Is the second law basically mathematical ? Something like the law of large numbers ? Is it basically the fact that there are more states that we call disordered than there are ordered states --- so that any change of state is likely to be toward disorder ? — plaque flag

The metaphysics gets more complicated here. Boltzmann was thinking in terms of particles, Jaynes then turned it into statistics, Shannon showed how the maths dragged in information. And then the Second Law was shown to be a special case of the more general thing of dissipative structure - at least in my view.

That happened with Prigoine’s “far from equilibrium” thermodynamics - seen as a special case of the Second Law. But the Second Law describes gone to equilibrium systems. And that doesn’t describe a Big Bang universe that is instead eternally cooling and spreading.

So exactly how to understand entropy and dissipation is an open conversation. Biologists have been calling for a Fourth Law for dissipative structure. And a Peircean view would support the idea that this would be the more generic story.

Any thoughts on Stuart Kauffman ? He seemed legit in a couple of video lectures. — plaque flag

Yeah, he’s solid. He’s one of those calling for “beyond the standard model of thermodynamics” theories.

If it fits in at all, where does consciousness fit in ? Does it play a crucial role ? Perhaps you've already said it and I didn't understand. — plaque flag

Consciousness is loaded jargon. It speaks to a Cartesian substance. And that is exactly what I am arguing against in saying it “reduces” to the generality of the notion of the semiotic modelling relation.

So the claim is that what brains do is model their environment. And likewise, bodies and societies and technologies all also are examples of the generic structure that is a pragmatic modelling relation.

Karl Friston calls it Bayesian mechanics. He had developed a full mathematical model that can again be seen as part of the effort to move past the old Second Law to a deeper level of description - one that is intrinsically self-organising and “alive” like vortices, and not “dead” like a gone to equilibrium heat death conception of thermodynamics.

you might get more responses if your post was more than "Go and research Zizek for me so I don't have to." — bert1

- hahahaha 1-0 for you

I hope you enjoyed your encounter with apohotep — bert1

- actually, I find pretty good and with potential to help me on this matter. But for some reason, he sees me as a materialist trying to debunk ZIzek, or at least that's my impression.

Yep, this the claim that meaning arises from the growth of constraints on interpretation. The central idea of semiosis.

Consciousness is loaded jargon. It speaks to a Cartesian substance. — apokrisis

:up:

This makes sense to me. I guess the deeper issue, 'behind' Cartesian confusion, is the thereness of the there. The world is not 'only' concept. It's hard to get at it this issue.

Are there really 3 dimensions ? Is color 'more' than differential response ?

And then the Second Law was shown to be a special case of the more general thing of dissipative structure - at least in my view. — apokrisis

I need to track down those references, of course, but while you are here:

Should we think of the 'second claw of thermodemonics' as something like an urge ? Such as will in Schopenhauer or deathdrive in Freud ? Do things 'want' to dissipate ? Or do we just project this telos because things tend to dissipate ? Random motion will tend toward dissipation, right ? Though occasionally it can move toward what we call order ?

Do you know of any resources that give a great overall intro ? I love bigpicture first then zoom in.

Do things 'want' to dissipate ? Or do we just project this telos because things tend to dissipate ? — plaque flag

The point here is for the scientist to accept all four of Aristotle's causes and not pretend nature is reducible to just bottom-up construction by localised material and efficient causes.

The scientist then deals with the obvious fact that there are grades of telos because there are grades of semiosis.

Stan Salthe offers the stepping stones of {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. Or in more regular language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.

See: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284

So yes, the physical world lacks a code within which to fix an actual purpose or desire. The Second Law is simply a globally inevitable tendency or propensity. But recognising this as telos at its simplest possible level is still recognising that it is a universal drive that causes order in the Cosmos.

It completes the dialectic where chaos is the local irreducible uncertainty of every event, and yet statistical order is then the inescapable globally bounding order that imposes its statistical constraints on the free possibilities of chaos.

Thermodynamics speaks to the limits on randomness imposed by a globally closed system. If you are pulling lottery numbers out of a bag, the numbers may be random, but they are all in the same bag. Statistical regularity is thus enforced.

Then life has genes and neurons to fix its organismic purposes. We would call this being constrained by function.

And mind has words and numbers to fix its personal purposes. We would call this being constrained by desires and reasons.

