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?

You and I can choose Gaussian or scalefree -- but that's not the philosophical question. the question is: Which do you choose? — Moliere

This is a quite normal political question. Any fool would say we want a society that is balanced, fair, equal and just. The question then becomes well which version of a society is that which you have in mind? One that is steady-state or one that exponentially grows?

On the whole, folk have voted for growth. And yearned for steady state. They want 3% as a basic forever rate of economic improvement and then they bellyache at the yawning inequality gap that such a regime creates simply as its equilibrium outcome. They remember the good old days when incomes were almost Gaussian flat. The good old days being the post-war anglosphere and not the pre-industrial era when GDP had flat-lined for millenia.

So there is the moral conundrum. The physical world foots the entropic bill. Fossil fuels are the explosive basis of modern economics and its scalefree social complexification. Peasants and serfs can now be pickleball professionals and influencers.

We are theoretically all equal in terms of being able surf the same entropic wave gushing through human affairs. We all have the same starting opportunity just by being born into a deregulated entrepreneurial modern society, especially now there is the scalefree information medium of the internet to let anyone and anything "go viral".

But then we have the bellyaching that goes with wiring ourselves for accelerationism – the wonders of exponential growth. Maybe the fossil fuels aren't such a free lunch and have an eco-services cost we never factored in. Maybe psychologically humans are still genetically programmed for the non-growth economics of stone age foraging. Fair and equal take on a different meaning within a different context of expectations.

Yesterday, the right was for every mouth around the campfire to have a feed. Three boxes for the adult and one for the child.

Today the right of every person is to be an influencer and star of their own superstar life. Equality comes in the form that the medium rewards the dipshits and victims as much as the beautiful and brainy.

So to draw a line from physics to moral choices is a complex and evolving tale, but perfectly doable.

My argument here is that to start the discussion, you first need to realise that we are indeed already caught in a choice between two poles of the "distribution game".

In one panel of Banal's diptych is everyone standing on the equality of a ground that never changes for anyone. The other panel represents the "fairness" of everyone being allowed as many boxes as take their fancy.

Assumed is that the world has some supply of boxes in the first place. And this particular world as pictured further assumes that only three boxes are enough to make everyone equally happy so long as the said boxes are distributed with the "fairness" of a maximum inequality.

So much to unpack as so much has been already assumed in the parable of the three boxes. As usual Bang-on pretends something is so obviously true it needs no further explication on his part. And as usual, he could not be more wrong.

I'm happy for you to choose. After all, it's you who claim that they are relevant. — Banno

But you have to clear up why your saccharine image illustrates anything in the first place.

You say it is something about distributions. And I agree. I can immediately see the familiar distinction between normal and powerlaw distributions, as found in the mathematically precise form given by statistical mechanics.

But in what sense is one distribution equal and the other fair? Such terminology seems to assume the idealist conclusion you are angling for. The one that says the realm of mind is ontically distinct from the realm of matter. Thermodynamics can apply to one, but not the other.

So I have asked repeatedly for you to make your case if you think you have one. I've already made my own.

How does it make sense to ask which of these is closest to thermodynamic equilibrium? — Banno

What you are not answering is which equilibrium do you have in mind? Gaussian or scalefree?

In the meantime, help yourself to more spit.

Go and boil your bottoms, son of a silly person. I don't wanna talk to you no more you empty-headed animal food trough wiper. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

More spit. Much as is to be expected on your history. — Banno

You and your eternal whinging. Just answer the question. What argument do you think your cartoon makes about "distributions" that might be dichotomously labelled "fair" vs "equal"?

Is this a difference that makes a difference somehow in relation to the further terms of "justice" or "balance", which were the terms of the OP?

I realise silence will be the reply. One can only hope you piss off permanently.

That's all very clever, but tells me very little. — Banno

Clean out your ears. This was the OP that I was addressing. I was pointing to the third option of the pragmatic/semiotic view that stands beyond the impasse of the idealism vs realism debate.

Systems science fixes things with its holism that can include the whole world. Thermodynamics - as updated by dissipative structure theory - now founds science from cosmology to the mind.

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 every time you say “thermodynamics”, you are not using it in the modern sense of self-organising cosmic order. You are still stuck in the metaphysical bog of idealist vs realist debates.

If you want to argue that equality and fairness are different kinds of distribution, then you have to start making that actual argument in a proper fashion.

And also show how the distinction is even relevant to the OP. Is justice on the equality or the fairness side of the equation? Or something else?

Whatever you think your case is, try putting that picture into words that make sense. They you might start to realise the confusions it relies on.

The boxes seem quite material, their distribution being the issue. — Banno

Yep. And I pointed to how this reflects the two kinds of equilibrium distributions in statistical mechanics – Gaussian and Scalefree.

Folk were objecting to thermodynamics because they could only think about it in terms of its original closed system Gaussian distribution and were unfamiliar with its more generic open system powerlaw or fractal distribution – the one that better fits the actual Cosmos with its dichotomistic action of expanding and cooling.

Thermodynamics is flipped on its head once it becomes a model of self-organising growth rather than featureless death.

And familiarity with this would help in ethical discussions about things like income distribution for instance. Is it fair that wealth has become almost scalefree in its global distribution?

Folk with Gaussian expectations of life would see the current world as insanely unequal and thus unfair.

Folk better informed by power laws would think free growth is just doing its thing. It is a distribution of wealth that is not constrained by a mean. The billionaires can't be blamed. The system is not distorted. This is just the distribution that a free growth system – based on its own problematic beliefs around endless fossil fuels and a free atmospheric sink for CO2 – will arrive at.

Your cutesy Hallmark card is confused because fairness depends on which notion of equality or equilibrium is in play. In time, small kids grow up to be tall adults. But right now, they need taller boxes. Or lower fences. Although then that will be unfair to the adults as they will have nothing holding them back in the paying stands.

Is there half of an intentional act? — Wayfarer

My point was that the basic issue is self-organisation. Reductionist science had the metaphysics that order is random accident. Religion said order was in the mind of God. Thermodynamics became the basis for a new metaphysics of nature as self-organising.

