The question I asked was this:

Why would they need some kind of neurosemiotic model to get to what I would want to call consciousness? — bert1

So stop being a lazy bugger and define what you mean by consciousness in a way that is relevant to how I treat it.

Panpsychism is a brute fact claim rather than a causal account. So why do you badger me endlessly for my causal account except to again crow about your brute fact claim.

You show no interest in what I say. And yet you won't leave me alone.

So stop being a lazy bugger and define what you mean by consciousness in a way that is relevant to how I treat it. — apokrisis

No. This is a philosophy forum. Show how your worldview solves philosophical questions of consciousness as philosophers define it.

Panpsychism is a brute fact claim rather than a causal account. So why do you badger me endlessly for my causal account except to again crow about your brute fact claim. — apokrisis

I am merely pointing out your repeated error.

You show no interest in what I say. And yet you won't leave me alone. — apokrisis

It's because I love you.

No. This is a philosophy forum. — bert1

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

You never give your causal account. And now we have further confusion, is consciousness caused, realised, enacted, or what? As for panpsychism, the AI you used said biosemiosis incorporates the view that all matter has proto-experience, which is indistinguishable from panpsychism. I didn't say that, you did, via an AI, in your post. You're not engaging with any of the philosophical issues, and again and again, you decline interrogation.

↪apokrisis The question I asked was this:

Why would they need some kind of neurosemiotic model to get to what I would want to call consciousness?
— bert1 — bert1

You never give your causal account. — bert1

I've given it way too many times.

...again and again, you decline interrogation. — bert1

Do I hear the furious stamping fury of the world's tiniest jackboots? :broken:

So elsewhere you do try to stack up some sort of causal account. We can use that given you are only going to take the "Vee ask der questions here!!" approach in any "philosophical" discussion with me.

In reply to...

I'm not saying they re not conscious but a primitive immature consciousness and so his experience is... very simplistic and immature.
— Raul

You answered...

Oh sure. I don't disagree with that. However I do think it entails that consciousness does not admit of degree. 'Primitive immature consciousness' is still consciousness. Complicated mature consciousness is still consciousness. The consciousness of an adult is the same kind of consciousness that a baby has, namely the kind of consciousness that permits experiences to happen at all. It is that very simple basic capacity to experience that is the subject of discussions in philosophy. It is in that sense that I don't think the concept of consciousness admits of degree.

EDIT: To put it another way, the adult is no more or less able to have experiences than the child. They do differ in the kind of experiences they can have. But that's a difference of content, not a difference of consciousness.

EDIT: To put it a third way, the hard problem is located at the difference between no experience happening at all, and some experience, no matter how 'primitive' it is.

So this gives us some glimpse of your hidden argument. And what jumps out is the need to explain how one can call on "the primitive" as a concept that one could measurably substantiate.

Biosemiosis offers its primitive in Pattee's notion of the "configurable switch". So a completely concrete argument is being made. And about ten years ago, biophysics added the evidence to substantiate the theory. So problem solved I say.

Whereas we can see your completely question-begging approach to this issue of where the "epistemic cut" between mind and matter is to be found in Nature. Your approach is that it goes down at least as far as newborns and probably any level of living organism – which is thus far, perfectly biosemiotic.

But then the hands start waving. As not biosemiotic cut off point has been identified, you say well, no choice chaps, we got to roll on all the way down to fundamental particles. Or something. Mumble, mumble.

That leaves nothing much to argue against as nothing much of any metaphysical import is being said.

Here is an AI refresher on Pattee's epistemic cut, on which I've posted so often...

Howard Pattee used the metaphor of a configurable switch (CS) to help explain how the non-physical realm of formal information can exert causal control over physical processes, a mechanism necessary to bridge his proposed "epistemic cut".

The epistemic cut describes a fundamental, unavoidable boundary between the physical world (governed by continuous, rate-dependent, deterministic laws) and the symbolic/formal world (governed by discrete, rate-independent rules, such as descriptions or measurements).

Key aspects of the switch metaphor:

Arbitrary Control: A switch's physical construction is irrelevant to its function of simply being "on" or "off" in a circuit. Its operation is "arbitrary" with respect to the underlying physical laws of matter, yet it exerts control over the flow of electricity.

Formal Prescription: The setting of the switch (e.g., open or closed, "on" or "off") is a formal, informational decision (a form of "prescriptive information") that dictates the path of physical events (the flow of current).

Bridging the Divide: The "configurable switch" serves as a conceptual model for how a formal choice can be instantiated in physical reality, allowing the symbolic (e.g., genetic code instructions) to direct the material (e.g., protein synthesis in a cell) without violating physical laws, but rather by applying non-integrable constraints.

