)

But if that is the case, how is it that the thing which is prior to the co-dependent whole and parts, the symmetry itself, not actually a whole, a whole with no parts, which later becomes a whole with parts? — Metaphysician Undercover

What's the problem if the whole with no parts is formally equivalent to the parts with no whole? That's what vagueness - as standing prior to the PNC - says.

The article of course does not mention the actual mainstream hypothesis of modern biology - which is that life arises as an expression of the more general purpose of the second law of thermodynamics.

People now go out to measure the temperature of the air above rain forests and other complex ecosystems these days. The hypothesis is quite testable. It can shown that life is driven by the imperative of maximising entropy.

Co-dependence is unacceptable because it produces an infinite regress with no beginning. Therefore the assumption of co-dependence is a negating of the beginning rather than a looking at the beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense. Instead of having to start with either a whole, or the parts, things start with the more foundational step of the beginning of their actual separation.

So the triadic part~whole relation goes from being something dormant as a pure possibility to something which actually starts to happen - a division that becomes crisply developed as it is self-sustaining due to feedback.

So yes, this still leaves metaphysical questions. But it kills the kind of mechanistic regress you are talking about because the first step is already irreducibly complex in being a symmetry-breaking relation. There is a concrete limit on any "beginning" which the "perfect symmetry" of vagueness marks.

As soon as you have the slightest bit of the one (wholes, constraints, global "formal" organisation), you also must have already the same degree of its other (parts, degrees of freedom, local "material" action).

Dialectical logic gives you no choice about this. Every action has its reciprocal reaction. Every thesis is intelligible only in the light of there being its antithesis.

Varela in 'The Embodied Mind' made an impassioned plea for scientists to open themselves up to first-person narrative, but it seems to have fallen on stony ground so far. — mcdoodle

You can blame the scientists. But it is the scientists who actually investigate and support the idea of a placebo effect. Its a huge area of research.

Who you really ought to blame are the public who are so susceptible to woolly mystic beliefs - like that antibiotics can fix their viral infections. Or SSRIs can take away their depression.

You could also give big pharma a kicking. It is in their financial interest to foster a mechanistic view of pharmacueticals.

So your fingering of "science" as the problem could hardly be wider of the mark. Science actually pays regards to the evidence in forming its views. You would never have heard of the placebo effect unless it had come to light as a result of research.

I go back to your example of a vortex in water. You can't just scoop out a vortex. Similarly I have a hard time visualizing what a constraint is supposed to be independent of a material basis. — darthbarracuda

So are solitons and electron holes material things in your book? We can use them for computing. They obey the quantum rules of particles.

And for the millionth time now, this is not about imagining reality independent of a "material basis". Why do you find a hylomorphic understanding of substance so difficult?

The difference is in the view one takes of the material side of the deal. For you, the material basis is itself substantial. Matter is already matter - which begs every important metaphysical question.

But my view explains materiality as emergent from contextual constraints - formal and final cause. It is the limitation on possibility that crystallises substance as something "physically actual".

Protons and electrons exist because the cooling/expanding Cosmic context freezes them out as expressions of broken gauge symmetries. They have actual mass and move about at less than the speed of light because the further global Goldstone symmetry is broken by the Higgs mechanism.

So modern particle physics says the basic substance of existence - quarks and leptons - are made substantial by material possibility (pure radiation) being trapped into formal regularities (broken symmetries) which they can no longer escape (because the Big Bang has removed that freedom with its cooling and expanding).

If you want to "visualise" a constraint, just think of the symmetries that underlie the standard model of particle physics. As forms, they have a logical necessity.

You can't get simpler than the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetic charge - the symmetry of a circle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_group

So that puts an irreducible limit under Cosmic existence. If you have a reduction of degrees of freedom going on of the kind that produces particles as the minimal possible states of excitation, then EM winds up being the bottom level particle property for the very good reason that nothing could be simpler.

And yet even that simplicity still has a structural complexity - exactly as Peirce's triadic view of relations argues.

So in any form of existence which involves the kind of constraint on action which produces an organised dimensionality (ie: a universe), the realist thing is the fact of mathematical form. Matter can try to do whatever the heck it wants. At the Big Bang, matter fields could fluctuate in ways to contain every kind of symmetry-breaking particle. But as a context develops - as the Universe expands and cools - then only the simplest modes of being can actually survive. And so everything reduces down to whatever mathematical form says is the simplest kind of ... mathematical form.