So a tornado is an example of nature being rather lively in this self-organising fashion – the "intentionality" that we can grant a dissipative structure. Aspects of the physical world can organise themselves so as to run down entropic gradients. A tornado has in its "body" – its localised vortex – the information needed to persist and take its next self-reconstructing step across some pressure/temperature gradient.

So we don't have to start life and mind from the reductionist position of a physical world which has zero self-organisation. There is self-organisation in a vortex in the sense that there is information – a memory – that constrains the dynamics. There is the beginning of the semiotic distinction – the epistemic cut – which bridges our reductionist notion of "the naked physics" and an organism with a purposeful informational model of its world.

In that sense of the physics already being self-organising, we are half-way there with the physical potentials that a modelling organism then harnesses for it ends.

But as mongrels go, that won't stop me from honestly expressing my views. — javra

Express away. :up:

And I'll again point to Peircean metaphysics upholding the view that the "laws of thermodynamics" will themselves evolve as the (physical) cosmos progresses in it acquired habits.

So from whence this metaphysical fixedness of thermodynamics as they currently are known (and as they occur) being an absolute and literally immovable/permanent grounding for absolutely everything - including notions of justice and fairness? — javra

You are making a confused argument. Anaximander posited the Apeiron as that from which a dichotomously structure ream of material complexity arises, but also then returns. Which rather nicely sums up the Big Bang with its trajectory from a quantum foam to a quantum void with right now being the Universe's high water mark of material complexity.

Likewise Peirce grounded his metaphysics in the tychism of firstness and its rational self-complexification that produces the cohesive equilibrium state of a synechic thirdness. But I would agree that he didn't offer a map of the downward unwinding that follows – the wave that builds, peaks and then disperses. He did reflect the knowledge of science and the Christian mysticism of his time in that regard.

I do not rationally understand how thermodynamics determines that while one man will deem the absolute obedience of their wife to be just and fair another man deem an equality of worth with their wife to be emblematic of justice and fairness — javra

As you admit, you don't understand thermodynamics so how could you understand how it might or might not apply to some "ethical" question or other.

I mean you should see that you are indeed questioning a dichotomy that appears to exist in the real world – one where two opposite sides seem to passionately believe that their pole is the one that represents the idealised "truth".

A "thermodynamic" or systems science view of this social situation can see how it expresses the two extremes that compose a system – its global constraints and its local freedoms. A functional system is one that can balance the two in a scalefree equilibrium fashion. That is, a fashion that is capable of being scaled and thus grow to fill its entropic niche in a persistent long-run manner.

Wives can be chattel in one kind of entropic setting – such as say a nomadic pastoralist community where offspring are capital and fertility is to be guarded – and then co-workers in another, like a neo-liberal white collar office place where careers are capital and offspring an optional luxury good.

Both would historically be fairly extreme points on the spectrum of social organisation. But both also clearly proved their local case by indeed scaling to fill their available entropic niches. A setting on the wife-constraining spectrum was picked and it could grow as it unlocked the entropy flow needed to sustain it as the sensible and "ethical" thing to be doing.

So an impossible dilemma becomes a trivial historical example of how a deeper "mathematical" principal – scaling – is at work.

All that moral philosophy posturing and agonising and ... it turns out to be this simple. :grin:

In regards to global governance, we already are under an indirect form of this - not from the UN (almost laughable seeing how laws of war are nowadays addressed by some nations, this as one example) but from the current oligarchies of neo-liberal (might as well be "neo-capatilist") economy, which is global - and is indirectly governed by said oligarchy via, again as just one blatant example, lobbyists and candidate funding at both national levels and, where applicable, individual state levels. — javra

Well yes. The well-meaning set up the key new post-WW2 institutions. UN, GATT, IMF, World Bang, EU, Nato, etc. And then they got corrupted as even in their design they had built in the smooth handover of currency sovereignty and Middle East oil from the Brits to the US. The modern empire package where capital and resources – as the avatars of information and entropy – became directly plumbed together in a rather human-excluding way.

We can't blame things on some evil force that snuck in from outside. Demonise some elite. We let fossil fuel grab the controls of the system we were building through its corrupting influence on a thinking class that hadn't really understood that humans are just another subsidiary branch of Nature's great entropification scheme.

The one that starts simple, complexifies like mad, then slides back down to ultimate simplicity again. As Anaximander outlined for us at the very dawn of metaphsyics.

But again, I so far do not comprehend why a, in this case, global fascism ought be universally shunned on the rational grounds of the relative degrees of energy dissipation as compared to that of a global (I should add, "and earnest" rather than mere lip-service) democracy. — javra

Again, the question is does it scale? Is it a powerlaw structure with equilibrium balance that has the legs to persist and grow. Or at least persist and repair.

Is it mature rather than immature or senescent? Does it balance the resilience of youth with the wisdom of experience?

These are questions that ecologists know how to frame and to measure.

But, here, the consciousness that holds awareness and which can both suffer and be content if not joyful is not appraised as some willy-nilly term that holds no true or real metaphysical importance to the grand picture of things. — javra

I see it the other way round. You have neither a model nor a measure to support any claim you might make. Thus you merely have opinions and anecdotes.

LIke many, you understand metaphysics as applied idealism – the practical reason not to have to engage with the reality of dealing with life in some properly reasoned fashion ... as Peirce urged with his Pragmatist model of inquiry, the triadic feedback cycle of abduction, induction and deduction.

Only the mathematical principles of thermodynamics can possibly determine whether, or else the extents to which, fascism is more fair and just than is democracy - or else vice versa, if the two are not in fact equally so. — javra

That isn't my argument. My argument is that it is the metaphysical principles which matter. The structural or architectural principles. So it is more about thermodynamics as a science of holistic (dissipative) structure. Even at the beginner's level of the Second Law, it is the science that encodes form and purpose as an irreducible "part of the world".

The maths has then developed from its original Gaussian atomism to match that general metaphysical holism. For instance, the maths that encoded the notion of entropy also – dichotomously or reciprocally – could encode the notion of information as its inverse operation. Order can be defined as the inverse of disorder with the kind of mathematical rigour that has proven rather foundational to the world we are actually making for ourselves.