Do you know of any resources that give a great overall intro ? I love bigpicture first then zoom in. — plaque flag

Maybe: https://complexsystems.org/publications/into-the-cool/

The point here is for the scientist to accept all four of Aristotle's causes and not pretend nature is reducible to just bottom-up construction by localised material and efficient causes. — apokrisis

:up:

That seems reasonable, and I grasp that it challenges a more encrusted view.

The Second Law is simply a globally inevitable tendency or propensity. But recognising this as telos at its simplest possible level is still recognising that it is a universal drive that causes order in the Cosmos. — apokrisis

So it's something that is just found empirically. One looks and sees and articulates this tendency. It doesn't reduce to this or that aspect (thinkers you mentioned.). (?)

See: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284 — apokrisis

This one won't work for me.

Maybe: https://complexsystems.org/publications/into-the-cool/ — apokrisis

This one did. This quote helps.

“Nature abhors a gradient,” they claim, and life arose in order to reduce energy gradients – in much the same way that tornadoes serve to dissipate the pent up energy in the gradient between high and low pressure air masses. The emergence of life is “causally connected to the second law,” they say. Indeed, the second law is variously characterized by Schneider and Sagan as a force that “governs,” “organizes,” “selects,” “generates,” “determines,” “mandates,” “pushes” and “leads to” biological structure and organization. The second law is the “source” for the overall directionality observed in evolution, they say.

Was it merely empirical for Darwin to recognise that evolution is the inevitable shaping hand of nature?

This is about recognising that constraint and construction are the co-fundamental dialectic of causality.

Reductionism only wants to admit to the reality of constructive causality, treating constraint as somehow “just a convenient idea”. But holism or systems thinking - in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, Peirce, etc - recognises that constraints are just as real, just as basic, to the existence of a world.

Darwinism rules even the emergence of the Cosmos. The Second Law is seen as the most fundamental law because it models that ultimate constraint in robust mathematics - statistical mechanics.

The world is (or seems to be) through a particular pair of eyes, though we grasp it always as transcending and encompassing those eyes.

How do you make sense of this peculiar situation ?

Do you see us participating in [ coconstructing ? ] a shared symbolic realm ? I like to think of us as tribal [ timebinding ] software running on local biohardware.

Was it merely empirical for Darwin to recognise that evolution is the inevitable shaping hand of nature? — apokrisis

I don't know. It's an organizing framework (?), making new observations possible, so probably not only. Just to be clear, I have no objection to seeing what's going on and articulating it. At one point, gravity was just there, and Newton had the model. Now it's part of GR, yes ? But I'm open to the 2nd law being fundamental. Why not ?

I am truly willing to take off reductionist goggles (which is not to say it's easy.)

For context : I take from Hegel the idea that 'subject and substance' (symbol and the symbolized?) are entangled and not truly separable. The lifeworld is symbolically articulated. The reductionist scientistic image is just that, a map that ignores our symbolic historicity, the sediment of purposive meaning. The real world (for phenomenology) is all encompassing context. Even a massproduced blouse in a certain style speaks of the industrial revolution and the beheading of kings by a rising bourgeoisie (and the fancy designer version that inspired the knockoff.) We have a teeming creaking jungle of references here.

We like to think that purpose is completely and only in us. We all tend to think that signtrading is necessarily conscious. The second idea has been demolished in philosophy. Tacit norms are now understood to dominate. But the first (all purpose is animal purpose) seems still very strong.

Do you see us participating in [ coconstructing ? ] a shared symbolic realm ? I like to think of us as tribal [ timebinding ] software running on local biohardware. — plaque flag

This is standard social psychology. Not at all peculiar. How else could it have been?

I am truly willing to take off reductionist goggles (which is not to say it's easy.) — plaque flag

It is hard because it is not taking off dark glasses but re-learning the very habits of vision. Reductionism is embedded in the grammar of speech, let alone in the mechanical turn of the scientific and industrial revolutions. It is what we are trained in from birth.

But surely if you are into Hegel, you can’t have got anywhere without understanding how his triadic system describes logic as the holist would see it?

This is standard social psychology. Not at all peculiar. How else could it have been? — apokrisis

:up:
It's like pulling teeth though to make that point around here.

Folks love their methodological solipsism !

But surely if you are into Hegel, you can’t have got anywhere without understanding how his triadic system describes logic as the holist would see it? — apokrisis

It's hard to say. In my experience, there are lots of ways to interpret and focus on Hegel, and I've checked out a decent number of them. I'd be glad to hear your take.

