• apokrisis
    7.3k
    Peter Hoffman's Life's Ratchet is another good new read if you want to understand how informational mechanism can milk the tremendous free energy available at the molecular scale. Life goes from surprising to inevitable once you realise how strongly it is entropically favoured.
  • Galuchat
    809
    ...a close comparison of pierce's semiotic pan-psychism to both standard materialism and Berkley's idealism. — sime

    Please provide a synopsis. If we're lucky, the thread may tolerate a close comparison. Otherwise, we are left with a dispute "over the best flavour of ice-cream."
  • MikeL
    644
    It's simple. The chemicals get together and become "dedicated". After that It All Just Happens Naturally.Rich

    There you go, I knew there was a reason. The anti-entropic gradient of dedication.

    I don't have too many problems eliminating the mind though. I can eliminate my senses one by one until I am left with empty space and thoughts manifested by humming neurons. Maybe I'm missing something.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Yea. Go morphic resonance. Go holographic mind projection. Give us the different story.
  • MikeL
    644
    Interesting. I think I would like to reach that.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    informational mechanism can milk theapokrisis

    Ah! A change of story. Chemicals have morphed into an informational mechanism that milks. Isn't a mind required to create information and for milking? No matter, transforming chemicals into humans is easy when all you need is a few words.

    Any other stories you wish to share?
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Anything is better than milking chemicals. Do they do it on a stool?

    One doesn't have to have any background in science to read any of these books. All you need to do is look for the first sentence in the book where chemicals become "dedicated". It's right there where the miracle begins.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Try to keep up Rich. Infodynamics is information and dynamics. Has been all along. They morphic resonance and project onto the astral plane of holographic chemtrails.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Infodynamics is information and dynamicsapokrisis

    Double talking is all about using big words and talking fast in such a way that people can't trap the misdirection.

    Information is Mind. Only in your world does a tube of sulfur process information. Any philosopher can easily point out the Science Delusion. Every explanation from science must have it. Mind has to be hidden somewhere, whether it be selfish, dedicated, milking, kicking, or information processing.

    At least Whitehead was intellectually honest and not trying to hide Mind somewhere in some verbs and adjectives.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Mate, you're hilarious. Getting all huffy about molecular machinery when you believe existence is a hologram .
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Molecular machinery, created out of thin air by some story teller. Science knows how to spin a good yarn. They get lots of practice from fundraising in order to keep their jobs.

    The Story

    The human body just miraculously all came together. All it is self-made machine. Yes, the molecules began to talk to each other, and look at each other, and love each other, and argue with each other and at times they would hold hands and sing to the Lord. Oh yes, that Mind. That is just an illusion. As for this story, it is just part of the Science Delusion.
  • Wayfarer
    22.3k
    Here is an open letter from an organic chemist to his colleagues about the unlikelihood of replicating cellular mechanisms forming spontaneously.

    With respect to life being an emergent property, the question I would raise is this: in every instance of living organisms, life seems to direct the process. There is everywhere, always, and on every level, purposive activity which is directed at the ends of homeostasis, survival and reproduction. Part of what this enables is evolutionary development, i.e. the gradual or even sudden diversification of forms into many diverse types, which act symbiotically.

    The problem I have with the theory that this is a consequence of 'entropification' is the complete absence of any acccount of intentionality from that process. That element of intentionality is what, I think, we are looking for, because in its absence, the claim appears to be that this is 'something that just happened'. Why it happened is left out of the account - it happens from sheer physical necessity, along with an element of chance; as Jacques Monod says in his famous book of that name. Actually even to ask 'why' is probably regarded as a retrograde question.

    That is why I think some kind of orthogenetic theory must provide an answer: that universe indeed possesses an innate tendency towards evolutionary development. But it is just that kind of tendency that naturalist accounts wish to avoid.
  • MikeL
    644
    Thanks Wayfarer, I will give it a solid read tomorrow. I tend to agree with you in the main. I have to say though I've been reading up on Apokrisis's dissipative systems and laws of entropy and have taken a knock back several steps. I will have to regroup my thoughts and come at it again.
  • Galuchat
    809
    I have found no practical way to define life. — Pollywalls

    I provided the following general definition of life in the "What is Life?" thread (participants included Apokrisis, Javra, Metaphysician Undercover, and Wayfarer): The condition extending from cell division to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients.

    Perhaps this needs to be modified to include creative power?
  • Rich
    3.2k
    It is very easy for science to explain everything on paper. It simply injects human capabilities and qualities into chemicals and removes all mention of the Mind. And Poof! it all just happens naturally, including machines arguing among each other.