So it is easy to scoff. But really, the facts are right under people's noses. Thermodynamics has rapidly evolved to become the holism reforming science. Even particle physics is no longer an exercise in atomism but about the maths of symmetry-breaking and thermodynamic condensates.

All you need to do is put in the numbers of these two competing systems into the right mathematical equations and one will obtain the scientifically valid answer. — javra

And what is the right maths? Is it Gaussian or powerlaw. Indexed as entropy production or information creation?

We are talking about a rich and all encompassing body of theory when it comes to thermodynamics in the current era. Folk are arguing against some antique strawman, which itself was already warmed over LaPlaceanism.

So does thermodynamics determine fascism to be any more, or else less, just and fair than is democracy? — javra

Does one political theory do a better job of self-organising in powerlaw fashion so as to become a superorganism of interest groups over all its social scales? Does one political theory thus have a better balance in terms of producing an ecological-style resilience and a maximising of its negentropic information flows?

The maths of thermodynamics actually now includes the kind of metrics one would need, like Friston's Bayesian mechanics and Ulanowicz's ascendancy.

So scoff away. You are laughing at the caricature you have constructed in your head rather than the meta-scientific enterprise I've been talking about.

Just asking you the unquestionable erudite what system of governance one ought endorse on the basis of justice and fairness so as to maximize entropy in the long haul. — javra

Well for a start, the solution we could have built in the 1970s when ecologists and systems scientists first rung the alarm bells with their mathematical models and crude but surprisingly accurate computer simulations, is now far in the collective rear view mirror.

We needed a world government for a world problem. Some of that governance structure was laid down, but only falteringly implemented.

So yes. The tools of dissipative structure wisdom were applied to the governance issue at a time when social democracy was in vogue precisely because of the recent experience of WW2 and the Depression before. Overpopulation, habitat loss, climate change and peak fossil fuel were all things we knew about as the maths made these realities crystal clear.

It seemed there was a mood to be scientific and technocratic about whatever "fair and just" might mean for a planet viewed through a holistic and naturalistic lens.

But then came the 1980s and regime change. No greenie could have imagined neo-liberalism becoming a thing. Most greenies have continued to fail to understand what their rosy models of human behaviour managed to miss – which was the extent to which fossil fuels could reshape us in their own image through the co-opted political agency of corporate big business.

It was the short-termism of energy, agriculture and materials whose burning ambition to be entropified as quickly as possible that hollowed out our own more self-interested efforts to become a species with a long-run liveable future. Neo-liberalism arrived with its literalist slogans like burn, baby, burn, and greed is good.

So you can scoff at the need to get the ecological basics of life right. But that selective metaphysics dooms you to losing the very ethical/political choices you might have hoped to be able to make.

So justice is not reducible to thermodynamics. — Banno

Just not your idealist framing of justice as transcendent truth independent of its material basis.

Equilibrium is the balance of dynamic interaction—when the interactions being measured become “equal”. — Gnomon

But then this "equality" is itself dichotomised in thermodynamics. There is the conventional reductionist metaphysics of Boltzmann that is a closed system and yield the "dead" kind of equilibrium that has a Gaussian statistics. And then there is the open and evolving story – the one Prigogine got going – of dissipative structure theory that is about geometric growth and complexification. This attracts to a powerlaw or fractal statistical distribution.

So even as metaphor, we need to know the technicalities to be able to draw any proper conclusions. Folk are quick to dismiss the first and simply miss the relevance of the second.

Ecology does have practical applications, but its primary consideration is ethical & holistic*1 : the universe is more than an aggregation of objects & forces. For us earthlings, it's also an association of beings. — Gnomon

Yep. The holistic ecological perspective brings into focus our real world ethical concerns of today.

The obvious one is whether humans have some kind of right or mandate to transform the planet into an anthroposphere in our own image.

Are we just doing nature’s work in burning all the fossil fuel to build a world of pig farms, office parks and gardened public spaces? This is simply biosemiotic evolution stepping through its gears.

Or should we be hardline greenies trying to return nature to is prehuman “state of grace”?

It is a very practical question, especially if you are in green politics. How much social capital ought to be spent on winding back the huge loss of local species that has occurred just since the 1950s? Or should a greenie accept this loss as inevitable and not actually an issue as the anthropocene is just a stage in nature’s journey?

We face actual ethical concerns that can’t even be widely discussed until you have some metaphysical strength grounding to your arguments. And the science to quantify and evidence the detailed political responses that would follow.

Then even beyond the general anthropocene question there is the political response to the 2050 bottleneck of too many people and not enough food. The dislocations of climate changes and economic collapse.

If you are not thermodynamically and biosemiotically literate, how can you even start to be part of an “ethical” discussion in this current stage of the fast evolving human story?

You never engaged with anything I said. You just continue to parade your triumphant misunderstandings. I won’t waste your time any further.

It's still very important to understand the difference between formal cause (as the existing conditions of constraint), and the final cause, — Metaphysician Undercover

The reason why the hylomorphic dichotomy of matter and form splits into four causes is because the further distinction of particular-general or local-global gets added.

So material cause has both its particular sense of some critical event - an efficient cause - and then the material cause which is a matter in the general sense of substantial being. Stuff you can work with.

Likewise formal cause divides into the immediacy of some actualising structure and then the generality that is an overriding purpose or constraining end.

At least this is how a natural philosopher would look at it. :smile:

This ties in with Terrence Deacon's ideas in Incomplete Nature (and in fact, there was an investigation as to whether Deacon plagiarized Juarrero when he published his book after hers, but he was absolved by an academic committee), and also (I think) with a lot of what apokrisis says about biosemiosis. — Wayfarer

Or indeed, exactly what I've always said.

As it happens Deacon is a serial offender when it comes to picking up good ideas and recycling them in his own jargon so that this arguments seem more original than they actually are. I was pissed off when he did the same with Vygotsky, for instance. His first book. Yet still, he is a good populariser.

Juarrero is more interesting as she had to recapitulate the biosemiotic case as an academic outsider whereas Deacon had all the benefits of being an insider.

