It’s not a question of whether the ‘wave function’ is or isn’t mind-dependent. The equation describes the distribution of probabilities. When the measurement is taken the possibilities all reduce to a specific outcome. That is the ‘collapse’. Measurement is what does that, but measurement itself is not specified by the equation, and besides it leaves open the question of in what sense the particle exists prior to measurement. — Wayfarer

What might help is to consider that "the measurement" involves both preparing the coherent state and then thermally interacting with the system so as to decohere it.

A deflationary understanding of the collapse issue is that first up, we accept our experiments demonstrate there is something to be explained. Quantum physics shows that entanglement, superposition, contextuality, retrocausality (as time entanglement) are all things that a larger view of the real world, of Nature in itself, has to take into account. A classical level of description only emerges in the limit of a grounding quantum one.

But then what is going on to decohere the quantum?

To demonstrate the quantum nature of reality in the lab, we have to first prepare some particle system in a state of coherence. So the scientist makes what is then broken. Nature is set up for its fall by first that fall being prevented from happening in its own natural way – just by the fact there is always usually dust, heat, and other sources of environmental noise about at our human scale of physics – and then allowed to happen at a moment and in a way of the scientist's choosing.

So a pair of electrons are entangled in sterile conditions that quite artificially create a state of quantum coherence. The scientist's artfully arrange machinery – built with scientific know-how, but still a material device designed to probe the world in a certain controlled fashion – manufactures a physical state that can be described by a probabilistic wave function.

Now this wavefunction already includes a lot of decohered world description. It assumes a baseline of classical time already. In quantum field theory, the Lorentz invariance that enforces a global relativistic classicality is simply plugged in as a constraint. So a lot of classical certainty is assumed to have already emerged via decoherence starting at the Big Bang scale that now allows the scientist to claim to have the two electrons that are about to perform their marvellous conjuring trick.

A state of coherence is prepared by the larger decohering world being held at bay. A wavefunction is calculated to give its probabilities of what happens next. The wavefunction builds in the assumption about the lack of dust, vibrations, heat in the experimental array. Those are real world probabilities that have been eliminated for all practical purposes from the wavefunction as it stands.

Instead the experiment is run and the only decohering constraints that the electron states run into are the specific ones that the scientist has in advance prepared. Some kind of mechanical switch that detects the particle by interacting thermally with it and then – because the switch can flip from open to closed – report to the scientist what just happened in the language that the scientist understands. A simple yes or no. Left or right. Up or down. The coherent state was thermally punctured and this is the decoherent result expressed in the counterfactual lingo of a classicality-presuming metaphysics.

Out in the real world, decoherence is going on all the time. Nature is self-constraining. That is how it can magic itself into a well formed existence. It is a tale of topological order or the emergence of complex structure. Everything interacts with everything and shakes itself down into some kind of equilibrium balance. Spacetime emerges along with its material contents due to the constraints of symmetrical order. Fundamental particles are local excitations forced into a collective thermal system by the gauge symmetries of the Standard Model – SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1).

The quantum is already tightly constrained by the Big Bang going through a rapid fire set of phase transitions in its first billionth of a second. The wave function at the level of the universe itself becomes massively restricted very quickly.

So in our usual binary or counterfactual fashion, we want to know, which is it? Is the cosmos fundamentally quantum or classical. But as an actuality, it is always an emergent mix. The realms we might imagine as the quantum and the classical are instead the dichotomous limits of that topological order.

There never is a pure state of quantum coherence (and so indeterminacy) just as there never is a pure state of classical determinacy. The Big Bang quickly bakes in a whole bunch of constraints that limit the open possibilities of the Universe forever. Thermal decoherence reigns. The Universe must expand and cool until the end of time.

As humans doing experiments, we step into this world when it is barely a couple of degrees away from absolute zero. We can manipulate conditions in a lab to demonstrate something that illuminates what a pure quantum metaphysics might look like in contrast to a pure classical metaphysics. We can filter out the dust, heat and vibration that might interfere with the coherent beam of a laser or whatever, and so start to see contrary properties like entanglement and contextuality. Then we can erase that view by imposing the click of a mechanical relay at the other end of maze of diffraction gratings half-silvered mirrors that we have set up on a table in a cool and darkend air-tight room.

But the Cosmos was already well down its thermal gradient and decohered when we created this little set-up. And even our "collapse of the wavefunction" was bought at the expense of adding to that thermal decoherence by the physical cost of some mechanical switch that got flipped, causing it to heat up a tiny bit. Even for the dial to get read, some scientist's retina has to be warmed fractionally by photopigments absorbing the quanta of its glowing numerals. The scientist's brain also ran a tiny bit hotter to turn those decoded digits into some pattern of interpreting thought.

"Aha, it happened! I see the evidence." But what happened apart from the fair exchange of the scientist's doing a little entropy production in return for a small negentropic or informational gain?

What collapses the wavefunction? Well who prepared it in the first place. The Universe expended unimaginable entropy in its Big Bang fireball to bake in a whole lot of decoherent constraints into the actuality of this world. The needle on any quantum purity was shoved way over to the other side of the dial even in the first billionth of a second.

A complication in the story is that it is in fact right about now, 13 billion years down the line, that we are nearest a classical realm with its rich topological order. Matter has become arranged into gas clouds, stars, planets, and scientists with their instruments and theories. But in the long run, all that matter gets returned towards an inverted version of its original near-quantumly coherent state. The Heat Death de Sitter void where all that exists is the black body radiation of the cosmic event horizon.

But anyway, right now there is enough negentropy about in terms of stars and habitable planets to feed and equip the scientist who wants to know how it all works. The inquiring mind can construct a delicate state of coherence on a laboratory bench and run it through a maze that represents some counterfactual choice. Does the wave go through one or other slit, or both slits at the same time? A classical metaphysics seems to say one thing, a quantum metaphysics demands the other.

Which reality we then see depends on at which point we thermally perturb the set-up with our measuring instrument. If reading the dial and becoming conscious of the result mattered so much, then we would likely have to take greater precautions about keeping them well clear of the equipment too, along with the dust, vibration and other environmental disruptions.

The scientist of course finds the result interesting because it says both understandings of reality seem true. Particles are waves and waves are particles. Reality is quantum in some grounding way – the Big Bang and Heat Death look to confirm that's were everything comes from and then eventually returns as some kind of grand dimensional inversion. Hot point to cold void. And then what we call classicality is the topological order that arises and reaches its passing height somewhere around the middle. Like right about now. You get electrons and protons making atoms, which make stars, which make planets, which get colonised by biofilms that earn their keep by keeping planetary surfaces about 40 degrees C cooler than they would otherwise be if they were left bare.

And so there you have it. Mindfulness is life doing its thing of accelerating cosmic entropification – creating states of coherence and then decohering them down at the level of enzymes and other molecular machines. A scientist can play the same game on a bench top. Spend a little energy to construct a state of poised coherence. Report what happens when a little more energy is spent on decohering it within the contexuality of different maze configurations.

Well designed, a contrast between a quantum metaphysics and a classical physics can be demonstrated. We can take that demonstration and apply it to the entirety of existence as if that existence were entirely hung up on the question of which kind of thing is it really – pure quantum or pure classical?

Or we can instead look a little closer and see that the quantum and the classical are our abstracted extremes and what is really going on is an act of cosmic decoherence within which we can roll the decoherence back a little bit towards a dust-free and isolated coherence and then let it catch up again rather suddenly at the click of a mechanical relay. The almost costless informational transaction that still nevertheless has its thermal cost, as would be measured by a thermometer attached to the mechanical relay.

If you looked at the Mind Created World piece, I explicitly state that I am not arguing for any such thing. — Wayfarer

I think a few folk are frustrated that this is something you dance around. The implication always seems to be there in what you post.

The only salient point for my argument is the sense in which the measurement problem undermines the presumptively mind-independent nature of sub-atomic particles - that at some fundamental level, the separation of observer and observed no longer holds. And that’s because in the final analysis, reality is not objective but participatory. We’re not outside of or apart from reality - one of the fundamental insights both of phenomenology and non-dualism. It’s easy to say, but hard to see. — Wayfarer

So here we go again.

Sure, the Copenhagen interpretation in the reasonable form I hear from its defenders is that if we can’t draw a line between observers and observables then we do have to say the only certainty is that the outcome of the probabilistic prediction can only be found by somebody actually checking the reading on an instrument. That might suck, but it is where things stand.

Yet we also know that we are built of biology where our god damn enzymes, respiratory chains, and every bit of basic molecular machinery couldn’t function unless they could “collapse the wavefunction” to get the biochemistry done. Nothing would happen without our genetics being able to regulate thermal decoherence at that level of cellular metabolism.

You could call this participatory, but it is only that in the physicalistic semiotic sense, the modelling relation sense - a sense far more subtle than the hoary old subjective/objective or ideal/real sense.

