Complaint? — Wayfarer

Sorry. Must have been someone else complaining about the fact science has arrived at the conclusion that reality is fundamentally irreducible in the dialectical or complementary fashion noted by Bohr.

Of course Bohr was more directly inspired by his education in the Lao-Tse than by Hegel. But same elephant, different philosophical traditions.

In opting for such a bold departure from the European tradition, Bohr was much influenced by the Daojia tradition of the Laozi, which enabled him to make sense of quantum phenomena, when he realised that these failed to conform to the ‘either (particle) or (wave)’ Law of Excluded Middle, as they are both simultaneously. There is logic other than classical bvalent logic.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321280738_Bohr_Quantum_Physics_and_the_Laozi

…in respect of what is ultimately real. — Wayfarer

Or let the maths decide what we might believe about that. Hence ontic structural realism as the new Platonic sounding metaphysics that has arisen out of a contemplation of gauge symmetry and quantum field theory.

Dissipative structure theory applied at the level of cosmology and particle physics in other words.

The fact we can calculate general particle properties to 15 decimal places, and also not measure everything about some particular excitation in the one act of measurement, ought to tell you something about how well we are in fact doing.

We can reach ridiculous levels of accuracy about the electron's dipole moment from just first principles. And we know why it has to be the case that you can't measure the two poles of a dialectic relation – such as position and momentum – in one go. Each variable is only quantifiable to the degree it is not its other.

But that's OK. We can capture all the information in a wavefunction. And then add in thermal context to narrow the probabilities to the point that they become pragmatically a classical description. A weak measurement gets close enough to certainty concerning one pole without driving its other pole to a reciprocal state of Planckscale uncertainty.

But instead of celebrating this quite remarkable success in fundamental science, you ... complain we're "not there yet".

Just as Bert does about an account of life and mind as biosemiosis in action.

It's not like the imaginary of the Enlightenment is easy to specify — Moliere

Some fact checking....

The Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that dominated in Europe during the 18th century, was centered around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

Enlightenment thinkers wanted to reform society. They celebrated reason not only as the power by which human beings understand the universe but also as the means by which they improve the human condition. The goals of rational humans were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.”- Montesquieu.

Four themes recur in both European and American Enlightenment texts: modernization, skepticism, reason and liberty.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that sought to improve society through fact-based reason and inquiry. The Enlightenment brought secular thought to Europe and reshaped the ways people understood issues such as liberty, equality, and individual rights.

The five core values of the Enlightenment were: happiness, reason, nature, progress, and liberty. Using logical thinking and reasoning the philosophers analyzed truth in the world. Given the current state of the world, we should all act more like philosophers in our day-to-day lives.

Enlightenment thinkers applied science and reason to society's problems. They believed that all people were created equal. They also saw education as something that divided people. If education were available to all, they reasoned, then everyone would have a fair chance in life.

We can identify three major 'roots' of the Enlightenment: the humanism of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Protestant Reformation. Together these movements created the conditions in Europe for the Enlightenment to take place.

So in all ways the world I remember growing up in. But then I was lucky with my parents and circumstances. These imaginings were pretty well fully implemented.

But as I say, now it would have to be Enlightenment 2.0, the green reboot as the Model A option. Or the Model B scenario question of how to salvage what's left during the great collapse so as to then start over in a well considered way.

I believe I did in defining philosophy as an anti-propaganda, at least. — Moliere

Even dialectics requires more effort than that. Tacking on not to A to arrive at not-A is the shallow approach of other logics perhaps. But it clearly defines nothing and simply begs the question concerning A.

Propaganda is a virus, as you say, but philosophy is an anti-virus in that it inhibits the mechanisms of propagation by asking questions and not giving answers, but rather methods of thinking through things. — Moliere

So now we have a reasonable natural system dichotomy of self and other - the infection vs the immune system.

And sure, the solution normally proposed is to educate a population in critical thinking. Instill the collective rational habit of fact checking. Properly fund and enable unpartisan journalism and other fact checking social institutions.

Implement life as the Enlightenment imagined it? But add planetary limits to human aspirations as part of the political and ethical equation this time around.

:up:

The "Peircean triadic systems view" is, so far as it is comprehensible, just more Hegel. — Banno

What am I supposed to do with your solipsistic pronouncements? If you have comprehension failures then that’s on you. I’ll get out the world’s smallest violin if it might help.

Why Maslow?

Is it true? — Moliere

It’s the meme that scaled. Maslow founded positive psychology in the 1950s.

During the 1950s and 60s humanistic psychology developed in response to what the pioneers saw as the reductionist, positivist view of the mind as a complex mechanism likened to a machine- a stimulus-response mechanism in behaviorism or an economy of sexual and aggressive drives in psychoanalysis (Mahoney, 1984).

