But this is a Philosophy forum, — Gnomon

Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

Fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does that sound? — Moliere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You do not do yourself a service. — Banno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proud of yourself?

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

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

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

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

Your trivialising them does not do you proud. — Banno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you smoking?

If he is an Immanentist regarding abstract concepts — Gnomon

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

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

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

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

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

How? — Banno

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

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.