The deep question, to refer you to Pattee again, is how can a molecule be a message? How does genetic information regulate a metabolic flow?

Or at the level of the neural code, how does the firing of neurons regulate a metabolic flow at the level of intelligent organisms navigating a complex material environment.

Figure this out as a scientific story at the biophysical level and see how it then provides a physicalist account - that is “participatory” if you insist - at all levels of organismic structure.

But how does that detract from what I’m saying? — Wayfarer

First job was to wind you back from confusing cognition as epistemic method with cognition as some kind of ontological mind stuff that grounds mind-independent reality.

Then second I offered the expanded view of how the scientific method is just more of the same. All cognition follows the same rational principles.

So we will all agree on north and south and many other facts. But all of those agreements still rely on perspective, we're part of a community of minds agreeing and disagreeing. — Wayfarer

The sense that the world exists entirely outside and separately to us is part of the condition of modernity, in particular, summarized by the expression 'cartesian anxiety': — Wayfarer

You've neglected the epistemic fact that an organism's reality modelling demands this twin move of generalising and particularising, abstracting and individualting, intergrating and differentiating, just to produce the symmetry-breaking contrast that renders the world intelligible in the first place.

You are trying to paint this modelling dynamic as a move from a subjective pole to an objective pole. Somehow big bad reductionist science – with its epistemic system of laws and measurements – is abandoning the personal for the impersonal. The particular is being sacrificed on the altar of the general.

But – as Gestalt psychology and indeed neurobiology in general tell us – organisms understand their world in terms of the construction of contrasts.

If we couldn't generalise, your landscapes would just be a blooming, buzzing confusion of specks of light. We would not parse into shapes and objects of some more generalised type. We couldn't imagine the land held stories that might connect it as a more general historical flow.

And equally, in generalising the notion of say a mountain or river, that allows us to be more particular about this or that mountain or river. This or that mountain/river in terms of its material potentials, or its tribal significance, or indeed its corporate significance.

So this all sits on the modelling side of the equation. It is part of the epistemology. Generalising and particularising is simply the crisp division that a mind would have to impose on its world to get the game of modelling going.

You say see that butterfly. Do I need to ask what a "butterfly" generally is? Can I now have my attention quickly drawn to some particular butterfly you have singled out for some reason"?

But if you exclaim, just look at that quoll, well then – without being equipped with that general concept – I might be equally lost to understand the particular experience being referred to.

So science arises in the same fashion as it is just another level of semiotic world modelling. It's encoding language is just mathematical rather than linguistic, neural or genetic.

Science takes abstraction and individuation to their practical limits at the communal level of human modelling. Science combines Platonic strength mathematical form with the specificity of marching around the world equipped with calibrating instruments such as a clock, ruler, compass and – a thermodynamicist might add – thermometer.

So nothing beats science for abstracting because nothing beats science for individuating. This why as a way of modelling reality, it certainly transcends our evolved neurobiological limits, and our socially-constructed linguistic limits. It arrives at its own physical limits – those set by the current state of development of the mathematical generalisations and the sensitivity available to our measuring instruments.

But again, this is all on the epistemic side of the equation. We are getting to know the real world better by transcending our previous epistemic limitations, not by actually stepping outside them.

Nor are we abandoning the particular for the general. We are refining ours senses as much as our concepts.

Quantum theory draws attention to how much more sharply we now see. Look, a counter just ticked! We must have made a measurement and "collapsed a wavefunction". Whatever that now means in terms of a mathematical theory that folk feel must be transcribed back into ordinary language with its ordinary cultural preconceptions and ordinary sensory impressions of "the real world".

In sum, epistemology is organised by the dichotomy of the general and the particular. It is how brains makes sense of the world in the first place. The cognitive contrast of habits and attention. The gestalt of figure and ground.

Science then just continues this useful construction of a world – the phemenology that is a semioic unwelt, a model of the world as it would be with an "us" projected into it – at a higher level of generality and particularity.

Sure, after that you can start asking about what is then lost or gained for all us common folk just going about our daily lives. The difference between just being animalistically in the world in a languageless and selfless neurobiological sense vs being in the world in a linguistically-based and self-monitoring social agent sense vs being in the world in the third sense of a rationalising and quantifying "techno-scientific" sense – well, this may itself feel either a well integrated state or you might be rather focused on its jarring transitions and disjointed demands.

So of course, there is something further to discuss about scientism and the kind of society it might seem to promote.

But the same applies to romanticism which wants to fix our world model at the level of the everyday idealism and even frank animism familiar in cultures dependent on foraging or agriculture as the everyday basis of their entropy dissipating.

And I don't think anyone really advocates dropping right down the epistemic scale of existence to becoming wordless creatures once more – just animals, and whatever that level of reality modelling is truly like from "the inside".

So yes, modernity might create Cartesian anxiety. But that arises from a dichotomising logic being allowed to make an ontic claim – mind and matter as two incommensurate substances, two general forms of causality – and failing to see that the ontic position is that the cosmos just happens to have these epistemising organisms evolving within it as a further expression of the Second Law.

We are modellers that exist by modelling. There are naturally progressive levels to this modelling. Words and then numbers have lifted humans to a certain rather vertiginous point. Numbers as the ultimate abstractions – variables in equations matched to squiggles on dials – take the basic epistemic duality of generalisation and particularisation to their most rarified extreme. I don't really see what comes next, particularly once we get into the adventures of algebraic geometry and its ability to give an account of the world in terms of its fundamental symmetries, or the emerging maths of topological order that speaks to the breaking of those symmetries.

Epistemic idealism is sufficient in my view. — Wayfarer

Then there is no ontic case to answer.

I'm not agreeing that 'the world would still exist in the absence of the observer' - what is, in the absence of any mind, is by definition unknowable and meaningless, neither existent nor non-existent. — Wayfarer

Even if we are trapped inside our models, we can aspire to better models. And biosemiosis would remind this is also how we can aspire to be better as the humans populating our self-created dramas.

You hate on science. But what was the Enlightenment and Humanism but the application of the same more objectified and reasoned take on the human condition?

Through social science, political science, ecological science, economic science, we can finally imagine actors of a different quite kind.

Of course economic science is the problem child here. But that is another story, :razz:

Rather it is built up or constructed out of the synthesis of (1) external stimuli with (2) the brain's constructive faculties which weave it together into a meaningful whole (per Kant). — Wayfarer

Well that is just an epistemic issue and not an ontic issue. We can all agree that we are modellers of our world. Semiotics makes that point. What we experience is an Umwelt, a model of the world as it would be with us ourselves in it.

We don't just represent the outside world to our witnessing mind, and our mind might come with all sorts of preconceptions that distort our appreciation of what is out there to see. Instead, being mindful is to have precisely the kind of modelling relation that is imagining an "us" out there also in the world doing stuff. Imposing our agency and will on its physical flow.

The modelling relation which is pragmatically formed between the brain and its environment has to build in this ur-preconception that we exist as separate to the world we desire to then regulate. A belief in a participatory ontology is the basic epistemic trick. It is why we believe that we are minds outside a mindless world. That is why idealism has its grip on the popular imagination. It is how we must think to place ourselves in the cosmic story as conscious actors.

But then the job we give science is to deflate that built-in cognitive expectation. We want to find out exactly how our being arises within its being in some natural material way. Which is why biosemiosis matters as the sharpest general model of that modelling relation.

And applying biosemiotic principles to the wavefunction collapse or measurement issue sorts it out quite nicely. It doesn't turn quantum ontology classical. But going to the point you are making, it does explain exactly where we can draw the epistemic cut between the thermal decohering the Universe just does itself and the way we can manipulate that decoherence as semiotic organisms with a metabolism to feed and an environment to navigate. Or as technologists, how we can manipulate quantum decoherence to produce our modern world of cell phones and LED screens.

The presumption of the mind-independence of reality is an axiom of scientific method, intended to enable the greatest degree of objectivity and the elimination of subjective opinions and idiosyncracies. — Wayfarer

As I say, that is the presumption that founds life and mind as processes in general. The modelling relation is based on the trick of putting ourselves outside what we wish to control, and that then gives us the main character energy not to just bobble about as the NPC's of the game of life. The model makes us feel as if we stand apart, and that is what then puts us into the world as a centre of agency.

How do you know when you turn your head fast that it is you spinning in the world rather than the world spinning around you? You subtract away the motor intention from the sensory outcome. And that neatly splits your world into a binary subjective~objective division.

The illusion of an ontic division – in the epistemic model – is so strong that this leads to the idealist vs realist debate that confounds philosophy. A constructed divide is treated as a real world divide – a world which is now "mindless" in its materiality and lack of purpose, lack of mindful order. The world with us not now in it because we exist ... somewhere else outside.

The necessary epistemic illusion of being a separated self is promoted to the status of an ontic fact of nature. And endless talking in circles follows.