Humanistic psychology championed the holistic study of persons as bio-psycho-social beings. Abraham Maslow first coined the term “positive psychology” in his 1954 book “Motivation and Personality.” He proposed that psychology’s preoccupation with disorder and dysfunction lacked an accurate understanding of human potential (Maslow, 1954).

It may sound that way, but is it that way? What is propaganda? — Moliere

I thought you were going to tell me?

But all communication is propaganda in being a message with a meaning and so coming from a point of view - a message with some intention conveyed from a “me” to a “you”.

Are you wanting to split the world into those messages that are particularly annoying to you and those are matchingly pleasing? Your world needs this new message setting.

Do you see this as a pragmatic job for AI browser settings or a case of “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee”?

One might be hard pressed to find a case where dialectic cannot be applied. That's not a good thing. — Banno

Yet you seem to claim that for “classical logic”?

And just to remind, in case you really did miss it, I don’t defend Hegel as the final word here. I defend the Peircean triadic systems view as the best metaphysical logic or model of causal being.

But keep on stabbing away at your straw man until it is time for lunch. Straw men are always a safer target than the real thing.

It's not like I really know what I'm talking about anyways (as the scary part of that is: I'm pretty sure no one does. We're strapped to a rocket without knowing where it's going, when it will stop, or how to control it) — Moliere

If this is your belief then in what sense are you interested in a real inquiry into solutions? And you should steer well clear of me as all I’ve got nothing but those. :wink:

I believe the liberal state is fully capable of combating propaganda. — Moliere

You mean like the same liberal state that pushes Covid vaccines on you? Or are you meaning you wish for the liberal state that has the balls to squash the conspiracy-mongers?

I’ll return to my OP. Histories best ethical ideas have been fair exchanges that scaled. A society by definition has scale. And scale is always hierarchically organised in some form just to self-stabilise. So your political slogan has to promise the best of both worlds. Enough freedom for enough protection. Enough collectivism for enough individualism. Enough rights for enough responsibility. Enough excitement for enough peace. And so on and so forth in terms of Maslow’s familiar hierarchy of needs.

So just saying you don’t want propaganda isn’t much of a slogan. I can’t see what it is that you do want in terms of some balance that promises a win-win as we ought to want both things in the one social system.

Perhaps something along the lines that anyone should be free to have an opinion and yet everyone ought to be fact-checked?

Also, on philosophy: I think of it more of an anti-propaganda. Rather than giving easy answers to difficult questions it raises difficult questions without answers. Rather than attaching emotions to particular actions it questions emotions at every turn (to a point that's a bit much, at times). — Moliere

Sounds a shit notion of philosophy. Sounds exactly like propaganda run wild in feigning reason so as to spread its irrationalism.

so it's not a very good example of dialectic at work. — Banno

Oh the irony!

The argument agains dialectic that I presented above shows how it is that dialectic methods serve to choose the option preferred by the narrator. That critique stands. — Banno

It stands against a person and so also the method. Your suspicion has thus been justly confirmed?

Sounds legit, but what would Wittgenstein have said? “See me after class, boy, for a good slap around the ears.”?

It's more that each is a "way of talking about how things are", each with its own merits. — Banno

So a dialectic.

but realism aligns better with "homely examples like kitchen utensils". — Banno

And a resolution that is comfortably within reach of its lasagne. :clap:

If we want to win and prove that we're the idea-maker then we'll compete and keep to ourselves and make sure we say nothing until we have our name on it and can say "See! I am the creator of this idea!" — Moliere

Yep. So that is what I'm talking about as the tech entrepreneur model. And it became the social entrepreneur model about 20 years ago. It was supposed to be the politics of the Millennial generation.

You start small and dirty and give your idea away. Apps that can do good are set free on the world to see if they will go viral and scale.

Tech makes this form of politics or radicalisation near enough costless enough that there only has to be a micro-return to earn a fortune. But as your venture capital backers also understand, the goal is to lock-in customers to your unique solution and so become the monopoly service. That's when you retire to your billionaire yacht and island.

So politics through the tech entrepreneur route is now a well understood and tested thing. It has done a lot of good but now has also become rather corrupted. The US is full of charitable endeavours that are actually wealth shelters. And yesterday's millennial social entrepreneurs are now today's Tik-Tok influencers.

Moral philosophy or progressive politics has to face these realities as modern hurdles to overcome. You can scale up a good idea to educate and water a village in Africa, or round up the plastic debris floating in the Pacific ocean, but then the wider world may be scaling up something else – like a crushing Woke vs Maga social division.