    But among all of this story telling, there is a real mind and a real purpose. Science had become a mass marketer of drug chemicals. The $trillion pharmaceutical industry depends upon people buying into this story - that they are just some chemical machines that can be fixed by other chemical machines using chemicals. That is why Big Pharm is everywhere now - in educational institutions, in government, in NGOs, it is ubiquitous. It funds everything that suits its purpose and goals. But dehumization has its costs. Tens of thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands are being killed by pharmaceuticals every year and it is being done with impunity. As for the health of humans, it is retrograding:

    http://www.newsweek.com/unhealthy-food-choices-contribute-one-five-deaths-globally-665957

    "The findings also showed that while people are living longer, more years of their lives are spent being sick."

    It should also be noted that the U.S, which is by far the biggest user of pharmaceutical chemicals among developed nations has the absolute worse life expectancy. This is a direct result of the Science Delusion. Science it's different when it crosses the ocean. It is not merely a philosophical parlor game. This is literally about life and death.
  • javra
    2.6k
    a thing becomes another thing when it has all the essential parts. a dead thing becomes alive when it completely fits the definition of a living thing. until that it is dead.Pollywalls

    To me it’s a complex issue (which I’m still taking a hiatus from for the moment). Wanted, though, to clarify the terminology you’ve expressed: a dead thing, by all common definitions, is a thing that once was alive. The main theme of this tread is not how life can follow death but, rather, how life can emerge from non-life/inanimate things.

    Taking a more vertical approach: Think of an individual cell, like an ameba for example. One of its lipids, on its own, is not alive (nor dead; it is merely non-life). The same applies with all of its individual molecular components (which, as an interesting aside, can all in due measure be stated to hold particle-wave duality). How then does the unity of the living ameba as identity emerge from the structures of its non-life components? Again, it is to me a complex, and not yet resolved, issue.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Life needs life to exist. It needs vegetables, fruit, etc. to continue to survive. Without it, it perishes. Try surviving on a bottle of chemicals. Life was there at the beginning and then it began to create - in some cases some really weird stories. I'm sure you know the one that certain races are less than human.
  • javra
    2.6k
    Life was there at the beginning and then it began to create - in some cases some really weird stories.Rich

    :) Yea, I guess you could think of it that way; but then these tails we tell/create latter on serve as the bed we made and need to sleep in/partake of, so to speak.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Not everyone sleeps so easily. Some are c so dehumanized they become simple fodder for the disgusting machinations of other human beings. The whole basis door slavery and genocide is that the victims are less than human beings. It has morphed into human beings are just chemicals that are too be used without regard to humanity because there is no such thing.

    As one obnoxious post put it we are just a "molecular machine."
  • javra
    2.6k


    Agreed.

    As it happens, new tales are always being told. Helps out when the enslaved too have a voice.

    As regard this thread, I was referring more to the uni-versal tale/logos ... to make my previous post clearer
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Yes, it's not all that much fun when you are on the wrong side of the molecular machinery. The Nazis exterminated tens of millions of people of all ethnicities and religions in the most grotesque manners on the basis that they were not human. What we have here is a clever repackaging.
  • Jenna Carlsson
    1
    Intentionality intrigued me. But given the right conditions, life is inevitable. All living things here have been expanding their capabilities to their needs for 3.5 billion years. Our bodies exhibits our mind. There is no definitive line when something is life and when something is non-life. I know some would argue that a virus is not life because it can not metabolize anything and uses hosts genetic machinery to replicate themselves. But RNA is very close to DNA. It is using the same language as we use to get our message out. Everything we are is directed from our DNA and the DNA can only act via being transcribed into RNA. It is called the central dogma in biochemistry DNA to RNA to Protein because all life shares this feature. For me the question is not how non life transitions into life or even how we have developed into such majestic and capable creatures because there is no intention. Only possibilities. And it is these possibilities which I think describes the universe best. Reverence comes from awe I guess. I wish everyone knew.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    How then does the unity of the living ameba as identity emerge from the structures of its non-life components?javra

    The simple answer is the semiotic one. When we talk about that x factor, we are talking about the information that regulates the molecular dynamics and so represents the higher purpose, design and intentionality that gives an organism a recognisable global identity.

    An organism is a memory for a structure with a direction. The chemistry of life has the special quality that it is constantly on the verge of falling apart. It only hangs together when energy flows through it in the right direction.

    This is one of the little surprises of nature that lay folk find it hard to get their head around. The ordinary expectation - the one that comes from being machine-makers ourselves - is that the foundations of systems must be solid and fixed. You can't build an engine from parts that are right on the verge of disintegrating the whole time.

    But life is the opposite. Key structural components like microtubules have a half-life of about 10 seconds. They fall apart, and then - given the right energetic nudge - reform. Only the core informational machinery itself - DNA - has stability. The rest is selected for its instability - as being fundamentally unstable is the trick that allows for informational control over that stability. Instability opens the door to being regulated - pointed back in the right direction - by the higher purpose of an organism.