If I sound frustrated, its only because the first time we corresponded, it was about ontic structural realism. You seemed to love the idea - yet clearly reading the Ladyman/Ross book has left zero impression on your thinking.

Fraid not. But there is now a real industry of secondary sources. So things are miles better than even a decade ago.

Cheryl Misak is good for a summary that puts him in context. She's done a new book as well as papers.

Peirce's populist articles for The Monist are a good introduction in that they clearly written.

But because Peirce never summarised his mature ideas in book form, only left a heap of notes that went unread for decades, there just isn't a canonical text that everyone can focus on.

You just keep repeating the only question that makes sense from your own reductionist ontology. What is it made of, what is it made of, what is it made of?

As explained, a constraints based view of materiality sees matter being produced via the limitation on possibility. So solidity arises as freedoms of actions are removed.

This is why Peirce notoriously described matter as effete mind. When spontaneity is deadened by the accretion of constraints, you wind up with what we call matter.

So what is material/efficient cause made of? Top down constraints on possibility.

Holism requires material cause too. The point is that there is always more than just that.

The fact that you have to resort to arguing your case in terms,of an engine demonstrate that you are only thinking mechanicallly and not organically.

A clue: machines are designed to operate only by efficient/material cause. Formal and final cause is engineered out of them so that these facets of reality are made a matter of human free choice.

So try again with my earlier example of scooping a vortex out of a flow in a bucket.

Yep. Self-awareness is narrative and hence propositional and deductive. It is essentially backward looking retroduction. If I just pushed that button, I must have made that decision.

So humans have an extra level of socially constructucted rationalising habit, based on language, that we use to structure experience - force it into rationalistic patterns that can account for everything in retroductive fashion. And also of course, a habit which we also use to control the body and its responses by setting up the novel states of constraint to which it must respond. So we can tell ourselves not to push that button until the light also turns green, or whatever other narrative constraint we might have reason to construct.

And then there is the biology of consciousness itself. The brain is an inductive predictive engine. It is always forward modelling to predict the future - predict the constraints on behaviour that will be coming from the direction of the lived environment.

So in terms of temporarility, the biological brain is pointed inductively at the future. It doesn't dwell on the past. It can't even dwell on the past. Animals don't reminisce. And the present only exists as the sum of a history. It forms the constraints that are the basis for future predicting. What has happened is done, but it in turn leaves open new possibility - the possibility into which the animal miind can creatively insert itself as an imagined player.

And then humans developed their new level of semiosis that allowed them to step outside of this natural flow and reconsider it in reasoned fashion. Through the structure of narrative, we can talk our way backwards in time to create a reasonable story about the past. That then gives us - or rather our cultures - the opportunity to build a quite different kind of psychology on top of the neural one. We can learn to think of our selves as "free willed, autonomous selves" ... who then can creatively insert themselves into the rather more abstract workings of a social community as an imagined player.

So the habit of retroductive explanation gives us the ability to now construct our own internal states of constraint. We can regulate our behaviour in a way that animals just can't. We can construct this thing of a personal identity, a collection of meaningful memories, a series of persistent purposes ... all done in our own name, but actually just reflecting our social construction.

Awareness is entropic induction. Self-awareness is negentropic retroduction. One looks continually to the future and runs down whatever is the easiest path. The other learns to act from "the past" and instead starts to devote itself to larger projects - the negentropic needs of the society which wants to shape "selves" as its tightly-regulated component parts.

So your claim is that the existence of the parts precedes the whole, in a manner of vague existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

I've said it hundreds of times now. When things begin, both parts and wholes would be maximally vague. It is in their co-dependent arising that they together dispel the mists of unformed possibility to revealed their mutually supported actuality.

But it is also true that part and whole have their most definite state of existence on quite different spatiotemporal scales. So what you are seeing is what you would expect to see as an observer existing inside what is happening.

To you - looking at the story from the middle ground scale - the parts coalesce first. The whole is present largely as a desire to be achieved in the long run future. So the parts shed any vagueness fast and the whole remains vague for the longest possible time.