The problem with coming up with different scenarios is that it doesn't matter which we choose since the powers that be will do what they do regardless of our reasonings. — Moliere

I think you don't understand the power of an organised crowd. Leaders shit their pants if they see an actual mob coming for them. The job is too look tough and appease.

That is why longterm change is killed by short-term electoral preference. Any radical measure gets watered down as soon as it is seen not to fly with the central 5% of swing voters.

what I like about pairing these ideas is it gives both a critical problem -- the Marxism -- and a different solution than Marxism-Leninism -- organizing along anarchist lines. — Moliere

Exactly. A dialectical analysis to discover the oppositions that can then become what the ethical algorithm balances.

So Marx vs Bakunin can be seen in systems terms as networks vs hierarchies, or bottom-up construction vs top-down constraint. The systems solution is to point out that hierarchies are just networks of networks – society as a scalefree realm of interest groups or institutions freely self-organising within a collective cultural and economic frame.

Social democracy would say it has already delivered that. Anarcho-Marxism would be reinventing this wheel in terms of combining some proper definition of a good community life tied to a economy that can deliver over the long-run.

But now we are into the accelerationism of the tech bro world coupled to the stagnation of the neo-liberal bust. So you are talking about 1800s politics that became the best of the 1900s' solutions and now we are well into the arriving crisis of the 2000s.

That is why I prefer to apply systems science to the task. It is the one that includes ecology and the realities of thermodynamics in its kitset of intellectual tools. The "is" to balance the "ought".

Ha! You got something against the science of Astrobiology* — Gnomon

No. I'm pointing out how the sociology of science operates. NASA wants to remain employed by the US taxpayer. The cold war arms race is over. The Mars colony or even Moon colony is no go. So it sponsors the new field of astrobiology because US taxpayers love aliens and their flying saucers.

I'm all for spending taxes on basic science research. But this Big Science story is also a problem.

Astrobiology has given some good researchers a new platform for working on the problem of abiogenesis. I follow this work closely. But that means also knowing what the field of abiogenesis had achieved before the tacit question – how is this going to make folk want to fund another mission to Mars or a next generation space-scope? – was hanging over its head. And a publicity department existed to make a rehash of old ideas sound all sparkly and new.

One reason I mentioned this particular scientific theory --- in this way-off-topic thread --- is that the postulated anti-entropy arrow-of-time puts Evolution in a new light. For years, scientists were able to picture Darwinian evolution as meandering, aimless, and ultimately doomed to a pathetic meaningless Heat Death. But now we have reasons for a more optimistic perspective : "his idea suggests that while as the universe ages and expands, it is becoming more organized and functional, nearly opposite to theories surrounding increasing cosmological disorder"*2. This notion is also in opposition to the presumptions of Materialism, which focuses on the Randomness & Chaos of the universe, instead of the Order & Organization that makes Science & Philosophy possible. — Gnomon

Sorry @Gnomon, I don't fathom how your brain works. What else have I been telling you for at least a decade?

Saviour by green tech or battening down the hatches for when it gets rough for everyone else and the job of the navy is to sink the refugee ships? — apokrisis

What was I even thinking. Ukraine shows that cheap drones would quickly put paid to inbound refugee ships. Citizen militias could crowd fund their own private enterprise solutions. The US Navy wouldn't even have to consider its ethical position on this new mission.

Smart ideas do scale. Moral scruples can also do so in the good times, and be swapped out just as fast when the community mood changes.

What's my point? I guess it's that somebody (everybody?) believes that you have to grow to survive. — T Clark

You have to grow enough to just to stand still as an organism. So as a going concern, an organism has to earn a margin on its entropifying sufficient to maintain the fabric of its body and then replace itself with reproduction of the next generation of owners. From there, in good times the bacteria can grow exponentially to fill their Petrie dish, or find that they are born into bad times where the dish is full to its brim and drastic degrowth follows.

Tribes who live by foraging learn restraint so as to coexist with their environments. It can be done. But does it scale?

So I'm not really sure if it's an ethical issue at all, rather a logistical one. The ethics comes in when we try to decide how to spread the pain around. — T Clark

The point of the OP is that the philosophically inclined like to preach about ideal societies and what they would look like. A world where technology fixes all problems. A world where we share and share alike. Or whatever.

We now have a crunch coming - scenarios A and B. Unless you think the current global politics has got everything under good control, it is time to be outlining the politics to deal with this imminent future.

And to work, any new political/ethical philosophy will have to scale. It has to appeal because it is plainly a win-win.

Does any such marvel exist?