She told the story really well with an outsider's clarity, but was ignored as she was outside the general swim of systems science. He told the story craftily in a way that built his status in the wider world of ideas, but created a sour taste within the systems science community.

You do not appear to even see the ethical considerations. — Banno

You do not appear to have even argued for them. So how could I know what you have in mind?

I'll leave you to it. — Banno

You never joined. And so won't be missed.

Well, I suspect that ↪Gnomon will go along with your scientism. — Banno

Oh yeah. A classic bit of your social manipulation. The mean girl asking if you really want to be seen hanging out with him. :up:

Not that ↪apokrisis analysis is wrong. But maybe not quite right, either. — Banno

Doing the usual? Offering judgement and having no argument. Standing on the sideline, pretending you are winning when you aren't even in the game. :yawn:

Perhaps to emulate Nature in its physical perfecting tool : survival of the fittest, by means of competitive selection. — Gnomon

Nature should be our instructor for sure. Unless you are indeed a theist or idealist.

But Darwinian competition was the first draft of science. It was a reductionist view that certainly reflected the early harshness of an industrialising and capitalistic Britain.

Over in Germany, there was the alternative of Naturphilosophie. A search for a more systems view of nature.

Science got there eventually with ecology. The global cooperation of species was added to their "red in tooth and claw" Darwinian competition. And the third ingredient of thermodynamics was added in explicit fashion. An ecology is an organismic state of order, closed for causality, in being a balance of competition and cooperation that maximises a stable state of entropy production.

So if we applied ecological science to global human politics then that would be the sound basis for a long term human plan. You would have something concrete and measurable, not just a lot of pie in the sky ethical precepts and other idealistic imperatives which folk say are truths that all must obey.

Unfortunately, as Marx noted, the thinking philosophers usually leave the implementation of their Utopias to doing politicians, who tend to sort themselves into dueling dualistic categories, such as Liberals and Conservatives, or Nationalists and Communists. — Gnomon

Dichotomies must emerge to organise any system. Communism failed because it was an idealistic, one-sided dream of a workers' paradise. People would own the means of entropy production but only take from it according to their needs. There was no natural balance in this rosy vision so of course it tipped over into something else in practice.

The thing instead is to expect a functioning society to organise itself into dichotomies. Some version of a complementary division is going to emerge that will defeat any simplistic notions of "everyone lives fair and equal". But then ecology teaches us that what this looks like when it is in a healthy balance is that a society feels like a collection of interest groups or social institutions that exists over all its hierarchical scales.

Kant was quite an eco-thinker – in the Germanic tradition – and framed this as his triangle of peace. The social ideal is the community. And the challenge of a fast paced growing system like the modern techological world is to build community across all possible scales. From tennis clubs to leagues of nations.

Communities recognise rights and responsibilities. Private freedoms and public duties. They enshrine some balance of the two that works for their members. And the political trick is create a power broking system that doesn't get frozen into stand-off but which can negotiate towards whatever is the balance across all its levels and types of communities.

If you find that your nation is becoming entrenched in a competitive divide, you can engineer a different system where cooperation and negotiation force the two sides into mutual accomodation. A two party state – the product of one vote for one party – can be broken up by proportional representation or other ways of forcing political opponents into alliances of convenience.

You can never fix a broken society by applying more philosophical idealism. Communism proved that. Facism likewise. It is frankly the dangerous path.

But you can apply a pragmatic and technocratic systems science understanding. You can do what a Singapore, Norway or New Zealand does. Innovate politically – it helps to be small and centralised. And figure out your competitive entropic edge – are you the pitstop of the world's busiest shipping lane, the beneficiary of a one-time oil bonanza, or an empty place that can grow grass really cheaply?

Dichotomies are not bad. They are natural. A system naturally divides itself in a complementary fashion. That is the basis of any order.

But then dichotomies do have to prove themselves by being complementary and thus synergistic or "win/win" when correctly balanced. The system goes on to flourish as a collective.

Of course, flourish is how we talk about entropy production, as in the end, everything is grounded in the ecology that is organising a steady energy throughput. To repair and reproduce the fabric of a society, it has to be living off some kind of disposable income. It has to be able to direct a material flow to the task of maintaining the community.

Ethical choices then open up within this context. If a society feels safe and secure in terms of its food and shelter, it can start to look further up the chain of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It can have interest groups organised around drag racing or flower arranging – each free to have its ethical debates about what "good and bad", or "fair and just", means within their institutional settings.

But humans can't just wish away the realities of their ecological realities. Societies must blend the dichotomy of competition and cooperation. And they must acknowledge that entropy production is how nature across all its possible levels is how it pays its negentropic rent.

Fortunately though, we humans are moral agents, who have the power to design a sub-system of our own : an ethical society, which is intended to be Fair and Just. — Gnomon

The problem here is perhaps expecting a rosy outcome in terms of a human social geography where “all are winners”. The natural dynamic at the heart of the human social order is a balancing of competition and cooperation. This is how the basic systems dynamic of global constraints in interaction with local degrees of freedom plays out in a biological species that then becomes organised by the greater entropic possibilities of language and reason.

So for a system to persist as an entropifying structure, it has to develop some set of global constraints - a way of life - that shapes the individual degrees of freedom within it - the people whose actions then reconstruct that way of life in its adapted and thus persistent form.

The human social system depends on having rational agents who can make creative choices as that is what allows sapiens to climb up the entropic ladder. We can go from being a few thousand foragers to a few million agriculturalists to billions of oil burning technologists. The ability to be strongly self interested in our actions is the kind of people that our social order is interested in producing.

But then to close the system as a persisting state of generalised progress, society must also have its long run political and cultural institutions. It must be able to place constraints on its people so that the individual energy is statistically at least managing to recreate the same way of life for a next few generations. A cooperativity has to also be prioritised to match the production of a useful degree of free self interest.

So neither competition nor cooperation are bad in themselves - something to be suppressed rather than promoted. But the art is in tuning the balance between individualism and institutionalisation.

The moral order is thus a negotiation between these two distinct imperatives. To foster the kind of rational agent who can live within a global order and play hard by the rules.