    So this is the big secret of life. Unstable molecular foundations are required to allow stable informational identity to be the one in control. The less able the parts are to maintain an identity, the more the identity becomes something that must be held as a semiotic habit up at the level on which information is being accumulated.
  • javra
    2.6k


    For my part, a very nicely expressed thesis of what biological autopoiesis consists of. I find nothing here to contradict.

    Not that this resolves what life shares in common with non-life that is a continuum rather than a plank-scale-like distinction of quality/attributes … but again, I for my part will let this issue rest.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Here is an open letter from an organic chemist to his colleagues about the unlikelihood of replicating cellular mechanisms forming spontaneously.Wayfarer

    The guy is a creationist. So he would say that. No doubt he is well-intentioned but his reasoning is pretty faulty.

    For instance, he says it is a problem that there are thousands of possible lipids that self-assemble into vesicles. It is a general property of these asymmetric molecules with hydrophobic and hydrophilic opposite ends. So which one got life going exactly? It's a great big research mystery as there are just so many for nature to choose from.

    It's comical really. In contradiction of what you write, exhibit A is that nature seems so over-exuberant when it comes to spontaneous membrane forming that it makes it hard for any scientist to decide which are the 999 out of a thousand lipids that can't claim to have got life started.

    Tour pulls the usual creationist trick. Imagine the world as the sterile laboratory of the synthetic chemist where everything has been pulled apart and kept well away from anything that might let it react or develop a structure.

    I think it was like a first day trick in my organic chemistry class that the lecturer got out the pure metalic sodium stored in oil to stop it spontaneously combusting in the atmosphere, scrapped off a slice so we could all watch it burst into flame.

    So this is reductionist science at work - nature disassembled in a fashion so humans can put it back together by careful construction.

    But that isn't nature. As I described with alkaline vents, you have a real world where entropic gradients are already set up and ready to go. You have a working contrast between hot akaline water one side, cool acidic water the other side. A source and a sink of hydrogen ions.

    For a lab chemist, this is a nightmare. His laboratory is already on fire! :)

    But for nature, this is an unstable reaction with an inherent dissipative direction that just needs some controlling information to keep it burning. So any first small steps that add stability to the events taking place in the vent will be selected for. And then the next steps is for enough stabilisation to be added for little cells of this metabolic activity to break off and survive as islands of "vent gradient" in the open ocean itself.

    It's not rocket science.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    What yarn spinners fail to realize and are surprised at is that laypeople find it really funny that chemists fall in love with chemicals and make them into little human beings, and technologists fall in love with computers and make them into little human beings, etc. etc etc. Tell me, in your yarn, what blend of chemicals would you recommend as a marriage partner? Sulphur + Oxygen maybe?

    Tell me more about how chemicals share information. Do they have little brains?
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Not that this resolves what life shares in common with non-life that is a continuum....javra

    Where's the difficulty? The molecular dynamics of non-life is ruled by the laws of thermodynamics. There are a lot of reactions that are energetically favoured but mostly don't happen as they have to get over some entropic hump. Then life has the information that can construct the machinery - like a helpful enzyme - that gets them over the hump.

    So it is all the same chemistry. All that changes is information enters the picture to change the observed frequency of some particular enthalpic reaction.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    I'll repost a longer explanation I gave elsewhere that explains the basic point Hoffman makes in Life's Ratchet. It details the instability or dynamism on which life is founded.

    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: In brief, 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.
  • Wayfarer
    22.3k
    It's not rocket science.apokrisis

    It's actually a lot more complicated than rocket science. Rockets are simple.

    Tour pulls the usual creationist trick. Imagine the world as the sterile laboratory of the synthetic chemist where everything has been pulled apart and kept well away from anything that might let it react or develop a structure.apokrisis

    That's not what the article says, though.

    I googled James Tour, he denies being creationist, but he has been associated with The Discovery Institute. And I don't much like them. So I guess he does have a creationist axe to grind.

    But I think the question still remains. The cardinal point of any living structure is that I manifests purpose, right from the very first. There has to be that purposive action for anything to be regarded as an organism, as distinct from a mineral. That intentional ability - not conscious intention, but the ability to adapt in pursuit of the goal of survival - that is unique to living forms, is it not? And that is what seems a cardinal difference from anything in the inorganic domain.

    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.apokrisis

    Downward, from what? Upward, I presume, is from physical constraints - the laws governing the interactions of particles. What imbues symbols with the power to exert 'downward control'?
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    It's actually a lot more complicated than rocket science. Rockets are simple.Wayfarer

    Yep. That was the joke.