Just curiosity, on the graph shown at about 8:30, it shows a dramatic drop in food per capita in the coming years. What would cause that and what does it mean? Mass starvation? — T Clark

Murphy is using the latest Limits to Growth data.

Resources can be renewable, like agricultural soils, or nonrenew- able, like the world’s oil resources. Both have their limits. The most obvious limit on food production is land. Millions of acres of cultivated land are being degraded by processes such as soil erosion and salinization, while the cultivated area remains roughly constant. Higher yields have compensated somewhat for this loss, but yields cannot be expected to increase indefinitely.

Per capita grain production peaked in 1985 and has been trending down slowly ever since. Exponential growth has moved the world from land abundance to land scarcity. Within the last 35 years, the limits, especially of areas with the best soils, have been approached.

Another limit to food production is water. In many countries, both developing and developed, current water use is often not sustain- able. In an increasing number of the world’s watersheds, limits have already been reached.

More data…

Feeding 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, then, requires closing three gaps:

A 56 percent food gap between crop calories produced in 2010 and those needed in 2050 under “business as usual” growth;
A 593 million-hectare land gap (an area nearly twice the size of India) between global agricultural land area in 2010 and expected agricultural expansion by 2050; and
An 11-gigaton GHG mitigation gap between expected agricultural emissions in 2050 and the target level needed to hold global warming below 2oC (3.6°F), the level necessary for preventing the worst climate impacts.

https://www.wri.org/insights/how-sustainably-feed-10-billion-people-2050-21-charts

I think the political situation here in the US gives us a good idea how at least one large country will handle it - badly. — T Clark

OK, we are discussing the Model B future. For sure this is the politics and ethics of starvation and resource scrambling. You can see folk consciously or unconsciously sliding into the required mentality when billions are going under around the globe.

The US is in a happyish position geostrategically. It has the demographics, the geography, the resource wealth, to begin closing in on its own corner of the world and letting the rest of the planet crash as it likes. This retreat from being the sponsor of the current global trade world order had already begun under Trump and Biden only made it quieter and more organised.

If you know Africa and Asia are screwed, much of Europe too, then the plan would rationally become get selfish, let the degrowth and decarbonisation happen to 6 billion others, problem solved.

The MAGA solution. It scales. Are its adherents irrational or just very cunning and forward looking. No matter who is next elected president, will the infrastructure investment in that new world order continue to be made? Fracking, internment camps, trade deals to draw Canada and Mexico in tight, wind farms and solar panels, geoengineering to fix the climate over chosen areas.

Given that the US isn't likely to handle this all that well, isn't continued US hegemony an obstacle to solving the problem rather than a help? — T Clark

But which horse is the US backing? Saviour by green tech or battening down the hatches for when it gets rough for everyone else and the job of the navy is to sink the refugee ships?

Rural America may be looking at its big useless cities and quietly making the same hard calculations.

Humans have to organise collectively to survive. That requires politics and ethics. Investments are already being made in terms of Model A and Model B futures. The mindset fostered in the free trade/world peace era is no longer going to be fit for purpose under Model B. And even Model A is a degrowth story as green tech way undelivers on the tech bro hype.

Possible slogans:
Thank god I'll be dead by 2050
Let's all build an underground bunker in Hawaii with Zuckerberg. — T Clark

:razz:

Truly the Boomers slogan, the first.

And if you are building your billionaire bunker somewhere remote, you will need to get onside with the natives. Otherwise we will be coming for you. We know where you live.

A serious point is that if world order breaks down, then every remaining pocket of humanity will need its own politics/ethics suited to its own Mad Max location. Philosophical inventiveness and understanding of rapid morality scaling will be a critical community resource.

This has been demonstrated around the world where what is a natural disaster that tips a low resilience and under resourced community into decades of chaos can be something that instead pushes a wealthy and connected community into a positive step up.

In moral philosophy, we have free choices apparently. Now is a good time to look around and see how things are liable to pan out in your own small corner of the world.

It is a law of economics, not physics, of course. So not so much a law but a business projection startling enough to make folk wake up to what scaling is about.

I had fun briefings on the topic at Intel’s Portland fab in the mid-1980s, as well as other manufacturers. Gene Amdahl for instance had his own law that predicted the demise of mainframes because they wouldn’t scale. IBM was starting to bolt together CPUs and Amdahl reckoned diminishing returns would kick in after six or seven units.

So scaleability was a hot topic at that time. Another example were the military guys making dedicated hardware for the subs and AWACs. It was a rude shock when they realised that Intel microprocessors had just changed their world and put them out of business. Bespoke doesn’t scale and off the shelf does.

‘Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush’. — Wayfarer

Comedy plays well. But as moral philosophy, we would soon have the anti-natalists hammering on the door. And as lived experience in the moneyed world, our children aren't having children. They are shifting to lifestyles less consumption-celebrating.