The "switch" metaphor helps to illustrate the mechanism by which top-down, intentional control (the symbolic side) can interact with bottom-up, physical dynamics (the material side).

And here is an old post of mine about the biophysical evidence for this biosemiotic theory....

On the transition from non-life to life

Biophysics finds a new substance

This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.

The key finding: As outlined in this paper (http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf) and in this book (http://lifesratchet.com/), the nanoscale turns out to be a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.

So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.

This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transition from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. At the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.

The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.

So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.

So the big finding is the way that contrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.

The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.

In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.

A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where it needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.

It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.

A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.

This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.

The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.

But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.

It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.

So contra conventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.

As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.

And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.

Graph of the convergence zone: Phillips, R., & Quake, S. (2006). The Biological Frontier of Physics Physics Today 59

phillips-quake-2.jpg

My tentative answer is that there is, at least, a kind of incipient drive towards conscious existence woven, somehow, into the fabric of the cosmos. And that through its manifest forms of organic existence, horizons of being are disclosed that would otherwise never be realised. — Wayfarer
Well biosemiosis has now turned all this from metaphysical speculation into firm science. What is woven into the initial conditions of the physical world is the incipient inevitability of its Second Law entropic drive running into a form of systemhood that can exploit its own loophole. — apokrisis

's "incipient drive" (nascent power) sounds like another way to describe my own notion of EnFormAction (the power to transform : Energy + Form + Causation). And the "entropic drive" of your nascent science of "biosemiosis"*1 (Decoding Life Signs)*2 may also be relevant to the topic of this thread.

However, identifying the Cosmic Encoder of the program (language) for Life & Mind remains an open question for both science and philosophy. All three proposals are currently "metaphysical speculations" with the potential to coalesce into a new science integrating biology, psychology & cosmology. When we learn to speak the language of Nature, maybe we will come to "know the mind of God"*3.

The Initial Conditions of the Big Bang necessarily included Causal Power (energy) and Limiting Laws (program for directing energy). But the pre-bang source of those necessities is elided (omitted) from most scientific accounts of the origin of our universe. So hypothetical speculations on "what existed before the Bang?" include such unscientific non-empirical notions as eternal/infinite Gods, eternal Inflation, everlasting Multiverses, or unbounded sets of Many Worlds.

Physical science, though, begins after the Planck time-gap of the Big-Bang-beginning itself. At which time the metaphysical Laws of Thermodynamics were already in effect. And everything after that puzzling "low entropy" initial condition is defined as Entropic, where the Energy of the Bang coasts downhill toward a hypothetical Big-Freeze-ending, characterized by the total disorganization of "Cosmic heat death".

Yet somehow --- after a few billion years of deadly entropy --- Order, Organization and Organic-life emerged, despite the "absolute" Second Law of Thermodynamics. Apparently, that Incipient Drive*4, woven into the fabric of matter-energy, was programmed to produce the "manifest forms" that we experience as perceived Reality. But who or what was the programmer of biological & psychological codes that have manifested in animated & intentional matter?

My Information-based concept of EnFormAction, or Enformy (negentropy) may be another term for the hypothetical incipient drive that produced the orderly systems of Life, which communicate and reproduce via the physical & metaphysical processes of Biosemiosis (DNA + code). But where did the original Information (natural laws?) come from, that caused a living & thinking Cosmos to explode into existence? That may be the implicit & annoying "un-scientific" un-proveable Ontological question that provokes the antipathy displayed by some biological entities in their replies to this thread. For the record, my answer is "I don't know". :nerd:


*1. Biosemiosis is the process by which all living organisms interpret and communicate through signs,
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=biosemiosis
Note --- Signs & Symbols are patterns of matter (e.g. on-off, black-white) that convey useful information within a system. But only sentient entities are aware of the meaning of that information.

*2. Organic Information :
Life is a complex phenomenon characterized by a set of universal biological traits, including cellular organization, metabolism, homeostasis, reproduction, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and heredity. It is a process that involves organized biological matter with the capacity for self-sustaining processes and evolution. Information, particularly in the form of DNA, plays a crucial role by providing instructions for building and regulating the components of an organism.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=life+information
Note --- Biological Codes are patterns of matter (DNA) that can be interpreted by RNA for information necessary to build & regulate structural & biological functions.

*3. Mind of God :
The phrase "know the mind of God" is often used by physicists like Stephen Hawking to describe the ultimate goal of science : to find a unified, complete, and simple theory that explains all the laws of the universe.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=physicist+to+know+the+mind+of+god
Note --- For the purposes of this thread, Inceptive Cosmos is the source of all energy (cause) and laws (codes) that eventually created a path to Life & Mind.