In a perfect world, that might look rather like social democracy. :razz:

But regardless, at least the debate over fair and just can start with this recognition that a system depends on this apparently “paradoxical” dichotomy of being a system of constraints that must be in the business of shaping up the degrees of freedom that can keep rebuilding that very same persisting state of generalised constraints.

Like a biological system, it is all about the capacity to repair and reproduce. The body of the organism is constantly falling apart. But it only has to rebuild itself a little faster than it decays to stay ahead in the entropification game.

So as a society, the same applies. You don’t need perfect and idealised outcomes for all to succeed in the basic game of existing as a long run entropy system. You only have to achieve enough repair and reproduction of the fabric which keeps everything hanging together.

That is basically the philosophy of a social democracy with its free market and safety nets. It isn’t a utopian vision of selfless and individually perfect beings. It is a recognition that the game just has to be kept going in a statistical fashion.

This is what pragmatism looks like from the political point of view.

How does it make sense to ask which of these is closest to thermodynamic equilibrium? — Banno

Hah. That is the problem of argument by Hallmark card cutesiness. You would have to be thermodynamically-informed enough to tell the difference between a closed Gaussian equilbrium and an open powerlaw one.

So sadly, an F.

A post-scarcity, demarchic social system is as "fair and just" as I can imagine. — 180 Proof

:up:

Flux contains the paradoxes. The Logos is not within it, the Logos is about the paradoxes flux brings. — Fire Ologist

Flux is material chance. Logos is structural necessity. The hylomorphic formula.

Heraclitus’ Logos did not resolve the paradoxes — Fire Ologist

Is a river not a good example of a balancing of stability and plasticity? Is reality not in general a balance of logos and flux?

I think Heraclitus got it. But still not many get Heraclitus.

Yeah, nah.

If good versus evil become good in the resolved middle, then what happened to evil? — Fire Ologist

I wasn’t accepting good and evil as a useful set of terms in a discussion of moral extremes. I was saying good as a direction in which to move makes more sense as the return towards the balancing middle.

Evil drops right out of the vocabulary at that point.

Each (human) "individual" is a (eu)social being first and foremost. — 180 Proof

Eusocial doesn't quite cover it as that applies to a social organism and hive mind at the level of ants and bees.

Humans have their biology – the eusociality of a chimp troop – but then also the further levels of semiosis that result from language and logic. So it is this further level that arguably is first and foremost these days. Well it was language until logic started to take over once science could harness fossil fuels through technology.

So the question of political organisation – what constitutes the fair and just – has ramped up through some actual sweeping transitions. We have evolved from ape troops to agricultural empires to free trade/fossil fuel economic networks.

Good and bad, fair and just, are terms that take some redefining as we move on up this hierarchy of dissipative order.

That leaves three things - the good, the evil, and the nuance in between. — Fire Ologist

It leaves three things. But in a fundamental sense, the systems view talks about balances that are complementary and thus "good" in that their contradictions (woo, bad!) are in fact the oppositions that can lead to the resolution or synthesis of a dynamical balance (hey, good!).

Are pleasure and pain the psychological equivalent of good and evil? Well pleasure is the signal to approach and pain is the signal to avoid. And between these two, we get steered towards the security of the safe harbour of a mental equilbrium.

Now feeling safe and sound – neither overly pleasured or pain – seems rather middling. But that is where our evolved neurocognition is channeling us towards. A mild and prolonged contentment ... which we know is going to get interrupted by perturbations from the world beyond anyway.

So having a baseline of a middling balance is what is "good". And being able to feel which way to go when we get jolted out of that – to approach or avoid – is also "good". Even it we don't say pain feels good, we know it is a most valuable and necessary part of the overall equilibrium-producing part of the cognitive equation.

What I am trying to say is that. if we live in a world of nuance, we don’t just live in a world of nuance; a world of nuance can only be so nuanced with it’s good and bad, and so these two are NOT nuanced but absolute. — Fire Ologist

The middling state of things being generally OK is just a whole bunch of tiny nuance. It is the feeling of not really knowing your are even happy or disturbed. There is a poised restlessness in both of these positions. We feel just OK. And that is a feeling that is vague.

Then pain and pleasure can kick in as oppositions that extremitise our mind towards the opposing limits of action. Absolute approach or absolute avoidance.

Good~evil takes this kind of natural dichotomy and politicises it in a religiously transcendent form. It indeed gets made an absolute constraint on individual behaviour – which may have been of use in the age of kings but doesn't make so much sense in the age of self-aware democracy.

Why seek to attack or defend an ancient jargon that has anyway outlived its value as social construct? It is a debate now passed into history.

Both is a third thing. This third thing is a paradox. — Fire Ologist

Nope. The synthesis is the resolution of the paradox – or rather the equilibration of that which has been dichotomised. It is the fact that the division is complementary that gets proven by the synergy of the resulting coming back together at a higher level of organisation.

This is a physicalist, scientific, currently predominant worldview - it is just for steel to cut flesh, for the moon to orbit the earth, as it is for the electron to orbit the proton; all is fair and just, following along as if in perfect willingness to follow every law to the letter. — Fire Ologist

But this is speaking from the reductionist paradigm – the rather religious view that the Church took of the scientific revolution and the need to maintain some separation of powers between an all-powerful God and an all-mechanical realm of material being.

Look into even Newton's laws of motion and you find the triadic structure of its three laws where the holism lies in the third law of action~reaction. To be a motion could only be measured in terms of the world that stood in resistance to that motion. A force could be impressed if a world was there to press back. The third law just axiomatised the fact this had to be a stable balance as its outcome.

And physics has since – with general relativity and quantum field theory – become explicitly holistic in this fashion. The cosmos emerges from the dynamical balance that is its complementary actions of expanding and cooling. It persists by doubling its distances and halving its energy density in a way that can run down the gradient of time for pretty much "forever".

So yes to triadic structure. But exactly where things go wrong is when you allow the physical to become separated from the ideal.

Aristotle is the saint of systems thinkers because he got this with his doctrine of hylomorphic form. Material potential and formal constraint are the two complementary limits that between them allow the rich and hierarchically complexfied "nuance" that is the kind of world fit for us to evolve within.