So degrowth has entered the chat. It's ethical and political outlines might be less hazy the more we boomers inquire into it. :smile:

However remember my argument is that the slogan would work in the pragmatic sense of putting folk in mind of some win-win complementary balance. Draw attention to the "other" of their own preference as also needing to be scaled to match.

As in "do unto others", or "to each according".

The future you impoverish may be your own’? — Wayfarer

Better because it focuses attention on to the collective future. Certainly counts as getting somewhere here.

but I'm also very dubious of green-left politics ... ever-increasing 'economic growth' pretty well defines liberal capitalism ... i've never seen Marxism as a credible alternative ... Maybe we need an Al Gore for alternative economics. — Wayfarer

OK. That sketches out the failures of the past. None of which were actually failures as all were ideas that scaled in the sense of grabbing some sizeable audience of believers. Can you identify some common thread in that history. What did they all fail to do?

Liberal capitalism at least gained the balance of power long enough to keep the economic growth growing. It delivered on that, even if its equation had the unsaid part about ever-increasing environmental degradation.

But this is about a slogan for the future.

As a data point, the Aussie 2019 election had its slogans like "A fair go for Australians", "Building our economy, securing our future", "Make Australia great", "The guts to say what you're thinking" and even "Making sure South Australia always comes first." :gasp:

The Greens' had the suitably anodyne: "A future for all of us."

So this can be done. Memes can be constructed in the hope of some ethical/political promise being made at least reasonably clear enough that enough voters would want to hold your party to them. An attitude can catch on. Given voters who want to play.

God knows there are those who are trying, but they don't seem to have much of a profile. — Wayfarer

Yep, the point of this thread is to focus answers to the level of a compelling elevator pitch. Your audience has a very limited tolerance for either philosophical complexity or political vagueness.

You sketched out some past experience, some real world context. Is there really nothing you can put forward as a slogan that works both for yourself in the idealistic sense and could also work for "us all" in a realistic sense?

I've bolded the relevant bit. — bert1

But the relevant bit is (as an ontological committment)...

Some physicalists, such as Daniel Dennett, argue that philosophical zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible — wonderer1

The Cornell University team called their "new law" of Evolution : "the law of increasing functional information.". — Gnomon

One has to laugh. Astrobiology - NASA’s fund-raising publicity department - reinvents the wheel. A new law that no one ever thought of.

Have you ever heard of pragmatism as a theory of truth? Doubt has to have its reasonable basis.

The Hard Problem pretends to have its ontic ground - zombies as a real possibility despite all that science and commonsense says - but it simply devolves to standard Humean epistemic issue that “we will never really know” that bedevils all rational inquiry and which became precisely the reason for pragmatism becoming standard as the way to move forward after that.

Did the sun come up this morning? It looked as though it did. But maybe you dreamt, misremembered or hallucinated that fact. One could always doubt your certitude.

In history I'd call this "cherry-picking" — Moliere

But this was your choice of example. I just followed through with the historical facts. And these seem to tell another story.

I think the question is more of a: where does the rubber meet the road? Same sort of question Marx receives. If we start from any thermodynamic paper, how do we get to "ought"? — Moliere

Yet again you simply ignore that I have already said that your disjunction is my conjunction. Is and ought wouldn't be separate, they would have to be openly complementary or reciprocal under a dichotomising systems logic.

A two-way mutuality is assumed as a condition of them being the larger thing of a causal-strength relation.

The top and bottom levels of a hierarchy must be in support of each other even if they are doing opposite things.

Even Bongo tried to make this point in his homily about corporate management where the board level ought must cash out as the bottom level office manager's is. The boss sets the strategy, the underlings beaver away at the monthly targets.

But in a fast moving world, underlings become closer to the changes that matter. The leisurely decision horizons of the board become a growing problem. Theories of flat hierarchies and the entreprenurial employee become the vogue.

Management science is another department of system theory. Like the rest of the humanities (even if the tap on the door hasn't quite been heard in the dusty forgotten corners of this large ramshackle institution).

Somewhere there are folk still sitting in their stuffed armchairs, digesting a belly of good lunch, basking in golden glow of their 1950s memories when philosophy had banished metaphysics, booted out the continental Marxists along with the irritating scientists too, so that all that counted was having a damn fine wrangle about the meaning of life in plain old ordinary language English.

They do not include thermodynamics as a base of thought to come from, though. — Moliere

But he said you don't need good grammar, philosophy or science in general. Just Jesus. Or at least the plain commonsense that Jesus expressed in saying competition must be tempered by cooperation. The social and ecological organising principle that hierarchy theory captures with mathematical crispness.