I offered a Brandom quote above that focused on unstable impersonal conceptual schemes that increase in complexity and comprehensiveness. For Kojeve's Hegel, this 'is' time (as the movement of the embodied 'software' coming to understand itself and what knowledge is.)

I offered a Brandom quote above that focused on unstable impersonal conceptual schemes that increase in complexity and comprehensiveness. For Kojeve's Hegel, this 'is' time (as the movement of the embodied 'software' coming to understand itself and what knowledge is.) — plaque flag

It all goes back to the Zapffe's break in nature. Talk about a break in symmetry! Humans have created a huge asymmetry. When meaning itself can not be justified, yet we "fear" the consequences of this or that, something went askew.

@apokrisis relies too much on the comforts of statistical norms as somehow "telling", but discredits the idea of bad faith. The logic of letting the egg lay the chicken. You buy into the statistical norm, it becomes the norm.

I take from Hegel the idea that 'subject and substance' (symbol and the symbolized?) are entangled and not truly separable. — plaque flag

It’s the other way around. It is the clean separability that grounds the more complex mixing or entangling.

In the beginning there is just vagueness - any and everything might be the case, which is thus also a vast nothingness. Nothing is actually the case when everything is potentially the case.

That symmetry must be broken by an asymmetry. There must be a dichotomy that separates in opposing or reciprocal directions. Possibility must be divided towards its complementary extremes.

So we can only conceive of motion in terms of its absence - a stillness. But also stillness only is measurable in terms now of the absence of motion. Run this dichotomy to its limits, to its extremes, and we derive the metaphysical dyad of stasis-flux.

Ancient Greek dialectics furnished us with the whole catalogue of such asymmetric distinctions. Chance and necessity, matter and form, one and many, local and global, discrete and continuous, vague and definite. The existence of each category is actualised to the degree it is measureably distant from its dialectical other.

So the maths is exact. Stasis = 1/flux and flux = 1/stasis. They are a Pythagorean unity of opposites where each is real to the degree it’s other is indeed othered.

Where your quote slips up is in reading this dialectical logic as dyadic rather than triadic - mediated by the third thing of the inverting relation that does the separation which then also allows the definite thing of the mixing, the entanglement, the complexification.

So yes, you can make a dichotomy of the subjective and the objective and so appear to create the two antithetical realms of the mind and the world. You can set up the standard Cartesian dilemma which results in a doubled reductionism. A belief in two disconnected substantial realms.

But Hegel was trying to show how the separated are the related. The relation creates the separation at a fundamental level - as a global systems constraint - which then allows the two aspects of reality to become interwoven in a constructing fashion over all scales of being.

At the level of neurosemiosis, that is how the pilot lands the plane. By becoming a still centre of an optic flow. The same dichotomising trick becomes an engrained habit that can be used to navigate a self through any cluttered and buffeted material environment.

Hegel didn’t have Peirce’s logical chops, so his exegesis is often obscure. But it was what he was trying to say.

there are lots of ways to interpret and focus on Hegel, — plaque flag

Depending how much it matters, it might be worth checking out the literature on Peirce vs Hegel.

For instance…

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/self-contextualization.html

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/self-contextualization.html

It all goes back to the Zapffe's break in nature. Talk about a break in symmetry! Humans have created a huge asymmetry. — schopenhauer1

But we are nature. We were implicit in Nature, which had to give birth to its wickedest and most beautiful child.

apokrisis relies too much on the comforts of statistical norms as somehow "telling", but discredits the idea of bad faith. — schopenhauer1

Either that or I’m actually competent in the maths and metaphysics of statistical thought. That is my unfair advantage. :grin:

But we are nature. We were implicit in Nature, which had to give birth to its wickedest and most beautiful child. — plaque flag

Never said we weren't part of nature, but just a really asymmetrical one that is out of sorts with the other parts. There is no justification for why we must do anything, yet we act as if we do! And here we have the tensions of PoMo and Evo Devo. We have human development and language.. The "constraints" of the system, but then order takes shape, but then this creates the ultimate disorder of NO JUSTIFICATION. As a deliberative language-bearing ape, is one that cannot escape having no justification at the end of its long journey. You don't have to work. You can die. You can fear death, but you can do go beyond what you fear. You can get by doing any number of things.

When meaning itself can not be justified, yet we "fear" the consequences of this or that, something went askew. — schopenhauer1

We are liquid temporal finite softwhere, always on the way toward more clarity, more power. Reason is purposive activity. Felix culpa ! Something happened. Something went askew. Pumpkin is cotton in then mark.