*4. Active Information :
Quantum physicist David Peat worked with, and was influenced by both Bohm and Roger Penrose, who also postulated some unorthodox theories of physics and metaphysics. I borrowed the name of his article¹ for this blog post. There, he noted that “Towards the end of the 1980s David Bohm introduced the notion of Active Information into his Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory”. To explain the “active” element of Information, Peat says “I suggest that Information is the final element in a triad—information is that which gives form to energy”.
https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page29.html

Physical science, though, begins after the Planck time-gap of the Big-Bang-beginning itself. At which time the metaphysical Laws of Thermodynamics were already in effect. — Gnomon

Don't forget that the Planck scale was as hot as it was small. As full of quantum momentum uncertainty as it was quantum positional certainty. As energy density curved as it was spatiotemporally flat.

So the Planck scale was the scale at which a unit 1 symmetry was broken. Counterfactuality was itself the thing that was born as now there could be the positive difference of a Cosmos that was doubling itself in one direction, and halving itself in the other. Doubling its spatiotemporal extent and therefore halving is thermal content.

Entropy could be generated as now there was a broken symmetry growing in a reciprocally driven fashion. The cooling was slowing the expansion. But the expansion was still inertially being driven by that initial energy density.

So if you want to talk about an incipient drive or nascent power, you have to remember that the Big Bang was as maximally hot as it was maximally small. And all it then does is grow in a dichotomous or reciprocal fashion where it flies off towards its Heat Death – the inverse state of becoming as large as it is cold.

The Big Bang – as an application of thermodynanics – is doing the very clever self-creating thing of digging its own heat sink. It is throwing its newborn self into its own self-dug grave.

But where did the original Information (natural laws?) come from, that caused a living & thinking Cosmos to explode into existence? — Gnomon

Pfft. That is mysticism and not serious metaphysics.

Let's get back to Nature as Anaximander, Heraclitus, Aristotle and others were trying to figure it out. With some considerable success.

You've landed on the only speculative element in my earlier response. That speculative comment you latched on to, is mainly my attempt to provide a kind of cosmic rationale for the existence of life, rather than seeing it as a kind of fluke of biochemistry.

My specific reply to you was written in more analytical terms - about how and why consciousness (or mind) has come to being seen as so inexplicable and hard to accomodate in the scientific picture (also subject of another OP I've just published.)

I'll repeat what I see as the key passage:

So it's important to disentangle the understanding of mind or consciousness from these kinds of ideas of it being 'out there somewhere' or what kind of phenomenon it might be. What it requires instead is the kind of perspectival shift that phenomenology introduced by way of the epochē, the suspension of judgement, which is a very different thing to either analytical philosophy or the customary scientific method. — Wayfarer

The gist of this is to turn the attention to the nature of one's own lived experience, rather than wondering what must have existed 'before the big bang' or in terms of poorly-digested fragments of scientific cosmology. Basically it's a return to the Socratic maxim of 'know thyself'.

The gist of this is to turn the attention to the nature of one's own lived experience, rather than wondering what must have existed 'before the big bang' or in terms of poorly-digested fragments of scientific cosmology. — Wayfarer

Which is in a nutshell Peirce’s great achievement. He went back to phenomenology to discover its epistemic structure - its natural logic. And that became the ground for semiotics as the resulting ontological adventure.

Sure, agree. But then, the philosophy encyclopedias all register him as an 'objective idealist', something which seems at odds with your naturalist leanings, doesn't it? That phenomenological element, which you correctly say is essential to enactivism, was also a major theme of The Embodied MInd, which was arguably one of the key texts of that school.

I've been reading some of Peirce's writing, which I find quite laborious, but generally congenial to the kind of idealism I advocate.

Sure. But then there is mind-like in substantial terms and mind-like in structuralist terms.

It is the second that I find to be of value in Peirce’s work. It is his writing on the science of logic, as he called it, that I lean on. The earlier scholastic realism of the essential logical structure of nature - the irreducible triad of a self-organising system, or semiosis - that he laid out before he got into the confusions of his objective idealism as developed in his series of Monist articles.

As you will know, the Monist was about Peirce’s only income at a time of extreme financial hardship. And the Monist was founded by a wealthy industrialist for the stated purpose: “The Journal is devoted to the work of conciliating Religion with Science" through the framework of monism.”

As AI says….

The journal's monism was a unique "religion of science" that conceived of the ultimate "oneness" as "God, the universe, nature, the source, or other names".

The journal was influenced by the German Monist League, founded by Ernst Haeckel, which was explicitly a "Religion of Science" that revered "divinized Mother Nature".

Peirce had a friend who introduced him to editor Paul Carus, which led to him publishing at least 14 articles in The Monist, including his major metaphysical series in the early 1890s.