You keep reaching for this word, thermodynamics, as if it were restricted to the dead realm of gone-to-equlibrium closed systems. But even the Second Law doesn't demand that reality. Prigogine got his 1977 Nobel for proving that and so launched the new age of thermodynamics as dissipative structure and "order out of chaos".

You might have approved of Prigogine as a person.

Born in Moscow at a complicated historical moment ... the family fled what Ilya himself described as “a difficult relationship with the new regime,” ... his attraction to the humanities would be decisive in his turning away from the more practical chemistry chosen by his father and older brother ... and instead seek more philosophical ground.

“Maybe the orientation of my work came from the conflict which arose from my humanist vocation as an adolescent and from the scientific orientation I chose for my university training.”

He was particularly fascinated by the concept of time, which he explored through the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. ... Bergson was known for his rejection of rationalism and science in favour of intuition and subjective experience. But in an age when time was just one variable in equations that could work both ways, the idea of unpredictability that he found in Bergson may have broadened his vision to take a step back and look at physico-chemical natural processes more broadly.

There was another essential ingredient in his cocktail of influences: his mentor and doctoral supervisor, Théophile de Donder, who specialised in thermodynamics.

Prigogine found a limitation in the thermodynamics of his time: it applied only to systems at or near equilibrium. This idealisation of nature left out a wide range of processes, such as the emergence and evolution of life itself, processes that are far from equilibrium and which, because they are irreversible, have a clear direction of the arrow of time, contrary to what occurred in the physical equations used at the time. The thermodynamics of irreversible processes was the subject in which Prigogine continued the work begun by [de Donder], considered the father of this discipline.

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya-prigogine-brought-order-to-chaos/

It is worth keeping an open mind and reading on. Your reaction to the term "thermodynamics" maybe because you view science and scientists as it they were some race apart from their worlds. Your lens is the one set to "scientism" as being dialectical to ... its righteous other.

I gotta make a lasagne. — Banno

Yep. Time to fire up the thermodynamics and turn that entropy flow on. :fire:

I'd say the Enlightenment is over. — Moliere

Huh? It's political structures are largely still in place organising the world. Even in the US with all its current corruption and division.

To take it back down a few notches of abstraction: Did Martin Luther King begin with thermodynamics? No of course not, but surely he knew something about how social organisms work. Or is everything he wrote and did parochial in the face of the new science? — Moliere

Were you referencing?

And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. (Amen) That's a new definition of greatness.

And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, (Everybody) because everybody can serve. (Amen)

You don't have to have a college degree to serve. (All right) You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve.You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. (Amen)

You only need a heart full of grace, (Yes, sir, Amen) a soul generated by love. (Yes) And you can be that servant.

What ground is King calling upon here then? What balancing structural principle is this ancient Christian wisdom meant to invoke?

Even as religion it resonates. And that is because it is the systems view which you dismiss as "just thermodynamics". King was addressing the gross inequalities his social interest group faced, pointing at a systematic imbalance that a new politics of the US would have to address.

And various technocratic measures were implemented in the US as a result – affirmative action, and end to busing, sensitivity training for law enforcement. Mechanisms designed to achieve outcomes. Even if the headwinds of self-protecting wealth and privilege, not to say engrained social prejudice, made it tough for America to live up to its original founding Enlightenment creed.

Agreed. The sad thing is that philosophy would now seek to reject such a totalising discourse? The very idea of a single way to live that would constrain us all as if we lived under actual environmental and thermodynamic constraints!

My view is that you can't science your way into future social organizations — Moliere

What was the Enlightenment all about then?

The question isn't "What social purpose was that existentialism shaped to serve?" but rather "How shall we shape this existentialism?" — Moliere

Well exactly. And are you planning to do that individually or collectively? Do you expect it could be done collectively and not hierarchically? Is it some form of evidence here that you can’t even advance anarchism or Marxism as politics that achieve their stated in advance goals?

If one ought not piss oneself does that not require one ensures he/she is not pissing into the wind?

Nature created human social order in its image. How you piss about starts from that thermodynamic foundation. The rest is the unfolding of history as an ever-enlarging and hierarchically complexifying growth project. With its own grumbling chorus of dissent.

That seems right, but no framework is THE framework. — Janus

Sure. The next level dichotomy is deciding the pragmatic balance between generality and specificity - between laws and measurements in science terms. Each side contains information about “the world”. The balancing of what has been divided becomes a question of epistemic efficiency. Occam’s razor. What does the job of organising our behaviour in some useful and self-sustaining way?