    I googled James Tour, he denies being creationist,Wayfarer

    I googled him too. His line is that he is a messianic jew who thinks it is important to read the Bible every morning and meditate on its meaning. He doesn't hear God literally speaking to him, but he is very aware of His presence.

    So at least he is honest about the axe he is grinding. He has strong motivation to read the state of the science a particular way.

    But I think the question still remains. The cardinal point of any living structure is that I manifests purpose, right from the very first. There has to be that purposive action for anything to be regarded as an organism, as distinct from a mineral. That intentional ability - not conscious intention, but the ability to adapt in pursuit of the goal of survival - that is unique to living forms, is it not? And that is what seems a cardinal difference from anything in the inorganic domain.Wayfarer

    Isn't that what I'm arguing? It all starts when the ontically distinct thing of information enters the world. Or rather, semiosis and "sign processing". A molecule becomes a message when it material aspects are no longer what is causal. Instead it is the function that is being executed in the name of some higher organismic purpose which is the thing.

    A cell pore is just a protein switch. You can explain how it opens and shuts due to the critical instability of its mechanical arrangement of electrostatic bonds. It just wobbles back and forth for "no good reason at all" so far as any materialist can see. Indeed, a materialist would chuck such a flaky bit of machinery in the bin as being fundamentally useless.

    But for a living system, that complex molecule exists to perform a function. It is informational in the sense that it performs a crisp logical operation. Shut or open. Them's your sharp choices. And so now the further thing of "choice" is an ontological reality of the world.

    So the material world is already busy entropifying. It already has that global thermodynamic goal. That is how the Cosmos exists and persists. It keeps running down the hill by expanding and cooling.

    Then the biological world seems to change the game by suddenly expressing a negentropic desire. It wants to live and survive. It gets this idea in its head of being an organism.

    However while that is true from a particular point of view - the usual one that evolutionary theory use to tell its story from - it misses the larger point of view which is the grand thermodynamic one.

    Now it can be seen that life and mind simply accelerate entropification locally. For some reason, entropification has got held up. Negentropy has arisen by accident in the form of the barriers preventing quick entropification. And so life and mind can get going as more purposeful and designed structure that knows how to fulfil the Second Law's desires.

    So life's desire to exist and persist is a sub-goal - a negentropic one that subserves the global entropic one. The fact that it is the very opposite seeming kind of goal is exactly what you would expect if it is to be the complementary or mutual direction of action.

    If accidental negentropy has arisen in the Cosmos - like the way fossilised plankton got trapped as petroleum in ancient sedimentary rock - then what could be more fitting than purposeful negentropy arising as the matching response. Entropification which got locally deaccelerated can be locally reaccelerated again.

    Indeed, just as we humans are doing for those languishing fossil fuel stores in our valiant bid to waste them all to heat in great big planetary-scale burst.

    Of course you will protest again that life on earth can't be so pointless and futile as all that. You feel that being human must have some special significance.

    But my argument allows humans to invent their own meanings if they like - so long as they are intelligent enough to understand the constraints that have formed their nature so far.

    Thermodynamics only sets the ground conditions. Within that space, we can freely choose what to do. Literally nothing is stopping us.

    We do have a choice over climate change and ecocide for example. But also, that choice seems quite polarised in our debates about the issue.

    Either we can be hair-shirt greens and say we have to cut down to 100 million people living off permaculture in harmony with whatever scraps of traditional ecosystems remain. Or instead, we can trust to the exponential wonder of technology, the glory of the Singularity, to make a safe transition to our next evolutionary step.

    I've always been a greeny, but it is honestly a tough call. Life delights in presenting us with polarised dilemmas - the 50/50 choices that maximise the information content of existence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, etc.

    A bit of a diversion in the argument it might seem. Yet really, I'm still talking about the same metaphysical issue. Everything turns out to be dialectically poised in existence for good reason.

    So if you are puzzled that the Universe seems to be torn between two purposes - entropy and negentropy - well really they are only the complementary aspects of the one (pansemiotic) process needed to bring existence into existence itself.

    I stress semiosis here because the basic idea was recognised by idealists like Schelling and Hegel - as their complementary intellectual response to the Newtonian-inspired Enlightenment realists. But Naturphilosphie and the like didn't get down to the basic infodynamic mechanism like Peirce managed to do.

    So this whole thread and the many others like it want to force a hard binary choice. Either brute materialism is right or religious-style idealism is right. By now it should be obvious that - socially - each needs the other as its "other". Our culture is divided sharply because the dichotomisation of our metaphysical choices is the mechanism that drives metaphysical advance (or intellectual negentropy) itself.

    But in the end, the bigger story is how the two extremes thus created can find their resolution, their synthesis. That is where naturalism or systems thinking comes up through the middle.

    Although no-one ever notices because you still have two cultures at war producing their vast clouds of hot air, or waste heat. Entropification always wins.
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