Quantum physics offers us enough new information on how the world "really is" not to have to deal with all the mind~body woo as well. We have to maintain a clarity as we work our way through the metaphysics necessary to ground all the twists and turns of our inquiry into Nature as the thing in itself. Before we evolved to take advantage of its entropy flows with our entropy regulating mindsets.

Whenever we point to the universe 'before h.sapiens existed' we overlook the fact that while this is an empirical fact, it is also a scientific hypothesis, and in that sense a product of the mind. Only within ourselves, so far as we know, can that understanding exist. — Wayfarer

OK. So you are still arguing epistemology and not ontology when it comes to the participatory hypothesis. Will we get to the stronger idealist interpretation shortly?

Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. — Wayfarer

Well yes. If it is our biosemiotic modelling that constructs a world of objects for us – the world as it should be for an object manipulating creature – then science must be right not to just take that humancentric view.

If objects turn out to be interactions in quantum fields – from the point of view of the scientist trying to model the world "as it really is" – then if that is what works as the model, that is the model which at least gets us that much nearer to the "reality" of whatever a cosmos is.

We are trapped in epistemology. Objectivity is wishful thinking. But subjectivity is such an elaborate social and neural construct that science of course would have to de-subjectify its models as much as possible. Even metaphysics has that aim. We can develop models that are able to revise their ontic commitments in a useful fashion – as the application of science as technology shows.

So what I'm arguing is that the fabric of the Universe has an inextricably subjective pole or aspect upon which judgements about the nature of reality are dependent. — Wayfarer

And now we slide from a generally agreed epistemic point towards the strong and unwarranted ontic claim?

Again you slip in "fabric" as the weasel word. Do you mean the fabric that is the general coherence of a model – our experiential Umwelt – or the fabric that is what constitutes the material of the actual world in which we place ourselves as the further thing of a locus of agency?

Likewise your leap to "an inextricably subjective pole or aspect". This implies that our subjectivity is necessary to the objective being of the cosmos. The ontic claim. Yet that then doesn't square with your apparent acceptance that the world would still exist if we hadn't been biological organisms around to impose our Umwelt of scents, colours, sounds, shapes, feels, etc, on it. The deflationary epistemic view of this debate.

So you provide a lot of words to support what seems you contention. But it all turns out to be making the epistemological points I already agree with and not making a connection to an ontic strength version of the contention that "consciousness caused its own universe to exist/the quantum measurement issue is the proof".

There's no reason to think we need anything more than particles, in definite locations at any time, behaving randomly to explain quantum mechanics. — Apustimelogist

Perhaps not quantum mechanics, but I don’t see how this works for quantum field theory.

I am all for minimising the mysteries, but quantum properties like contextuality, entanglement, non-locality all speak to a holism that is missing from this kind of bottom-up construction view.

are integral to the fabric of existence — Wayfarer

So these are your words. They imply no observers means no fabric, no world.

The interpretations generally want to argue some position on observers participating in the production of crispy counterfactual properties, But where is some fabric of relations or probability in doubt?

Perhaps the wave function must be collapsed. But where is the argument that it needs our participation to even exist?

Take away that need to collapse the wavefunction and thermal decoherence gives you everything we see in terms of a reality that is classical or collapsed just by its own self-observing interference. The wavefunction simply gets updated by constraints on its space of quantum probabilities.

Humans then only come into this no collapse story as creatures who can hold back decoherence until some chosen moment when they suddenly release it with a suitable probe.

It is a bit of a party trick. Keep things cold and coherent enough and then let them hit something sharply interacting. One minute, they were entangled and isolated, the next as thermally decoherent as the world in general.

So we can mechanically manipulate the “collapse of the wavefunction”, or rather mix some isolated prepared state with its wider world. But that participation doesn’t also have to collapse the entire wider world into concrete being. The self interaction of decoherence has been doing that quite happily ever since the Big Bang.

There are plenty other than me that call that into question — Wayfarer

I’m sorry but which of these interpretations say that human minds are what cause the Universe to be?

That the Universe resists the simplicities of our attempts to frame it as classical is something rather less problematic.

This is not woo-woo - it is also consonant with the realisation of cognitive science that the world as we experience it is a product of the constructive activites on the brain - as you yourself well know — Wayfarer

Nonsense. One is an exaggerated ontic claim, the other a modest epistemic fact of neurocognitive processes, easy to demonstrate.

You conflate them. But no point taking it further.

Without repeating all the detail, the salient point is the emphasis on a kind of constructivist idealism - that what we perceive as the objective, mind-independent universe is inextricably intertwined with our looking at it - hence the title of the article. — Wayfarer

But there is a difference between there being an "observer problem" as a general epistemic issue and then making it the motivation of some strong ontic claim. You haven't managed to show that quantum weirdness is somehow an ontic issue and not just an epistemic issue. You just jumped right to the conclusion you wanted to reach.

Fair enough that you cite Linde. But he makes quite a technical argument. And you should be able to see how my account of where to place the epistemic cut between observers and observables deflates the whole issue.

As an 80kg organism, Linde's biology draws that line down at the quasiclassical nanoscale boundary of chemistry where an enzyme is gluing or cutting some gene-informed sequence of amino acids. That is ground zero for life as a system that exists by modelling its world so as to regulate its entropic flows.

It starts with life. Then add on further levels of world modelling or semiosis – in the form of the codes of neurons, words and numbers – and then we get the really elaborate modelling exercise that we might call a conscious human, or even a scientist trained enough to set up experiments in a lab and report on it in journals ... revealing the world "as it exists" to that very mathematical and logically counterfactual level of mindfulness.

So it takes a certain kind of training to be a certain kind of observer. Quantum physics can train us to see reality in a different way to the way Newtonian mechanics might have trained our natural-seeming classical and reductionist preconceptions.

But even there, how many really understand Newtonian mechanics and why that was just as epistemically shocking in its day? I mean, the fact that a state of rest is derivative of a state of constant motion? Galilean relativity already applies?

So it is one thing to throw about these references to "the participatory universe". For sure, physicists are prone to say rash things about "consciousness" as they aren't properly informed of the relevant science. And the force of the biosemiotic answer is only a decade or so old. Biology has only just shifted from cells being bags of metabolic soup to cells being a hive of molecular machines colonising the nanoscale borderline between a classical and quantum version of "the real world".

But that answer is now in. A "consciousness did it" story no longer counts even as speculation that you might have risked your good scientific reputation on back when writing your book in the 1990s.

The line between observer and observables is the epistemic cut as Pattee outlined even back in the 1960s. We just now have a vast flood of new biological evidence hammering that reality home.

'The dial' or any instrument is an extension of the human ability to perceive the object. — Wayfarer

Tosh. It is what allows a human to impose a subjective notion of measurement on the world. A logic of counterfactuality which is then confounded when quantum level reality doesn’t quite seem to be playing ball in the way expected.

Complexity likewise doesn’t quite play ball with its nonlinearity. No measurement can be exact enough to predict future turbulent states.

So in general, science has observer problems. Anthropologists have their observer problem of how their subjects react to outsiders and their questions.

It is not about us being “conscious” and that somehow being what reduces reality to the mechanical predictability of our triumphant scientism. Our keenness to project a mechanical ontology on to the world is just a fact of what it takes to be in a pragmatic modelling relation with the world. It is how we construct a machinery of control over its entropic flows.

I don’t find Linde’s approach convincing. In the thermodynamic view, time is relative to itself in the sense that it expands and cools at a constant powerlaw rate. Its beat is set by every doubling of its volume being a halving of its energy density. A thermometer tells you how old it is.

Humans are irrelevant. The Cosmos would be the same with or without us.

But instruments don't make measurements - or rather, whether they do or not relies on the measurement being observed. — Wayfarer

How does reading off a number make a difference to what the dial has recorded? Be as precise as you like.

You claim there is some difference but then throw in a lot of examples that immediately skate over this issue of what counts as a measurement. It is the doing or the reading?

Sure. The point is that we humans understand the world by imposing a yes/no counterfactuality on to it. That is the mechanical trick that elevated human inquiry to the level of “hard science”. So that is how as observers - humans who don’t in fact construct their own personal lives with such logical rigour - we learn to be proper scientific observers trusted to be let free in a laboratory of sensitive and expensive instruments.

We are trained to apply a mechanical 20 questions yes/no rack on reality. But to implement that as a practical technical art, we have to make the instruments that actually do the interacting in the way we would like.

it deserves a thread of its own. Would you like to continue in a new thread & topic? — Gnomon

I should be getting on with my work as it is. :worry:

Right. You see that echoed in the measurement problem and the ambiguous nature of sub-atomic particles.... — Wayfarer

This gets tricky as vagueness has to be beyond even quantum indeterminacy as it is usually modelled.

One thing to note though is that quantum field theory plugs in the dimensionality of special relativity as an operator. So the calculations start from already presuming a relativistic backdrop of spacetime is in place. Especially time as a classically fixed existent.