Both ideas are inherently vague—we never actually encounter a whole self, or a whole world. — Janus

Who is this "we" to which you just referred? Some form of self as a point of reference that suitably anchors some world in the passing pincer grip of a dialectic or dichotomised polarity? "I see this or that makes sense or nonsense within this or that world model or ontic framework."

Self and world never seem to be found apart, and yet never together either. Curious. It is almost as if each is the other's reflection somehow. An Umwelt almost.

It was so off the mark that I thought it better to let it sink into the darkness. :up:

And I'm trying to point out that what you say is pretty much what Marx is on about :D -- wanting to understand how the capitalist machine works through critique in order to supply theory for the movement. — Moliere

Of course. Marx was a decent critic of his times. He took a systems view. He and Engels had their model of Dialectical Materialism.

But diagnosis did not produce the cure. Fukuyama points to the historical evidence that dialectics can't balance things. You need trialectics to achieve that.

After the madness of Stalin, the USSR achieved a stable political formula in having the triadic balance of the Politiburo, Army generals and KGB. An arrangement of power was institutionalised.

So we do know what makes systems work. And it ain't demolishing hierarchies. It is ensuring that hierarchical order does in fact have the two way information flow where top-down constraints exist in balance with bottom-up construction. A society is well balanced when it is a collective of interest groups formed over all scales of its existence.

One's freedom of choice is an existential condition more than a political one, I'd say. — Moliere

And what social purpose was that existentialism shaped to serve?

At what point did a revolutionary political idea become the basis of modern mass consumerism? The "because you're so individual and special" reason that you deserve a Lamborghini or Rolex?

At what point did it become the justification for neo-liberalism and the worker as entrepreneur?

Counter-culture mutates into mainstream culture to the degree that it fuels the end result – fossil fuel burning and resource consumption. If it is a "good idea" in that sense, it becomes the norm. The new ought.

"setting myself up as the judge" — Banno

But you just mumble the same old opinion. "Meh". There is never work done to justify you even speaking out. Who needs your "meh's"? Keep them to yourself. Or expect a kick up the bum for rudely interrupting just so folk know you are there.

Shared worldviews allow a more closely bonded society, so the challenge for science is to make itself more accessible to the average person. — Janus

Even just keeping everyone on the same page in terms of general rationality would be good. :smile:

TOE physicists have become like a decadent priesthood, demanding that the populace build them ever more elaborate cathedrals, with spires reaching ever higher into their idea of heaven, Since a theory of everything would be not only utterly irrelevant to daily human life and concerns, but also incomprehensible to the vast majority of people, TOE physicists can be likened to the late medieval Scholastics. — Janus

I think I've said that myself fairly often. It has become a widespread self-criticism within the field.

But humans are humans. CERN is an institution and so has develop the social skills to keep the funding rolling at the level to which it is accustomed. The same story as the Catholic Church or US military or Wall St banks.

At least CERN does remarkably little harm in its priesthood being so removed from the everyday of real life's temptations. The power bill is huge, but that is about it.

And if you shut it down, just cut it back to its mathematical department, it would be an absolute shoe-string project by anyone's reckoning. The bureaucracy and sizeable publicity machine would be gone. Just the metaphysical speculation could continue, as abstracted from the general populace as everything else vaguely difficult to understand would be.

I've also seen semiotic accounts of computation, but this has always focused on the computing devices designed by humans, rather than biological or physical computation writ large. Because computation can also be described as communication, it seems like there is an opening here for a triadic account, although I've yet to find one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My view is that computation always has been and always will be a technological extension of human semiosis. It isn't its own form of life or mind. AI is pipe dream. Information technology exists to extend our reach over entropic nature, just like any other mechanical contrivance we tack on to our human enterprise as we turn our entire planet into an anthrosphere shaped in our own image.

So at the level of giving computation meaning, it only can have meaning in the ways it amplifies our human ability to "harvest the biosphere" as Smil puts it. To extend the business of controlling the wider world's entropic flows.

That is the pragmatics. Howard Pattee's Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology is good on this. Semiosis doesn't exist unless the meaningful relation is the one of an informational model plunged into the business of regulating its entropic world.

A computer is just a machine – a rack of switches – plugged into a wall socket. It has no need to care about the source of energy that flips its logic circuits. Humans operate its metabolism, just as humans also find whatever meaning is to be had in its circuit states. The computer is no more alive or mindful than an artificial leg, flight of stairs, or chainsaw.

An irony of the current AI hype boom is that the good reason for the promotion of large language models is that they demand huge compute power. There is money to be made in building ever more energy-expensive cloud computing services and their vast data centres.