Yes. We humans, however, are too often not "fair and just". — 180 Proof

But does every individual have to be fair and just or should we build a social system that is on average fair and just?

To expect individuals to construct their world all from their own "goodness" is rather an unrealistic ask. Instead what works is for the world to impose its own "good balance" – in the familiar form of a state, a justice system, a democracy, even a religious code – that stabilises the individual actor in some "fair to all" fashion.

For goodness (or evil) to be a system property, it has to be embodied in the dynamical balance between the top down constraints and bottom-up freedoms of the collective organism.

It is notable – particular from Fukuyama's trilogy on world political history – that all stable societies have had to invent some transcendent principle that can stand even above its hierarchical rulers so as to close the system in a fair and just fashion. You have a people, a management, and a vision.

The King is the attentional focus dealing with the short-term and immediate. An army paid by taxes is what underpins that.

Then a God or some philosophical creed stands for the accumulation of long-run habit. The disembodied wisdom of generations of "the people" distilled into some kind of transcendent structure of belief.

Kings come unstuck when societies get too large and entropic for a person to actually both dispense justice and speak for the collective transcendental ancestor. Executive power has to be divided from priestly power so as to better organise the reciprocal things of immediate choices and long-term habits.

It takes a lot of political engineering to recreate the brain's dynamical balancing act at the level of a nation state able to act with the rationality of a self-aware people's collective. (And we already need to do that at the level of a whole planet, now that nation states are past their sell-bys.)

Small is not Large — Treatid

But small is not not-large. So small is the least possible large. Thus largeness and smallness are defined in terms of the excluded middle. But the LEM as applied to defining the contrasting limits of a potential rather than a pair of actualisable states.

Circular definitions are an artefact of trying to define Object A. — Treatid

The way out of circularity is hierarchy. A feedback growth spiral. This is what is missing from your notion of logic. It is what Peirce's logic of semiosis (or logic of vagueness) was intended to remedy – after he had already sorted out regular logic before Frege got in on the act and won the credit.

So you can go round the circle – the symmetry-breaking that is the dichotomy - and come out at a higher level. Ascend a hierarchy. You don't need to be bamboozled by circularity because going around in a circle – as a point – is what in fact creates a circle as now a new level of symmetry to be broken.

The world is exactly what it looks like. And it looks like relationships. It does not look like objects. — Treatid

Well yes. But there is then the hierarchical story where the dyadicy of relations (Peircean secondness) becomes such a thickness of interacting that it takes on the solidity of a statistical equilibrium. It becomes the regularity or continuity of a Peircean thirdness.

And that then becomes a state of form or matter which can now in turn have its symmetry broken.

A quantum vacuum fluctuates freely and so expresses its zero point average. This then allows the production of actual particles when higher level constraints are placed on the vacuum. Those particles in turn can thermalise and form their own collective average. Fundamental particles can become a condensate that then develop their own new topological order – the phonons of the condensed matter view.

You need a Peircean strength logic to talk about "relations" in terms of what the world is actually like from a cosmological and particle physics point of view.

The world looks exactly like how you expect it to look – that is normal psychology. But even at the level of the logic, we have an upgrade available that makes much sense of what ought to be seen.

The mature world is no longer Good vs Evil, but a nuanced environment that can be managed by rational actors into a worldview where we can look forward to waking up tomorrow in a familiar place with new challenges to manage. — Gnomon

Yep. This is the general structure of cognition. The balance that is the rearview mirror of accumulated wise habit and the forward view of creative possibility. Automatism vs conscious deliberation.

Neither of these is inherently bad and thus "not-good". And the balance that is then "the good" is the arrow of action that arises out of the ability to flip from acting out of habit to acting out of attention.

Habits are the accumulation of simplicities. Attention is the exploration of complexities. And the "arrow of causality" points to the feedback balancing act where today's destabilising complexity is being turned into tomorrow's stabilising simplicities. We move along the gradient of cognition that pragmaticallyt assimilates the world to our model of the world.

Although I'm not comforted by scriptural assurances that "all things work together for good", I do infer a kind of Logic to the chain of Cause & Effect in the physical world --- and an overall proportional parity between positive & negative effects. Of course, that mathematical & thermodynamic symmetry may not always apply to the personal & cultural aspects of reality : to people's feelings about those effects. I won't attempt to prove that vague belief in balance, but it seems that philosophers have always been divided on the question of a Just World — Gnomon

First up, logic does say that balance is what emerges from the very possibility of a dichotomy or symmmetry breaking. If you have a dividing, this in itself brings the further thing of a mixing. There has to be a unity of opposites as the final result. The action going both its way has to arrive at its own equilibrium average state.

So forget good and evil for a moment. This just is the logic where a symmetry-breaking must play itself out to become a symmetry-equilibrating. The wrinkle then is that the equilibrium balance is then itself a new ground of symmetry – now raised a level – that can once again be broken and equilibrated.

Hierarchies of structure can arise in openly growing fashion as each level of symmetry-breaking below it becomes some closed and stable balancing act.

This is a tricky kind of causality to contemplate. It is not the reductionism of "cause and effect". But it was already where metaphysics started with Anaximander and his pre-socratic cosmology.

So there is a general metaphysical model of division and its balancing. And then the further possibility of stacking up these "phase changes" on top of each other in hierarchically complexified fashion. A rich cosmos can emerge from its simple dichotomous origins.

And then we get to the vexed issue of good and evil. Which is problematic because it replaces the complex systems causality of the natural world with the polarised story of a cause and effect world. A mechanistic viewpoint. Instead of a pair of actions that are complementary – as in a dichotomy or symmetry breaking – we have just a single arrow from a here to a there. There is a high and a low, a good and a bad, a wonderful and an awful. There is a place to leave behind and a place to approach.

So we have now the reductionist causality that seeks to encode reality in terms of a one-way traffic system. If you discover that two directions exist, one of the ways has to be the correct way, the other thus the opposite of the correct.