But as I say, this is an optical effect. It is what you see when you regard creation from some scale intermediate between its local and global limits. Of course the parts look small and definite "by now", while the whole looks large and mysterious, still to make itself absolutely clear to us.

Hey, that paper is in fact a pretty decent defence of Panpsychism. But you are right. Being a pansemiotician myself, I would fundamentally disagree with it. :)

So the guts of my objection would be that nothing can be solved by positing a dualism of substance. In metaphysics, progress is always achieved by discovering the formal complementarity at the heart of every phenomenon. And arguing for two kinds of substance is making a brute claim about there being two types of the same general thing (a substance) that have no particular reason to be locked into a mutually formative interaction.

So positing a microphysics of matter plus mind cannot work. It has no internal logic. There is nothing to show how the existence of one requires the existence of the other. There is no holism or unity that binds these two ontic catergories. This is Panpsychism's essential problem. Matter and mind can't be shown to be the two halves of one whole, the two aspects of the one symmetry breaking.

With pansemiosis on the other hand, we are talking about the symmetry breaking that is matter and sign (or matter and symbol). And now the two categories are related as a symmetry breaking dichotomy. The two-ness is a fact of logical necessity rather than merely a brute and arbitrary claim.

Materiality is all about material degrees of freedom - the entropy to be dissipated. It is physical dimensionality.

But then the very fact of materiality makes room for its complementary opposite - information or the immateriality of symbolised meaning and sign relations. As I have argued in another thread, the universal expressiveness of a language is due to an extreme constraint on dimensionality. When materiality is reduced towards the ideal of a zero-D point - as it is with any serial code - then this active lack of materiality becomes the birth of the something different, the something opposite, that is the "immaterial" realm of symbols. Or negentropy.

Of course the play of signs, the play of symbols, still has to obey the second law. It takes work to run a computer or brain. Both must produce a lot of waste heat. But from the point of view of the play of symbols, the entropic cost of every bit, every operation (like executing a program or uttering a thought) is effectively the same. There is always a cost, but it is immaterial in not making a difference to the computation or the brain activity.

So the pansemiotic view can argue it's merit on first principles. Matter and symbol are formally complementary in that the existence of one makes the existence of the other a necessity. You couldn't have a material world and not then have "immaterial" sign relations with that world as a logical possibility.

So in general you start by arguing that reductionism is a failure - its reliance on a rather mystical notion of emergence being a symptom of that. I of course agree. Emergence is always itching to be reduced back to supervenience in the mouths of reductionists. A reductionist only wants to believe in an emergence that is sanitised by quote marks.

And then you argue that if monistic reductionism fails, then maybe mind - that horribly ill defined notion - is the second substantial ingredient that must be discovered in the microphysics. And yes, if all else fails, perhaps we have to accept such a brute fact posit.

But all else hasn't failed. Science already has a science of sign. It is perfectly normal in neuroscience or biology to treat the phenomena of life and mind as sign relations with the material world.

And the matter~symbol dichotomy has the required Metaphysical validity. Sign - living in its zero dimensional realm of digital bits - can be shown to be the outcome of material constraint taken to its physical limits. Negentropy is defined as the inverse of entropy.

The rapid emergence of an information theoretic approach to "everything" - microphysics and cosmology too - shows that this is the universal Metaphysical duality that is working. Information encodes the Janus face relation between sign and matter. Information theory describes entropy as both epistemic uncertainty and as ontic degrees of freedom. The two sides of the deal are now mathematically joined at the hip. Their essential complementarity has been recognised as a quantifiable quality - the holy bit. ;)

But Panpsychism has not fared so well. There is still no metaphysics, let alone physics, connecting the brute and disparate categories of matter and mind. As a possibility, it was raised a century ago and has proved a complete dud.

Pansemiosis, on the other hand, has become science's new dominant paradigm - even if cashing out all that which is implied is still a work in progress across the span of the sciences.

So now you recognise that to "have a collection" one must add the further thing of "a container for the parts"?

Cool. You have conceded my point in regards to taking a set theoretic approach.

But this is metaphysics, and metaphysics is an area in which all is speculation and belief. — mcdoodle

But demonstrably, historically metaphysics is founded on the assumption that nature is intelligible, rational, logical, organised by mathematical patterns.

It is then a speculative turn - only possible given this positive central thesis - that nature might be other.