The tech giants were pushing "big data" as the business world revolution a few years ago, just as social media was supposed to be the great next step GDP productivity booster. Sold a lot of data centre, but corporations eventually realised big data was just another productivity con.

And here we go again with AI.

So yes there is a triadic account as you do need a bank of switches standing between the informational model of the world and the entropy that is what sustains the organism with its model.

But this is the biosemiotic model of semiosis. The one Salthe, Pattee and others moved towards after being influenced by Peirce's larger corpus finally beginning to hit the public space in the 1980s and 1990s.

The interpretant would be some neural or genetic structure of habit (or linguistic or numeric habit in social and technological humans). The referent would be some negentropic action in the world. The signifier becomes the interface between model and mind – the rack of switches which encode a set of off-on connections between the two sides of this biosemiotic equation.

Or in Pattee's terms, the molecule that is also the message. The enzyme that is acting as the on-off switch of some metabolic process. The receptor cell or motor neuron that is the on-off switch in terms of a sensory input or motor out put – the transduction step needed to turn thought into action, or action into thought.

Hmmm. I write a post explaining how dialectic invites confabulate, and get ↪Moliere and ↪apokrisis in reply. — Banno

You are so deeply confused on the issue that I thought I didn't offer you any reply. It seemed pointless to attempt to unravel your tangled thoughts.

You see, I don't think that this comment says anything. At least, not clearly. — Banno

Your standard phrasing, setting yourself up as the judge of the matter, then denying anything has been said that would require you actually giving your counter argument, ended with a grudging acknowledgement that perhaps not exactly nothing was said.

You are your own parody.

Then the question: "To what?" comes up. — Moliere

Sure. You have the freedom to choose otherwise. Or claim you intend to.

Agency is what hierarchy produces. Constraints limit possibilities but then what is not forbidden is what is not just allowed but expected. It is the range of choices that are statistically likely to rebuild the systems as it is. Along with any adaptation that proves necessary.

So degrees of freedom are entrained to the general project. Keeping this body, this species, this society, this economy, going. It is what has worked before and - with some adjustment as circumstances shift - ought to serve it in the future.

Your political comments seem of that mind. It is fair enough to say the general human system doesn’t seem well balanced and we ought to be making serious adjustments. You want to do your bit to serve the greater imperative of keeping the human project on the road.

But then comes the real work of understanding what has been making that system tick along and how pro-system change could actually be effected.

Your choices may be free - but also likely to fail if your analysis of how is and ought are connected is faulty. The past doesn’t determine the future but it sure as hell constrains it.

This is captured in cosmology as the evolving block universe concept. It has physical generality.

No one believes in them. — bert1

And yet you think it is your gotcha…

As biological creatures zombies, we only need to insert ourselves into our worlds in a semiotically constructed fashion. The task is to build ourselves as beings zombies with the agency to be able to hang together in an organismic fashion. — apokrisis

What can you say to folk who claim to believe in philosophical zombies? :death:

The metaphysical speculations about the results of quantum physics are of course untestable — Janus

The progress hasn’t quite been zero. Nobels have been handed out…

Experimentalists such as Alain Aspect have verified the quantum violation of the CHSH inequality as well as other formulations of Bell's inequality, to invalidate the local hidden variables hypothesis and confirm that reality is indeed nonlocal in the EPR sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality

Of course folk can still invent even more outrageous loopholes to preserve classical realism like superdeterminism. Which is pretty much equal to claiming we all exist in the mind of God.

But meanwhile, back in the real world, quantum theory explains more and more about supposedly metaphysical issues like how the Universe is structured as it is. Quantum contextuality says a particle is a sum over all its possibilities, and the answers turn out correct to as many decimal places as you can measure.

It can pose questions like whether the vacuum is stable or prone to another inflationary decay event - a Big Rip. The test becomes whether the top quark is more massive than the Higgs boson. And thankfully it is.

Wayfarer will protest that quantum theory is still incomplete. Just as Bert will complain neuroscience hasn’t answered the Hard Problem despite the vast insight we now have into the fine detail of cognition as a process.

At least science acknowledges that it is all only pragmatic modelling and not a pretence at knowing the ultimate truths. But science can afford to humble brag having achieved so much in telling the structural story of Nature.

If you believe America's democratic republic is hanging on by a thread, then you might understand why my dream featuring Harris rising to the call of greatness is the most appealing fantasy for me to entertain seriously. — ucarr

Fair enough. But when Trump mounts his post-election coup, you might be waiting for some next hero to show up and save the day.

Or are you thinking Harris will have the balls and the Supreme Court seal force-level immunity to arrest Trump's ass and ship him off with the rest of gang to Guantanamo Bay? Act 2 of the drama? Act 3 to follow.