But the systems approach says the only way anything is caused to exist is by it going in both its directions in a symmetry-breaking fashion, and the place that this dichotomising "leaving behind" then approaches is the symmetry-equibrating thing of its overall dynamical balance. A holistic state of globalised order ... which then can be the ground of departure for yet another rung of hierarchical complexity in the form of dichotomising~rebalancing.

So in terms of human moral social order, good and bad would be arrows pointing between some lower level and some next step level of stabilised equilibrium balance. The arrows wouldn't be the simple and brutal monotonic ones of reductionism. One path mandated and the other path forbidden. The arrows would point the way from one state of naturalistic balance to the next more complexified state that might be attained.

The lower level isn't intrinsically bad as it has proven itself to be a stable platform for some kind of higher aspirations. But the goal is to break it as symmetry so as to step up to some higher equilibrium state – that likewise is good to the degree it can prove itself a stable platform for steps even beyond that.

So in that organic or thermodynamic context – which moral discussions can at least dimly grasp in terms of a Maslovian hierarchy of needs – good is to be building community to a degree of stability that creates the potential of further steps, and evil is the back-sliding destabilisation of the teetering house of cards that already exists as the relatively stabilised platform on which we stand.

Good~evil is tarred jargon as it does speak to the simplicities of reductionist models of causality. But we can sort of get what the terms are getting at from a systems perspective and its ecosystem style, richness constructing, hierarchical complexity.

There is no need to climb an endless ladder of complexity or goodness of course. But for a natural system that must exist in an uncertain and destabilising world, there is a value in maintaining a potential for taking next steps as situations demand. We have to be able to step up because there is a reserve to spend.

This trade-off between stability and plasticity in organisms that live and act is certainly yet a further wrinkle in the whole causality deal. But who says metaphysics has to be simpler than it actually is?

For instance, there would be some sort of phenomena awareness for orange juice in a blender, a corpse, or water in a river? — Count Timothy von Icarus

But we know what living organisms have that these things lack. An active semiotic modelling relation with world based on an encoding mechanism like, principally, a hierarchy of genes, neurons, words and numbers in the case of us socially-constructed humans.

This is the central fact you fail to engage with – the way that life and mind are indeed mechanistic. A system of informational switches regulating entropic flows in the way anyone can recognise as being alive and mindful. Or in other words, constituting an organism.

But continue to talk past the epistemic cut that is what bridges the so-called explanatory gap...

but that these are two paradigmatic ways of describing and explaining the one thing, and that they are conceptually incommensurable — Janus

Describing vs explaining is a good way of putting it. The would-be phenomenologist says I can describe, and you can't explain.

But my first psychophysics lecture flipped that one on its head. The professor explained Mach bands as a neural contrast enhancing and boundary making mechanism in the visual pathway. I walked out into the bright sunlight and looked up at the sharp edges of the tall buildings against the sky and for the first time noticed that these illusory contours were indeed right there.

So explanation led to the description – the phenomenal experience. It showed that the causal gap had its proper bridge.

You just have to stick with it and bring the whole general show across with you. Arrive at a general explanation that grounds all such specific explanations. Develop a model of biosemiosis, the modelling relation, epistemic cut, Bayesian mechanics, or whatever it gets called.

If neural activity just is mental activity, if the two are one thing seen from two different (and conceptually incompatible) perspectives, then there is no interaction between them, and thus no explanatory gap. — Janus

Sounds good as this is most surely the epistemic reality, but the claims folk want to make are ontological in the most basic way.

A "just neural activity" point of view is normally as guilty of avoiding the issue as a "I just know I have a mind from direct experience of it" point of view.

The explanatory gap is at least correct in pointing to the failure of the conventional reductionist model of causality employed by even well-meaning scientists. If you end up saying there is all this busy material complexity and ... hey presto, strong emergence! ... then you haven't solved the causal issue at hand.

That is why I set out Peirce's semiosis, Rosen's modelling relation, Pattee's epistemic cut and Friston's Bayesian mechanics as new models of causality that are not just generally holistic but deal directly with the question of how the two sides of the causal equation are joined in practice.

So what is on offer from biosemiosis is an explicit model of the mind~world relation as a self-organising or organismic causality. It speaks to mindful systems in the ontologically general sense.

Of course this then leaves non-science types dissatisfied as they want an specific account of their own phenomenology. They want not an account so general that it covers life and mind in any possible form within the constraints of our physical Big Bang universe, they want to have a science account of why their back itches right at this moment in the hard to put into words way that a back itches, but it must have been itching before you really noticed it, and then when you reach for the spot, it doesn't seem to be actually there, and it was also a little bit pleasurable while also rather annoying, and giving the skin a good dig with your fingers was painful, yet also better. Etc, etc.

So reductionist science falls short. But we can fix that with not just a more holistic model of causality but a completely specific general model of mindful organisms.

The trouble then is that this requires some very deep learning. It is hard work that takes a long time to relearn how to think and reason as a holist and not a reductionist, then as a semiotic holist and not just an ordinary "it emerges" one.

The lay person with an interest in "consciousness explained" has a very long road ahead. They can easily grasp why reductionism – it just neurons firing – is a causally inadequate account. But even crossing through a grounding thermodynamic level of physicalist holism is a journey too daunting. Biosemiosis may as well be from another planet.

Producing a world doesn’t mean coding a world but performing one. — Joshs

But the claim is that this performance is based on a mechanism that connects. Take away genes, neurons, words and numbers, and what have you got? Can you still have your organism in a meaningful relation with its world?

If you want to to convince people (and maybe you don't, but surely most people don't think the explanatory gap has been solved) it might be helpful to lay out the core premises and how the conclusion is supposed to follow from them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. I can happily leave you with your self-proclaimed mystification.

Do we build a world of intent and expectation ‘in our heads’ or in our embodied patterns of material interaction with an environment? — Joshs

The latter is of course the deeper phrasing. :up:

What’s the difference between a model and a representation, and the difference between both of these and the enacting of a world through sensori-motor coupling with an environment? — Joshs

A model in the modelling relation sense is there as a machinery of semiotic control over the world. A model in the more usual sense – like a plastic kitset Spitfire – is indeed just a representation.