Either that or I’m actually competent in the maths and metaphysics of statistical thought. That is my unfair advantage. :grin: — apokrisis

I never said you don't understand statistical mechanics, but as I said to plaque:

Never said we weren't part of nature, but just a really asymmetrical one that is out of sorts with the other parts. There is no justification for why we must do anything, yet we act as if we do! And here we have the tensions of PoMo and Evo Devo. We have human development and language.. The "constraints" of the system, but then order takes shape, but then this creates the ultimate disorder of NO JUSTIFICATION. As a deliberative language-bearing ape, is one that cannot escape having no justification at the end of its long journey. You don't have to work. You can die. You can fear death, but you can do go beyond what you fear. You can get by doing any number of things. — schopenhauer1

I agree with you to some extent but then you try to put the order where there is disorder.. symmetry where there is a large break in symmetry.

There is no justification for why we must do anything, yet we act as if we do! — schopenhauer1

Can you justify this need for a justification ?

Justification is part of the way humans cooperate and compete, it seems to me.

The "constraints" of the system, but then order takes shape, but then this creates the ultimate disorder of NO JUSTIFICATION. — schopenhauer1

I'd say that humans evolve to feel constrained only be themselves. We fucking decide now, --at least until the contemptuous and lecherous Neptunians make us their pets.

We justify ourselves only before one another, not before gods or the void.

Justification is part of the way humans cooperate and compete, it seems to me. — plaque flag

It's all self-motivated though. I choose to internalize as much as it is habitual. That line is much greyer than both camps like to admit.

Using @apokrisis holism, and not being reductionist, we can say that choosing to habituate into someone is also a choice. It is possibly a unquestioned assumption (as to if, what, and how) to habituate someone else in the first place. As people develop their own identity, they can then break free of the constraints if they so choose...But then they encounter the dilemma of bad faith and authenticity.

I agree with you to some extent but then you try to put the order where there is disorder.. symmetry where there is a large break in symmetry. — schopenhauer1

This week I'm reading Richard Wrangham's The Goodness Paradox. You ought to read it too.

It tells how as a species, Homo sapiens self-domesticated its neurobiology in response to developing a new language-enabled social sense of self. We became creatures adapted to being egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands because we could collectively submit to the dominance of the higher thing of a timebound group identity.

The logic of the organism reconstructed its natural structure when given the entropic opportunity. You could call that statistical inevitability ... hence not at all blind chance or unlucky accident.

Science is eating up all your 18th C "romantic reaction to the industrial revolution" dialectical "truths".

Every step in the human journey can be seen as completely natural once you have the proper theory of nature.

So yes, you can make a dichotomy of the subjective and the objective and so appear to create the two antithetical realms of the mind and the world. You can set up the standard Cartesian dilemma which results in a doubled reductionism. A belief in two disconnected substantial realms. — apokrisis

Perhaps you are misunderstanding me. My point was that such a separation was impossible or confused. The truth is the whole. Entities have their reality or meaning only in relation to other entities. Anything isolated is nonsense. From the point of view of an inferentialist semantics, such entities play no role in inferences and are logically (scientifically, philosophically) null and void, hot air.

The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. This is as true of philosophy as of religion; for religion equally does not recognise finitude as a veritable being, as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal. Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance.
...

The tricky part for me (in understand your view) is how the metaphysical image constructed by philosophers is related to reality as a whole. Is that metaphysical image actually the complex heart of a self-organizing, self-articulating reality ?

Science is eating up all your 18th C "romantic reaction to the industrial revolution" dialectical "truths". — apokrisis

You give too much credence to this romantic notion of the romantic reaction to the industrial revolution. It was there in Ecclesiastes and Gilgamesh.

Every step in the human journey can be seen as completely natural once you have the proper theory of nature. — apokrisis

I didn't say how we got here wasn't inevitable based on evolutionary trajectory. I am explaining the current conditions. There is no justification and that is indeed a large asymmetry with the rest of nature. No other animal has that degree of abstraction, deliberation, and thus self-awareness. This creates the problem of doing things one wouldn't "want" to do. Of knowing there is X negative and doing it anyways. One can do otherwise. One can commit suicide. One can hate and do. One HAS to do X otherwise Z. But it's not that, it's KNOWING that. It does represent an exile from Eden of sorts. A break.