This means that vagueness (indeterminism, chance, ambiguity, probability, uncertainty) is constrained in quite a definite fashion. We haven't yet drilled down to a completely vague potential where time and space are fully emergent as well. This was what quantum gravity aims to model, with the help of decoherence to give time a direction in which to point and avoid the incoherence of Many Worlds-style interpretations.

These are live issues still.

...which likewise bears resemblance to Wheeler's 'participatory universe' idea (see Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?) — Wayfarer

If you can't figure out where to place the epistemic cut, then sure, you wind up trying to put it in the "mind" of the individual scientist making the measurement rather than where it should be, which is out in the instruments designed to produce the mechanical click of a yes or no, an on or an off, an up or a down, etc.

Thank goodness that biosemiosis has now proven that case and the participatory universe stands debunked. It should impress that even life itself exists by being able to produce its quantum switches – its enzymes and molecular motors – that can informationally switch the world's entropic flows. DNA can tell metabolism what to do as an enzyme is a "classical" device that can dip its toe into quantum waters and use quantum tunnelling, superposition and other good things to direct the chemical traffic in a way that closes the causal loop to build and reproduce metabolising bodies that contain informational genes.

So forget old hat mysteries. Biosemiosis now places the epistemic cut between the measuring instruments and the quantum decoherence (or "collapse") out where it belongs. Right at the interface that allows life and mind to even be the thing of a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

We think of life and mind as the supreme examples of the organic. The irony is that it is the (thermodynamical) physics that has the lively and energetic self-organisation we know and love. Life and mind are then the trick of imposing a machinery – a system of logic driven switches – on the physics of entropy flows.

Life and mind are deeply mechanical and classical in their ontology when you get down to what is really going on here.

But isn't the problem that these can't be reconciled with gravity? That this is the major obstacle to a GUT? — Wayfarer

GR includes gravity into relativity. It reconciles two of the three Planck constants in c and G – or the speed of light and Newton's gravitational constant.

QFT then reconciles c and h - or c and Planck's quantum constant.

The trick is thus to unify all three constants, cGh, in one quantum gravity theory. And it exists for all sakes and purposes as an effective or emergent theory. The issue is that folk believe that gravity also ought to be quantum and so produce self-interacting gravitons as particles with mass. These on top of everything else would drive the mass of the Big Bang to unbalanced infinity and collapse it before it could get going.

So yeah. We are here. And maybe gravitons just don't exist. Maybe the fabric of spacetime has its gravity waves – we've seen those now – but not its self-interacting cloud of virtual contributions.

String theory and supersymmetry have pretty much bitten the dust. Again, the scientific consensus is moving on and Okun's cube – that Planck triad of constants – may be combined by some kind of metaphysics that is a little more .... systems thinking. :grin:

The clue could be in the threeness of the constants and the twoness of their reciprocal or dichotomising relations.

So sure. The science is a work in progress. It is where it is today. The popular science account is still recycling the familiar conundrums of 20 years ago. Popular understanding is then way back in the rear view mirror.

You mention 'top down constraints' - but what is the ultimate source of those constraints? Can they be traced back to Lloyd Rees' 'six numbers'? Because that has a satisfyingly Platonist ring to it, in my view. — Wayfarer

The Planck triad are the fundamental constraints which as said have given rise to our modern Platonic structure of physical theories. Check out Okun's cube of theories. I've posted an explanation of that before a few times. See...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/586530

Even Aristotle seemed to imagine his Matter/Form*1 principle as an Essence. — Gnomon

Aristotle wasn't the final word on the systems view. He was notable for getting the debate properly started.

But that's just a hypothetical postulation to explain how the chain of Causation got started from scratch. From that perspective, your "mutually exclusive" Matter/Form is not "jointly exhaustive, because it is a compound, subject to division. — Gnomon

It is not logically a compound if understood as a Peircean vagueness. Peirce defined vagueness as that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. So that puts it beyond the compounds or mixtures that are what become possible after the symmetry-breaking of form from matter has happened.

Of course we can look back from where we have arrived to say the divisions we find must have been realisable possibilities of the potential. But the ur-division doesn't exist until it starts to happen, and individuated compounds that are mixes of the divided likewise only follow after that.

So there is an evolutionary sequence here. And things can't start to be divided unless there is some logical sense in which beforehand the division simply didn't exist. Although in retrospect we can see that the potential for it must have existed. And indeed – given the choice between the split being accidental or necessary – a starting division in terms of form and matter does seem the fundamentally necessary one in terms of there being anything at all for us to be looking back and talking about.

The Greeks of course were handicapped by not being able to imagine a creation event that includes spacetime itself. So that tended to make them more materialistic about the matter side of the equation and more transcendental about the formal side. Plato's forms came from some eternal place outside of space and time. Aristotle couldn't accept time had a beginning and so leant towards an eternalised past.

But this is the 21st Century. The maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking tells us how spacetime and its matter contents are two sides of the same quantum coin.

It is still very difficult to imagine dimensionality and materiality as not being ultimate substantial simples. We are everyday embodied minds having our everyday embodied experiences. Substantiality is all that we directly seem to know. But logic and maths allows us to explore these questions at their deeper metaphysical level.

But my thesis is monistic, in that there is a single precursor to all real things. It's not a thing itself, but the Potential for things. This hypothetical infinite & undefined Apeiron, somehow splits into Form (creative causation) and Matter (the stuff that is enformed & transformed). In practice, it's what I call "EnFormAction" : the power to give form to the formless. — Gnomon

So we agree at this basic level then?

Except I would find ways to avoid talking about a precursor thing or state as that retains to many substantialist/essentialist overtones.

What a modern QFT-informed metaphysics would emphasise, and what a Peicean semiotic logic would endorse, is that reality is always something being produced by the "monism" of a triadic relation.

So this says there is one ousia or principle of being. But it is relational and not substantial. It doesn't all boil down to one stuff – even a precursor stuff as some kind of potential. Apeiron should not be taken so literally. Don't forget that Apokrisis as the dichotomising relation is what reveals the potential by the very fact of its separation, and then the further thing of its re-balancing or mixing. :wink:

So there is a monism of process. And the process is a logical arc of three steps. Or looking at it more holistically and less serially, it is a hierarchy where potentiality and necessity are the enclosing bounds and actuality the immanent and substantial outcome that arise in-between.

We are substantial beings. Looking down, we see the rapid and fine grain quantum blur that is the limit in terms of a raw material potential. Looking up, we see the slow and stately unfolding of a relativistic dimensionality that becomes so large as to be a continuity of form completely filling out view.

In dichotomous fashion, two limits on our being emerge. The limit that stands for local materiality, and the limit that stands for globalised form – some universalised structure of laws or constraints.

So in the process view, complementary limits are what emerge. In ancient Greece, the division of form and matter is how we might have put it. Today it would be general relativity and quantum field theory. A theory of the global container coupled to a theory of its local contents.

The Big Bang is then the combined action that is a GR expansion and QFT cooling. Every doubling of the one producing a halving of the other in the simplest powerlaw fashion. The evolution of an act of dichotomisation in which the whole is divided towards its complementary extremes in a process persisting "forever" – but already down to a couple of degrees of one of the limits and most of its way to its final full size in terms of the other.

Interesting. Makes morality sound like a problem of maximizing entropy under constraints. — Apustimelogist

It is based on thermo-maths but of the "far from equilibrium" kind of a self-organising dissipative structure.

So it is the hierarchical model that an ecologist would bring to studying nature as a stable long-run biological enterprise. A system that has to live within its environmental constraints by balancing the complementary forces of global cooperation and local competition.

In which case, selling drugs would have to be judged on a case-by-case basis: which drug, to whom, under what circumstances; how did they use it, what affect it had. Doesn't that require a lot of usually unavailable information? How does the dealer justify it to a jury? — Vera Mont

A sharp point. Therefore the pragmatic approach to notions of "correct action" is to recognise the need for a separation in terms of global constraints coupled to local freedoms.

Human social structure needs to form its own long-term behavioural norms – framed as generalised aspirations or balances. This get justified as a code of law or whatever. Some at large conversation tries to boil life down to livable maxims.

Then individuals should be free to act in whatever way they choose within those globally-understood bounds. A lot of those individual actions may in fact not matter. Like whether to wear a black or red tie. But if the occasion is a funeral, then some kind of justification might be needed for why a red tie was chosen. You forgot, red was your dead dad's favourite colour, whatever.

The strength of the justification only has to match the strength of the social constraint. A lame excuse is fine if the constraint sort of exists as a general dress code rule, but who really cares about dress codes anymore? The moral settings of society as it is today has pretty much agreed that this is an aspect of life that has slid right down the charts – compared to murder or drug dealing.

So the point is that justification is intrinsically social. Negotiation is to be expected as there is a balance always to be struck between the generality of social norms and the particularity of every individual's circumstances. And thus what we should expect living in a pragmatically moral social order is this balance between globalised constraints and individualised freedoms.