So yes, Peirce definitely had his theistic leanings. He was already inclined towards arriving at his objective idealism. But also he needed the dosh and was writing for a specific audience.

But you will read the Peirce congenial to your views and I will continue on with the “mind-like structure” that biosemioitics could understand and develop in a way that nicely fits the facts of life and mind science.

Do I hear the furious stamping fury of the world's tiniest jackboots? — apokrisis

Absolutely. I want to nail you to a wall until you answer my questions. You have similarly become frustrated with me when I have refused to answer yours until you answer mine, ad nauseum. In civil society, this impulse to interrogate is generally considered somewhat anti-social. Someone even wrote about it and amusingly characterised it as the 'philosopher attack'. An excerpt:

My sister nearly threw the phone at me, in tears, and left the room. My philosopher, on the other hand, was in an absolutely superb mood.

What just happened? My sister was the unfortunate survivor of a philosopher-attack. — Alan Cook

But in philosophical circles, I suggest, there is a converse ethic. Avoiding rigorous (but polite) interrogation is what is anti-social. Less philosophy happens when people don't answer questions. I suggest a polite and productive way to proceed is in batches of questions. First one party has a go, and then the other.

↪Gnomon
You've landed on the only speculative element in my earlier response. That speculative comment you latched on to, is mainly my attempt to provide a kind of cosmic rationale for the existence of life, rather than seeing it as a kind of fluke of biochemistry. — Wayfarer

Yes. I found your "speculative element" to be compatible with my own hypothesizing. Your "cosmic rationale" of incipient drive for Life, and 's biosemiology speculation of entropic drive, seem to be similar to my own semi-scientific* philosophical rationale of EnFormAction as a natural evolutionary tendency toward Life & Mind. Since a Tendency (inclination toward an end) can't be seen in a telescope, none of these conjectures has hard scientific evidence. But soft rational inference may provide sufficient reasons for viewing Life & Mind as intentional (willful?) instead of an accidental "fluke".

Several prominent philosophers & scientists have proposed similar cosmic DRIVEs with less scientific backup : Schopenhauer's cosmic WILL*1, Bergson's ELAN VITAL*2, and Spinoza's CONATUS*3. So, your speculative rationale has a long history. But only in recent years has physical science pointed in the same direction, by combining Quantum Fields with Information Causation*4.

I don't know if physical Science will ever accept the logical implications of these speculations, but metaphysical Philosophy should be able to see evidence of Intention in Evolution*5. Of course, Teleology is heresy for Materialists, but may be unavoidable for Idealists . . . . and fodder for further debate. :cool:

* based on current sciences of Quantum Physics & Information Theory

*1. Schopenhauer’s Will as Intention :
EnFormAction is similar to Schop's Cosmic Will, except that it is characterized as Intentional instead of Accidental, and Purposeful instead of Aimless.
https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page19.html

*2. Elan Vital :
The concept of élan vital is also similar to Baruch Spinoza's concept of conatus*3 as well as Arthur Schopenhauer's concept of the will-to-live and the Sanskrit āyus or "life principle".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lan_vital

*3. Conatus :
is a Latin term for an effort, striving, or impulse, but it is most famously used in philosophy, particularly by Spinoza, to mean the innate drive of all things to persevere in their own existence and to enhance themselves. This concept applies to everything from the physical will to live in an organism to the metaphysical tendency of a thing to exist as its true nature
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=conatus+meaning

*4. Active Information :
Quantum physicist David Peat . . . . To explain the “active” element of Information, Peat says “I suggest that Information is the final element in a triad—information is that which gives form to energy”.
https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page29.html

*5. Holism and Creative Evolution :
Change is typically imagined as a cause & effect Mechanism, but Bergson seems to view Darwinian evolution as a kind of Teleology or Entelechy.
https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page25.html

You have similarly become frustrated with me when I have refused to answer yours until you answer mine, ad nauseum. — bert1

If you had a counter argument, you would make it. You don’t. So we get the lame excuses. And your obsession with me continues. :up:

... a kind of cosmic rationale for the existence of life, rather than seeing it as a kind of fluke of biochemistry. — Wayfarer

Yet (any) "cosmic rationale" itself is merely a "fluke of" [the gaps]. There's no getting away from (some kind of) a fundamental "fluke" – I prefer one that is scientific, however, rather than merely mythic / mystical.

Teleology is heresy for [irrelevant to] Materialists [antisupernaturalists], but may be unavoidable for Idealists — Gnomon

This is because "materialists" do not mistake – equate – their maps with the territory whereas "idealists" tend to do so (i.e. ontologize, or reify, ideas/ideals).