So I am making that sensori-motor coupling distinction. Bayesian mechanics is about how brains minimise the environment's capacity to surprise us.

It has all the energy. We have all the smarts. We learn to make it a predictable relation. And that is how we insert an "us" into "our world". That is how a modelling relation arrives at its biosemiotic Umwelt.

Isnt normative point of view (intent and expectation) the hallmark of all living self-organizing systems rather than just conscious ones? — Joshs

Again, what else have I ever said? Humans even acting at the level of habit and automatism have that same hallmark. Metabolisms and societies too.

The relationship is much the same as that between Newtonian Mechanics and General Relativity. There is no iterative path from Newtonian Mechanics to General Relativity. General Relativity does not make sense given the assumptions of Newtonian Mechanics. — Treatid

What? There is no path from mechanics with Galilean invariance to mechanics with Poincare and eventually de Sitter invariance? Tell me it ain't so. :cry:

You can't have logic and dichotomies at the same time.

A relational universe is incompatible with an objective universe.

It isn't possible to comprehend one in terms of the other. — Treatid

More piffle. As came up in another discussion, Aristotle codified both. The Organon was followed by his hylomorphism.

Of course folk can take them as incompatible or contradictory. But done properly, atomism can be shown as a subset of holism. They indeed form a dichotomy. A complementary pair. Both the same and yet also different as they are each the other's inverse operation.

Except, of course, it isn't possible to specify an initial set of premises in a fixed and unambiguous fashion. Before we can wonder if the premise is static we have to deal with never knowing exactly what the premises are in the first place. — Treatid

All this is true but built into the structure of Peircean logic. He accepted chance as real – just as real as law or globalised constraints that then emerge as the "other" to the logical vagueness of an indeterminate (or yet to be contextually determined) potential.

This is all perfectly familiar ground. We can move on.

As a kicker we can round off with General Relativity, wherein the notion of objective truth can get bent. — Treatid

Or another way of looking at it is the triadic systems approach to causal structure. GR defines the coherence of the metric, QFT defines its incoherent content. Decoherence within a de Sitter spacetime metric is how you arrive at the critical balance that is the Cosmos in terms of its VeV – vacuum particle action – at some given temperature and pressure.

So GR and QFT make the bounding dichotomy on what Peirce called synechism (global continuity) and and tychism (local chance). A flexi container and its flexing contents. Then these two opposites get mixed over all scales in a fractal or powerlaw statistical fashion. The thermal decoherence constraint that "collapses" the quantum wavefunction of the Universe itself.

This then turns your epistemic dichotomy of objective~subjective into the more useful one of an internalist vs an externalist metaphysics. Peircean logic and Systems Science speak to an internalist view of nature in which "objectivity" is what a community of inquirers hopes to arrive at in the limit.

The goal can't actually be achieved – that is assumed. But it can be approached asymptotically. And that is demonstrable as agreement becomes increasingly universalised among those doing the inquiring.

So GR seems pretty robust on that score. QFT too. It is agreed by all who rely on GPS systems or semiconductors at least. And too bad if you hold some different metaphysics that would want to quarrel with that level of detailed reality modelling.

A consistent system cannot illustrate what a contradiction is. — Treatid

Only consistency could be held up as the proper measure of what we might mean by inconsistency. Relativity is already built in by standing in opposition. The question then is only to what degree they are able to stand far apart.

How much inconsistency does it take to undermine a claim of consistency, and vice versa?

Everything that is possible within the universe (including languages) is possible. Language works with the same mechanism as the rest of the universe. Just like the universe, everything that is possible is possible. — Treatid

I think your theory of possibility needs more work. It presumes modal realism and so would need to be supported against other possibilities, like Peircean propensity for instance.

There is a whole history of metaphysical case-making that you just glibly dismiss in your scattergun mini-rants.

However, your comment regarding the foundation of science makes me think your pragmatism is superficial. That you are holding onto old assumptions despite the evidence. — Treatid

Of course you must find ways not to engage with actual arguments. Discussing is losing. Thinking is hard. Researching takes up too much time.

But against this, we might consider global workspace models of conciousness and the decent empirical support that suggests they get something right, which would seem to suggest that something much more definiteness is required to result in phenomenal awareness than having a metabolism, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I was talking to Baars back in the 90s at the same time I was talking to Friston. While the workspace story had some metaphorical value, it wasn't a real theory. Friston has developed a real theory. It is mathematical rather than metaphorical. It actually claims to have the status of a mechanics – a Bayesian mechanics. It comes with equations.

If Toyota, the City of Miami, and memes are all "concious" they seems to be so in at best an analogous way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, this is simply because you have fallen into the Cartesian representationalist trap of reifying phenomenal experience as a mysterious substance. You can't get away from the primacy of the looks and feels. They have become what "must be explained".

To break out of that, you need a more general account of what brains actually are doing – which is biosemiosis. Neurons, like genes or words, are ways of informationally constructing a modelling relation between an organism and its world.

So step one for science is giving a mathematically rigorous treatment of this modelling relation.

Step two is to turn from the generality of one mechanism that speaks to all kinds semiotic order – that of a corporation or tornado even – and apply that back to the human condition. What we as the only biology, and even neurobiology, to be enhanced with the further levels of semiotic technology in our language and logic systems, might "feel" as organisms engaged in just that kind of reality-modelling relation.

Once you add enough social psychology, psychophysics, neurocognition and other good stuff to your understanding, it is easy to see why being on a modelling relation with a world would have to feel like something. How could it not feel like something to be a self engaged in a world in this feedback loop way?

If I turn my head, do I feel my head turn or does the world suddenly spin before me in alarming fashion?

Bayesian mechanics models that modelling relation for us. We build a world of intent and expectation in our heads so as to feel we are in control of the world instead of the world being in control of us. We insert our being into the world as the new centre of its being. Consciousness is the feeling of standing apart in ways that subjugate material reality to our mental whims. A difference between us and the world is what must be constructed so that there is then an us that can be deeply engaged in the flow of the world.

Cartesian representationalism reifies the self and its feels. It only sees the dualistic separation and not the triadic unity.