The community is rightly serving its long-run interests in terms of feeding, housing, reproducing its way of life – a way that has proven itself functional over a long period despite life's inevitable perturbations. And individuals are rightly serving their own local or short term self-interests within this generally acknowledged and regularly debated understanding of how to act.

When called upon, they must show that they too have thought about their actions in a socially-responsible manner. And within that call for justification there is still the natural latitude to try to get away with what you might be able to get away with even lame and implausible excuses. It is part of the game.

Just being sorry is pretending that at least you do acknowledge the social constraints to be something real and so you are still an active part of the community in question.

I suppose "that" depends on whether you view Matter or Form as fundamental, or as equal partners. — Gnomon

To dissect in more detail, matter and form are terms needing more clarification here. But they are certainly equal partners in the deal as they arise together in dichotomous fashion. Each – as one of a pair of complementary limits on enmattered and informed Being – exists to the degree it stands in sharp contrast to its "other". They form a dichotomous relation, in other words. Logically speaking, matter and form are "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive" as a pair of natural categories.

So matter and form become reifications in our mouths. They speak to the two extremes of Being that emerge when we apply our causal analysis. They are precisely what are not there right at the beginning, yet are what then emerge to create a state of substantial hylomorphic being. We can't speak of a world that is made of matter and form. We must speak of a world that becomes organised in the fashion we would call enmattered and informed.

Thus beyond the apparent duality of matter and form is their common origin in what Anaximander called an Apeiron, what Peirce called a Vagueness. A pure potential beyond any material or formal distinction. An essence without yet any essential. A vague everythingness that was equally a great nothingness.

What seems like a fundamental duality becomes instead a triadic relation where that duality is the hard outcome of a "soft launch". The beginning is where something first imperceptibly starts to happen as pure possibility begins to reveal the immanence of the sharp separation it can eventually become.

So you are talking in a way that takes matter for granted as that which already exists as a fact in its own ontic domain, just simply lacking the "other" of a shaping hand of a form. It is a primal stuff that thus concretely occupies a place and time. It comes with the inherent property of being able to sit still and unchanged. Or alternatively – and rather confusingly – to be squished and moved about. It is a stuff supposedly as maximally amorphous as potter's clay, yet still perfectly substantial in being able to take on form, or alternatively resist form, or even perhaps find its own forms if it gets a little more hot, a little more cold. Like the clay that gets baked or becomes too watery.

Then you pair this rather complicated "fundamental stuff" with an equally equivocal story on a matching realm of form. A place of mental stuff. A place that seems to be the mind of some intender or creator. It is the origin of both purpose and pattern. It can will any change, and yet seems mathematically restricted in what it can in fact impose. The Platonic solids are a good example of that.

This is the problem with a dualism of matter and form. It becomes an argument for two different domains of cause – one in the material world and one beyond it. The domains themselves seem confused and self-contradictory in the jobs they are suppose to do. How the two connect is as much a problem. The metaphysics is shot full of holes. It is not the way hylomorphism can be done.

But what I am talking about is quite different. In the beginning there is a vagueness beyond all distinctions. However the one thing that can then result from this is the birth of a primal distinction – the distinction we call the mutualising dichotomy of formal cause and material cause. It is a distinction that feeds on itself and so naturally grows to become a contrast that is sharp and strong. We quickly evolve to a state of being that is a general somethingness. A state of being that is fully substantial in being enmattered and informed. It has its complexity of materials and its complexity of structures. The two complexities between them compose a complexly realised reality.

Science now offers us concrete models of this kind of hylomorphic logic. It is the story of the Big Bang. It is the story of particle physics. It is the story of dissipative structure theory.

Everything begins in the systems dichotomy of a differentiation and an integration. A material possibility and its structural incorporation. The emergence of wholes that are more than the sum of their parts to use the clumsy expression. The incoherence of a quantum fluctuation and the thermal decoherence that then fits it into a growing pattern that is a history of actual particle events.

Science is rich with the proper logical and mathematical language to talk about a hylomorphic principle of Being. Unfortunately everyday speech is only rich in the language of reductionism. Even dualism is just reductionism doubled.

A systems metaphysics is triadic. It starts itself beyond the differentiation~integration that is the materiality of local energetic actions and the formal cause of globally cohesive constraints. It starts right before anything can be said to exist by the virtue of the fact that things might also not have existed.

So what is essential or fundamental is the everythingness that was a nothingness yet could then become divided into the somethingness of a substantial world becoming ever more complexified in terms of its material and structural possibilities.

No need for transcendence or duality. Spontaneous symmetry-breaking or dichotomisation is a self-organising and immanent process in Nature. Science sees that everywhere it looks, even if that is not a well understood fact as yet.

But this is a Philosophy forum, — Gnomon

Hmm.

But Matter is concrete, real, and changeable (perishable) — Gnomon

Sounds a little self contradictory. Not what you would expect from an essence. More work might be needed.

Systems Theory is especially applicable to Philosophy.... — Gnomon

But the holistic systems view is hylomorphic rather than essentialist. There's that.

For example, when I say "Energy is Causation"*1, it's a philosophical notion, not a conventional science concept. — Gnomon

Fine.

When I say "energy is fundamental"*2, I am including all of the various pre-material fields*3 that physicists postulate as foundational. For example, within an amorphous holistic electromagnetic field, a single Photon, the "carrier" of energy, can split into an Electron & a Positron, the primary elements of Matter*4. But, it's the energy field that is fundamental and essential, not the particles. — Gnomon

But then if you cross over into a science-constrained metaphysical discussion, you have to take more account of what the science actually says.

For instance, a photon is a massless gauge boson. But the weak particles – W+, W-, Z0 – are gauge bosons with mass. So something more complicated is going on that has to explain why bosons may or may not count as matter in your book. And why indeed electrons and positrons were massless particles before the temperature of the Big Bang fell to the point where the Higgs mechanism could kick in.

If your way of thinking has any real advantage, it has to be able to lead to better answers than the scientists have already figured out. Explain what is observed in some self-consistent fashion rather than ignore the critical details that don't fit your essences story.

Matt Strassler has a good set of blog posts that explains how quantum field theory actually "thinks" about particles in terms of "ripples" in fields. You can see how it is based on an ontology of mathematical structure rather than material substance.

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/

(1) According to physicists ... Energy is Causation, and Matter is one of its effects : Noumenal Energy transforms into Phenomenal Matter. So, Energy is the fundamental "substance" (essence)*2 of the physical world. — Gnomon

But this is simply nothing like how physics talks. You are projecting. It is your central misunderstanding.

An ontology of "stuff" is medieval science. Stuff as alchemy. Stuff as fluid stuff and corpuscular stuff. Stuff as a substance with inherent properties like gravity or levity. Stuff like calorie as the heat that flowed from one place to another.

Physics broke with this "essences" metaphysics by mathematical abstraction. Energy became no longer some vital force or basic substance but instead a description of changes in motion. Mass was inertia or a resistance to such change. Gravity was a universal acceleration between two masses. Heat was a thermal jitter or local acceleration.

Science kept on stepping back further into abstractions based on outward observables rather than. claims about inherent essences.

Now it talks about particles as excitations in fields. Fields exist by breaking mathematical symmetries. Reality is pictured as a pattern of interactions – a structure of relations rather than a "stuff".

Then we get down to the terms that really trip you up – entropy and information. These are not the new ur-substances. They are the language of statistical patterns. They are a further level of abstraction and the general move to a structuralist understanding of reality.

The world certainly seems like just a place of stuffs. Substances within the non-stuff of a spacetime void. The ontology of "medium sized dry goods" as modern-minded metaphysicians will joke.

But that is just how brains evolved to make sense of their worlds. An array of solid objects to be navigated which can be pushed and pulled around, or which instead might push and pull, acting on you.

Science started to go places by abandoning that very local and specific scale of experience and learning how to see reality through the lens of mathematics and measurement. What becomes real is the inevitability of reality's structure – the rules of geometric symmetry it must ultimately obey. The Poincare group of invariances that define a relativistic spacetime which can even have its fixed locations. And the fundamental gauge symmetries that then grant these locations the internal chiral structure which results in the Standard Model particles. The mass that populates the void. Or rather the excitations that trace out their patterns in mathematically-constrained fashion.

Substance ontology gets stuck in a dualism of matter and mind. You seem to want to bridge them by saying they are two faces of the same more fundamental thing of a psychic energy. An ur-cause. And this is how the informational turn of physics ought to be understood. Information is the new name for substantial being.

But information is a measure of structure. It is the new observable for a new maths. We can start to convert "it" to bit. A physical event or interaction – some detectable change – can be converted into the more abstracted notion of a local degree of freedom. A countable bit of information. And from there, a more abstracted maths can be applied. We are lifted yet another step further from the human-centric view of living within a world of "medium sized dry goods". Substantial stuff that observably yields or resists our bidding.

I mean, that's at least step 1, yes? If you can't be polite and amiable to your fellow humans, then it's unlikely anything will come of our efforts. — Moliere

Perhaps I am too use to the cut and thrust of academia. Polite agreement is never the helpful response. That is like standing on a tennis court weakly patting a ball back and forth. You want to be stretched to your limits by the stinging accuracy of a superior opponent.

I'm somehow trying to figure out my own anarcho-marxism, whatever that amounts to. — Moliere

And what does it amount to? You at least seem to be starting from a dialectical framing in somehow thinking anarchism and Marxism make for a productive unity of opposites.

But no need to answer. That would be a different thread.

I only have one life, and so I like to help and see the future grow -- there will always be difficulties, and the horrors of the future scare me, but we can see it through. — Moliere

But what is the plan? Beyond being polite and amiable to your fellow human?

I mean that is a practical personal plan. If things work out, then you are carried along in the flow of your community. And if things go to shit, stocking up on that kind of social capital is the smart move.

But big picture, what is the larger political and economic plan for that generally better future? What laws do we want enacted, what institutions do we want founded?

That's the level I am discussing things at. And any kind of -ism would seem also to be showing an interest in.

If we try to shoehorn everything into on type of discussion, we are going to miss very important distinctions. — Banno

You mischaracterise science which in fact progresses by resolving the world into its metaphysical strength dichotomies. Quantum theory first dissolved atomism into a story of particle~wave complementarity. Then into the holism of fields with excitations. Now into thermally decoherent systems of contextual constraint and localised fluctuations.

So on the one hand we have the warmed-over Cartesian dualism of the meaningless painted canvas and its mind-comprehended meaning.

On the other, we have science that continues to do its best to close the semiotic circle between observers and observables. Add thermodynamics to the quantum mix and we are right there. Or at least that is what biosemiosis now argues with theory and quantum biology now supports with evidence.

Of course art appreciation and social fashion can be cocooned off in its own little bubble by a Cartesian separation of powers. The two cultures are alive and well in those who were taught that that was the way to think about reality in general. And they can get quite angry about their little world being challenged.

I think of societies as organisms, but ones which we do not understand very well. — Moliere

Who is this "we"? I've put a lot of effort into the literature that exists to explain history, politics and society this way. I could give you a reading list...

there is this other, materialist-scientific side to Marxism that I believe your account gets along with fairly well: just in the place of "thermodynamic dimension" it's "Capital", — Moliere

Yep. Capital (or debt) is what becomes dichotomous to Material (or disposable entropy). This is what the systems view makes explicit.

The idea of value is abstracted to become a fungible relation. So as to make scalefree growth possible, we have to reduce the two sides of the dynamical equation to there complementary essence. The pure source of entropy that is a barrel of oil. The pure source of information (as the signal telling entropy which way to flow) that is the US dollar.

Or given that capital is now financialised as debt, US treasuries. The liquidity of all our mortgaged tomorrows – mostly in the trusting hands of the oil producers to nicely close the petrodollar foundation to the modern economic world system.

Capital and Material speak to the fact that humans have made the basis of their existence a system of balanced liquidity. We value life in dollars and oil. One may seem the epitome of the ideal, the other the epitome of the material. But that is the dichotomy of our clever construction. We divided our existence towards these opposing limits so that we could indeed live within a world thus structured. Limitless growth based on limitless oil and limitless debt.

Capital used to be land ownership in the agricultural era. That is what eventually got idealised as property rights and so setting the scene for capitalism as a currency-based expansionary enterprise.

Land just gives you access to the photosynthetic bounty of the sun. Bags of gold harnesses first people, then horses, then steam engines and gun boats. Petrodollars create a system that will pump the ground for its last drop as civilisation has no choice but to service its futurised debts at the same furious eternalised rate of growth.

Look at how China got sucked into the vortex and ended up building ghost cities in despoiled landscapes.

Beauty, not use, is my stated aim. I at least think it's important. — Moliere

A pleasant sentiment. But how do you in practice aim for it? You would have to hash that out and discover what it really means in terms of a socially sustainable way of life for a biological creature in a thermodynamical world.

I don't even need philosophy to be true to be worthwhile, much less do I need it to be useful. — Moliere

Maybe you don't. But maybe that is because you can take your lifestyle for granted as something that is just magically there as a stable foundation.

Or maybe you are instead disillusioned with the world as it is given to you, but have little hope in changing it? Philosophy has to be a comfort, a solace, rather than a plan of action.

I would agree that civilisation does seem to be on its own mindless path. It does exceed our control. Oil just wants to be burnt and it doesn't care about us except to the degree we serve to accelerate that entropic purpose. We opened the Pandora's box and we are being swept along by the larger forces that have been unleashed.

But my attitude is that you only have the one life. And right now is the most spectacular moment in human history. We can see how the whole metaphysical deal got put together. So sit there and understand what is going on right before our eyes. Fluffing about with philosophical distractions is a waste of an opportunity when this is the moment that reality is becoming properly known to us for what it metaphysically is.

the person seeking justice or goodness will say "But equality and balance are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the parochial terms. That's ethics" — Moliere

Fine. But the OP set it out this way....

I get a sense that this forum has some moralists who feel that the physical world is morally neutral, yet organized human societies should be scrupulously fair & balanced toward some ideal of Justice ; and some amoralists or nihilists who think its all "just one damn thing after another" ; plus perhaps some nameless positions in between. — Gnomon

So a grander view was being asked for than a parochial one. Then Bono unhelpfully heaped on his confusion with a trite depiction that seemed to argue that equality and fairness are different things, or perhaps not. Not even a parochial clarification was attempted.

But as a case in point, we can see that it touches on a valid difference in terms of notions of "fair and just" life opportunities and "fair and just" life outcomes.

So we have then a problem of how to square the two. In the real world, people come with their biological variance and their social variance. In the old days, we were foragers. The biological variance was Gaussian and the social variance likewise. For a million years or so, bodies only evolved a bit, lifestyles only changed a bit.

Then we had the agricultural revolution. Folk still had the same genetic balance of equality/inequality. Luck could make you smarter or stronger than the average. But steadily populations grew and social outcomes became more of a hierarchical competition. You had the explosive growth of empires rising and falling.

Then the industrial revolution and now social outcomes could be hugely varied. And indeed, political structures were rejigged to make that part of the game. Liberal philosophy advocated for all to have the opportunity to get fat and rich, every person getting the just desserts they could earn.

But unfettered capitalism doesn't work. Some kind of balancing in the other direction – an evening out if outcomes are too uneven – has to be built into the politics. Marxism was one such response – but better institutionalised by social democracies than communist autocracies.

So yes, there is some ethical meat in this. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". We can see that as the kind of formula which connects the biological variance and sociological variance, that connects the distribution of opportunities to the distributions of outcomes in the hope of approaching some happy medium.

But then the rub. The happy medium is in turn dependent on the underlying entropic foundations of that society. There is a burn rate that the political thermostat is attempting to regulate. The populace must produce – or these days consume – at a rate sufficient to keep the system on the road and growing, while also paying for the matching social safety net (including its state security apparatus) that stops the social fabric tearing itself to shreds.

If you neglect to discuss this deeper thermodynamic dimension to human affairs – what it means to have moved from foraging, to agriculture, to fossil-fueled industry – then it will seem as if social settings are decided within some ethical bubble. Politics can ignore the burn rate it exists to control and can just fluff about debating good vs evil, Marxism vs Liberalism, your whatever vs my whatever.

That is why the jargon used in moral philosophy has to become more openly thermodynamic and thus connect society to its real world basis. The life and mind sciences have already done just this. Even sociology, history and politics have schools going this way.

If moral philosophy is the last one to jump on the train – well, I'd say that is probably damn well unethical. What use are these fools who insist on the abstract purity of their ivory towers.

Now let's get back to more pragmatic issues like the trolley problem and anti-natalism.... :grin:

one has to go through the dialectical process, and as such, engage in the dialectic rather than ask for a final answer that let's us check a box "yes" or "no" -- "just" or "unjust" — Moliere

No. I’m not arguing for open-ended dialectics. I’m arguing for arriving at some suitably definite dichotomy where just is defined with precision in terms of its “other”.

Negation doesn’t work as just vs unjust tells us very little about this still unnamed other. A metaphysical,strength dichotomy would be pairings like discrete-continuous, chance-necessity, local-global, vague-crisp, flux-stasis, etc.

If we can’t think of something to pair with just in similar fashion - as that which is logically mutually exclusive AND jointly exhaustive - then this in itself an argument for it being not a metaphysically general kind of distinction. It ain’t working as a bounding absolute when it comes to our dialectically formed vocab of ultimate abstractions.

Equality and balance are more robust terms, more overarching terms, as same-different is one of those standard dichotomies that concretely arose out of Greek philosophy. Justice and fairness are more parochial terms. As we have discussed and agreed, you can have the confusion of whether we are meaning equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.

Opportunity implies the competition that will result in a statistical range of outcomes. Lucky for some, unfair to others? Outcome implies a range of individual differences will be averaged over so that none are different by the end. Is that kind of communism just? Does one dream of the kind of discipline that leaves us as equal as an army marching in lockstep?

It is amazing that anyone could bandy these terms around - good, fair, just - as if they were already metaphysically robust … even if we can get by with them as socially coercive appeals in our everyday social politicking. Just claiming that goodness and justice is what your side represents and what your foe doesn’t.

It sounds to me like you'd have to say that the real world is fair and just, — Moliere

But in what sense? What context? Can you define these terms as you contextually understand them.

The slippery use of language shows folk are uncertain of their metaphysical assumptions. We have physicalist terms like equal and balance being thrown around with it remaining unclear how they either complement or challenge these other idealist terms such as fair, just and good.

So are folk building in the strong division that thus resist its ontological bridging? Or do they assume the opposite that Nature is a functional whole and so separation is part of the game that leads to eventual reconciliation as a dialectical unity of opposites?

My approach is the usual one of hearing folk agonising about some puzzling duality and then explaining that this is merely a symptom of a greater holism – the triadic ontology of a holomorphic system.

If we are concerned that the Cosmos appears in some way fundamentally unequal and unfair, while humans have this idealistic potential for understanding fairness and constructing equality, then that dilemma is the place to start a larger ontologial reframing.

We can know that our terms make proper sense once they apply comfortably to both the polar extremes involved – from the most brute physics to the most enlightened philosophy.

What do balance and equality look like at the sociocultural level of human "morality". And what do fair and just look like at the cosmological level of thermodynamics?

We are getting somewhere when we can see they are polarities that encode a spectrum of state that constitute "the world inbetween" their limiting extremes.

This is the power of metaphysical logic. It dichotomises to arrive at a unity of opposites. Mind and matter denote to opposing limits. A useful distinction which gives us the measure of all things inbetween to the degree they seem either more mindful or more material. Our definition of terms is precise to the degree it has been framed as a logical reciprocal relation.

Mind = 1/matter in being the least materially bound condition we can imagine. And matter is likewise 1/mind in being the least mindful level of any conceivable real world process.

Anyone who cares about their philosophy would make the effort to ground their use of terms in this dialectical fashion. They wouldn't just grunt and gesture – as if pointing is enough and no explaining is required.

Proper definition is counterfactual and must point to what is present in terms of what is absent. But how does the grunter and gesticulator point to that which is the absent? What use is such a person on a philosophy forum?

Are polar opposites are simply the negation of some concept, like Justice/not-Justice, or if Justice is contrasted with injustice, or if Justice stands alone in relation to Fairness? — Moliere

Right then. The work begins. And perhaps some terms are so soaked in idealism (or physicalism) that there is no rescuing them?

I myself tend towards systems jargon like constraints and freedoms, plasticity and stability, vague and crisp, chance and necessity, etc, etc. I already inhabit a dialectical paradigm where work has been done to create robust reciprocal distinctions. There are a ton of terms that bridge the divide that reductionism creates. Those in system science speak their own language for a good reason. That is how they can share the same general mindset as a community.

If the talk turned to justice, this would be understood as some kind of optimising balancing act – as illustrated by a set of scales. Differences can be converted to equalities. A pound of cheese can be measured in terms of its equivalent – some sum of money being what matters to the shop keeper with physical goods to trade for hard cash.

Weighing the value of goods is prosaic. The exchange of money acts as the most impersonal way of establishing a biosemiotic connection between a society and its entropification. Definitions of a fair, just, balanced and equal deal seem to be synonyms of each other as the gap being bridged is so habitualised and ritual. Just read the price and pay the money. Or don't.

But then where we get to "moral" decisions that weigh the individual and their actions against their society and its norms, the weighing of the scales becomes a lot more difficult and complex. Pile up the sin on one side and what then is the good that can be placed on the other?

Is it an eye for an eye or juvenile rehabilitation? Does a crime of passion deserve an automatic market discount?

You have to see through these abstracted notions – fair, just, balanced, equal – to discover the pragmatic complexities they are supposed to encode. And that is even simply in the everyday human social context let alone when someone poses the very broad metaphysical question of whether the real world in general is "fair and just".

So if we take Hegel's philosophy we get a dialectic where the negation of the negation does not lead to the original concept, but instead is a process of sublation — Moliere

I find Hegel pretty clumsy. Peirce tried to tidy him up.

I think what needs to be added to the dialectic is the trialectical arc of rational development – the steps from the firstness of vagueness, to the secondness of dichotomy, to the thirdness of hierarchy.

So we start just with a pure unbroken "everythingness" that is thus also a "nothingness". Counterfactuality ain't even born. We just have an Apeiron – an unstructured potential.

Then there is a symmetry-breaking or dichotomisation. The hot separates from the cold in original Greek abstraction. It may start as a more seed of difference but then feeds on itself to become a general polarity. If we break the symmetry of 1 as the identity element, then we get both infinity and the infinitesimal as its logical extremes. Shrinking and growing arrive eventually at their own complementary bounding limits. Infinity = 1/infinitesimal and infinitesimal = 1/infinity.

So the antithetical arises not as thesis and its sublation – a temporal order – but is present right from the start as the other side of thesis in a more spatialised sense. It is already a pair of directions ready to unfold in mutual fashion.

But yes, in general the systems view is dialectic. But if you start in a pure vagueness of a structureless Apeiron, then you are thinking more thermodynamically as it is all about symmetry-breaking itself and not already into the realm of dyadic counterfactuality – Peircean secondness.

The universal and the particular as logic-grounding concepts have to arise from "somewhere" that is their own ground. And a logical vagueness is how to get that triadic game going. Peirce defined vagueness as that to which the PNC doesn't (yet) apply. (And generality as that to which the LEM fails to apply).

So this is Hegel+, perhaps. Sublation is what an action reveals by managing to leave that further somethingness behind. But from a fully relativistic point of view, attention is drawn to the mutality or logical reciprocality of the deal. Both are revealing their other as a "leaving behind". One isn't the first move, the other the second. It is a dependent co-arising.

Justness and Fairness are the teleological ends (top down constraints) and our human choices are the bottom-up freedoms. Or something along those lines. — Moliere

The situation is hierarchical and so local~global is the most general view of it as a dichotomous symmetry breaking. We have the community as the social level of mindfulness and rationality. We have the individual as the local degree of freedom – who is in fact having to juggle social diktat and personal biology as a microcosm of the same juggling act that society is having to balance its more general ecological equation.

Both global constraints and local freedoms are "being mindful" or making intelligent choices about the same basic issue – staying alive by maintaining an entropic capacity for running repairs and reproducing growth. But their "cogent" scales are as different as possible. Individuals must be able to make split second choices. Communities might prefer to remain essentially recognisable and unchanged for as far back and far forward as they can remember or imagine.

Can fairness and justice be made terms that fit neatly into this kind of systems perspective? You can see that the local and global view might be quite different.

If I am a rich kid and my envious schoolmates force me to share my lunch "equally and fairly", whose perspective carries the moral absolutism? Am I being robbed or socialised? Your justice could be my injustice. So you need a model of social systems that can weigh the scales in some balanced fashion. Which is where I came in with that point about Gaussian vs powerlaw distributions.

It is not just about whether thermodynamics can apply to such scenarios, it is about knowing enough statistical mechanics to understand the dichotomies that polarise a thermodynamical point of view.

Just take climate change. We are already having many more extreme weather events than the models predicted. But the models were too Gaussian and the reality more powerlaw. A straight line was drawn and this assumed linearity proved to harbour more non-linearity and feedback than allowed for.

Science hasn't even had the final word on science let alone ethics. But that doesn't mean it ain't thundering down the line.

I'm guessing that we'd say something along the lines that you have to accept the good with the bad, so that the world is neither wholly just nor wholly unjust, and the same would go for fairness. Since we're always in a state of growth or becoming it's going to be the case that we'll find ourselves on the side of injustice as well as justice as we progress.

How does that sound? — Moliere

I think that is a soft answer. We do have the power of choice and can vote for better. Back in the 1960s, science told us about all the terminal 2050 problems of climate change, peak energy, overpopulation, ecology destruction. The exponentialising and even super-expontialising of the growth curves had to be matched by their own exponentially-growing antidotes. Just to get back into a powerlaw regime, energy efficiency had to reduce demand just as fast as energy consumption was increasing it.

Computer chips are at least a technology hitched to such a curve and so are a pretty sustainable growth ambition. But most other things, like food, stable weather, cars, clean environment, are not.

But that is the world we are making – which is arguably unnatural to the degree it is unregulated growth and not the kind of long-run ecological growth where we have had a gradual increase in entropification in terms of biology climbing its ladder of organismic complexity.

So again, the OP question has to make sense by its context being defined. And everyone just jumps to the idealism of the Platonic kind of fair, balanced, equal, just and good that inhabits a realm of contextless abstraction – then wonders why they can't draw any kind of line back to the real world that must ground these as pragmatically useful distinctions.

I can spell out what I think it means -- I don't think it's very deep. I think it's comparing two versions of equality -- the equality of opportunity and the equality of outcomes. — Moliere

That’s right. Which you can see is putting us into the frame of being growth predicated organisms. And yet then confusing things by pretending that there are sufficient boxes to go around to achieve every one’s growth goals.

This is a metaphysics of infinite human potential without entropic constraints. It is the very modern worldview of a romantic/technocratic age where we can have our heaven on Earth rather than having to wait for the release of death.

It is a surprisingly toxic ethics when you dig into it.

Any scenario will do -- I'd be interested in hearing how you go from physics to ethics (as generally I don't think it can be done) — Moliere

But my systems view doesn’t draw one way lines. That is the reductionist expectation where reality is just a tale of bottom-up material construction.

The systems view says reality is a growth process in which a stable existence arises from a complementary balance of two polar opposites. It is dialectical. A system is formed by its lived interaction between its top-down constraints and its bottom-up freedoms. Global constraints shape the local freedoms that then in their turn - statistically, on the whole - reconstruct that prevailing state of constraint.

So a neoliberal political structure is a mindset that constrains the youthful mind in a way that is intended to shape that person as an entrepreneur. We are encouraged to take risks (and incur debt) so as to reap the self-actualising rewards.

The entropic cost of a planet of entrepreneurs is left out of this mindset. The success of a society is literally being measured in GDP - where tearing down things Is equivalent in value to the GDP involved in building them up.

But still, this can work for at least one or two generation of humans. We have a system that limits the choices of its parts so that their free action is ensured to be of the kind that rebuilds the system as it stands. At least to a statistically constrained degree.

This is the evolutionary algorithm in a nutshell. A genetic template that produces enough direction to rebuild the living body while also producing enough trait variation to incorporate the changes that work.

Entrepreneurship celebrates failure as taking a chance is even more important if you want to grow your lived world at an ever faster rate.

Conservative politics favours the other end of this risk/reward setting. So the constraints become more obvious, the agency more clearly “ethically” restricted in definite directions.

So the line here is not from some reductionist notion of physics or thermodynamic science to the human self-creation of utopias on Earth. It is a reframing of the whole tired field of classical ethics with its is/ought debates that arose at the intersection of the scientific revolution and its romantic anti-deterministic response.

It seems there is a rational debate to be had with is/ought safely demarcating ethics as its own cool little social enterprise, predicated on the open infinity of human potential. But yeah, nah. Times have moved on.

You do not do yourself a service. — Banno

Enough with the bully tactics meant to show that your audience stands with you in judgement of me. Either give proper answers to fair questions or bog off.

So your claim is that things are thus-and-so and so must always be thus-and-so. — Banno

Nope. That is just you making shit up after I specified that I was talking about systems that grow, evolve and change ... as is possible in a metaphyical paradigm based on thermodynamical self-organisation.

You can play the dunce and pretend you can't follow what is plainly said. But then don't get upset by finding that hat being planted on your head.

Nor have you shown why we ought adopt - what is it, a "powerlaw thermodynamic balance" over a "Gaussian balance of a no-growth". — Banno

Why would I have to treat these as antithetical rather than complementary?

You haven't even said clearly if you view equal and fair as different, let alone exactly what that difference might be.

So yes, you are being tiresome. Let's hear what you case actually is here. Do the work. Use your words. Stop deflecting.

It seems to me that your description of how things are does not tell us how they ought be. — Banno

My description was of how things are fundamentally constrained. There are pragmatic limits that shape our individual degrees of freedom.

So is/ought is a false binary from the systems point of view. You just haven't understood the force of that.

Is/ought is a problem for a reductionist metaphysics that can't reconcile the divide it makes between mind and matter.

But for the naturalistic holism I argue, we are all contextual beings who have the right instincts because we are being shaped by our lived environments to make choices that on the whole – statistically speaking – lead to the continuing repair and reproduction of that system.

We reconstruct the system of constraints that are what shape us to be active agents of change in the first place.

Is/ought drops out of the equation. Constraints and freedoms become complementary rather than antithetical in the systems view of reality.

I was waiting for that. The next rhetorical move, after abuse and ridicule, is to claim that you already answered the question. — Banno

Your one trick. Pretend there have been no answers so as to cover your own failure to respond in good faith.

You introduced fair vs equal as some kind of relevant distinction. You still haven't explained what that was except take the attitude of "its obvious from someone else's picture".

I, by contrast, have pointed out that an asymmetric distribution of boxes is what would constitute "fair and equal" as a powerlaw thermodynamic balance – the one of a growing system. While a symmetric distribution is "fair and equal" as the Gaussian balance of a no-growth system.

I think the meme is trite as it mixes up two kinds of systems – the growth curves of humans with in a "world" of a fixed number of boxes to distribute. Confusion follows, as is illustrated in just thinking how the same three figures would "fairly and equally" distribute food around a campfire. Etc.

There is much that could be unpacked if you really wanted a dissection.

But still that is where we are. You memed. I gave the obvious retort. You clammed up on why you thought there was any merit in this illustration of "what is equal vs what is fair". I gave a fuller explanation. You pretend there is no reason you should have to either tackle my approach or go back and fill in the blanks on the distinction you claimed to demonstrate that ethics ain't applied thermodynamics.

Proud of yourself?

The second direction is that we can change how things are to make them as we want. We alter how things are in order to match our theories and language. This is not the province of science so much as of ethics. — Banno

Except we have to live together in the actual world and so that roots any utopias in the realities of thermodynamics. Any action we take is going to have an entropic cost that has to be budgeted for in any ethical system.

The cost to ecosystems was something that humans living simpler and less techological lives could afford to ignore.

But now that human aspirations are about constructing a planetary level of civilisation, this thermodynamic reality is all up in our faces. To not have it front and centre of an ethical debate is itself unethical in any non-trivial ethical discussion.

Your trivialising them does not do you proud. — Banno

But I asked you to present your case in your words. As usual, that is far too risky. And now you are resorting to your usual defence of "everyone who is my friend agrees with me without further question."

My repeated question to you is, how does thermodynamics help us here? — Banno

The case was put. The burden is on you to explain how it does not.

nor shown how physics helps with the ethical problems commonly discussed hereabouts, such as antinatalism, run-away trams, and keeping promises.

There are profound and important issues here that remain unaddressed by mere thermodynamics. — Banno

These may be examples of the profound real world problems that are keeping you up at night, but really? Antinatalism, run-away trams, and keeping promises! Don't you just groan seeing these trivialities rehashed time after time on PF?

Let's get back to the issue you actually raised in this thread. By force of Hallmark card meme, you wanted to suggest that fair and equal are somehow distinct in some fashion for which you want a thermodynamic explanation.

I pointed to an obvious thermodynamic distinction – the one between powerlaw and normal statistical distributions. Equality could mean either the closed system symmetry of one box for everyone, or the open system asymmetry of a 0,1,2 distribution of the three available boxes.

Now you want to continue to pretend I made no case and that I have to ring up Rawls and Nussbaum to explain your own counter-case to me.

What are you smoking?

If he is an Immanentist regarding abstract concepts — Gnomon

My impression is he just wants to be a metaphysics basher and to avoid at all costs having then to address the metaphysical inconsistencies that are buried in what he then asserts about the world, the mind, truth, etc. He wastes your time and does no work in return. So is not worth the bother. He can't even say how equal and fair are different things, let alone in what sense they are not the same.

But my position is immanentist and I would argue that importing "the divine" or "the mind" is always to be a closet transcendentalist as it does raise these natural processes to the status of standalone existences. The idea can be named independent of the ground that is its genesis.

In the Aristolelean tradition of the systems scientist and natural philosopher, we assume reality to be the product of immanent creation. That is, it self-organises into being. It arises because order is what emerges when disorder starts to cancel away its own irregularity and start to fall into dynamical patterns – "lawful" habits – that it simply cannot avoid. In some sense, nature has to find its way to a fair balance that is good in the sense that it is self-stabilising and persistent enough to exist. It is a process that can run down some gradient, some direction, for a very long time.

And clearly the Cosmos, life and mind have turned out to have just that kind of self-organising logic. And thermodynamics – as a general label for a vast field of maths and science now – is all about systems that self-organise. So thermodynamics is how we can bring 21st C precision to a metaphysics of immanence.

Yet you seem to think that this somehow answers ↪Gnomon.

How? — Banno

[Querulous voice from the back seat] Dad, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Dad? Dad?