Dfpolis in his Aristotelian representation, places the basic intent to create, as internal to matter itself. It must be local, rather than global. But I think that the proper interpretation of Aristotle puts the basic intent of final cause as transcendent to the matter, but in a local sense. This allows final cause to give matter its basic form, transcending it internally, with the form coming from beyond the boundaries of matter to the inside, while Df thinks its immanent to the matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Please do not give your interpretation of my position, as you do not understand it. (1) I do not hold that matter has any intent, let alone an intent to create. I hold that the laws of nature are intentional, but they are intrinsically immaterial. (2) I hold that this intentionality has an end-of-the-line of explanation, a source, normally called "God." So, the local intentionality of physical processes has a transcendent source. Thus, while the laws of nature are immanent (found within the processes they guide), their Source is so not confined.

But is it an analogy at all? Isn’t it pointing to something real — not metaphorical, but actual? — Wayfarer

Umm... No, not as I see it. Isn't that the whole point of this discussion.

Now, if you’re an artillery officer, all you need to know is how to aim — and that’s what Newtonian physics helps with. Your tables and calculations tell you how to fire accurately. That’s one kind of aim — and it’s the kind physics is concerned with. And it made a huge difference!

But there’s also another level of aim: why you’re firing, why you joined the army, what the war is about — and none of that appears in the physics. Yet it’s still part of the aim. Physics models the trajectory, but not the reason. — Wayfarer

The artillery officer, the war planners, and the politicians are all human. I've never claimed human actions can't have purposes and goals.

In the same way, when Aristotle speaks of telos, he’s not always invoking a designer’s intention or a conscious goal. He’s pointing to the formative structure of things — the way they unfold, and what they tend toward in their becoming. The acorn doesn’t “intend” to be an oak tree, but neither is its development just accident and brute cause. — Wayfarer

You and I are just making the same arguments over and over. You say the acorn and the artillery officer are analogous. I know you disagree with me, but by now you must recognize that's an argument I find weak, to put it kindly.

But the question of what all this is for? — Wayfarer

And the obvious answer from where I stand is it's not for anything. It's not that you're wrong. As I've said previously, this is metaphysics. It's not true or false, it's more or less useful. I don't find your way of seeing things as useful and I think it's misleading.

Actually "final cause" was intended to put an end to the infinite regress. Any chain of causation would begin from an intentional act. If it wasn't begun in a freely willed act of a human being, it began as a freely willed act of God. I don't think God can be classified as "sentient". — Metaphysician Undercover

I have no problem with a religious point of view where God is the final cause giving the universe, the world, reality, or whatever you want to call it, meaning and purpose. That's not my way of seeing things, but it's something I understand. My problem is with all this talk about teleology without God.

To say that reality is confined to this human box called "the universe" is an arrogant self-indulgent attitude of certitude. It suggests that we have reality all figured out, and it all fits into this concept, "the universe". But the reality of intention and free will don't fit into this concept, and this demonstrates to us that a significant part of reality actually escapes this determinist concept of "the universe". — Metaphysician Undercover

You can call it the universe, reality, the world, existence, the Tao, or whatever you want. I'm just talking about everything there is even before all those things are things.

So contrary to what you say, the scientific approach is to jam reality into the box of human experience, empiricism, while the teleological approach, which accepts the reality of free will and intention, allows for a vast aspect of reality beyond what we can experience with our senses. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I wrote previously, if you think God is the source of purpose and meaning, there's no need for this discussion to go any further. I recognize and respect a religious argument, even though it's not how I see things.

Nevertheless, it has been an interesting discussion for me. — boundless

For me also. There's no better way to understand what you believe than to bump up against something you don't believe.

Yes! I think that reductionist versions of physicalism have serious problems. But this isn't the case for non-reductionist versions. After, 'physicalism' can be a very broad category. — boundless

For what it's worth, I don't call myself a physicalist, although you might. I call myself a pragmatist.

I believe that our concept 'mass-energy' either corresponds or represent a property that physical systems have and which can be measured. I don't think it is a 'thing' or anything substantial. I'm not sure what you are taking issue with.
The points I was making do not rely on a particular ontological position about 'mass-energy', 'momentum' etc. If they are simply 'abstract ideas', as Feynman put it, nothing really changes. — boundless

I doubt Feynman thought "the ontological status 'mass-energy' is a rather controversial topic." That's certainly not what he wrote in that quote you included.

Galileo showed that bodies do not fall because of their purpose, but due to forces and motions that could be described mathematically, without reference to final causes. — Wayfarer

This is the common view. However, Galileo did not show "that bodies do not fall because of their purpose". He showed that their falling could be mathematically described. Of course, Aristotle was wrong about the purpose of bodies. It is not to find their natural place. It is to respond to the presence of other bodies in the specific ways physicists have learned to describe mathematically.

Contrary to popular opinion, there is no conflict between mechanism and teleology. Instead, they are simply two ways of describing the same process. If bodies follow mechanistic (determinate) laws, they will come to a determinate state (end) at any time. A determinate end requires determinate means (mechanisms) to attain it. Thus, every physical end requires a mechanism to attain it, and every mechanism attains ends. So, the only difference between mechanism and teleology is in the mind -- in how we choose to conceive a process. There is no difference in the process itself.

Excellent OP, btw.

I have no problem with a religious point of view where God is the final cause giving the universe, the world, reality, or whatever you want to call it, meaning and purpose. That's not my way of seeing things, but it's something I understand. My problem is with all this talk about teleology without God. — T Clark

The problem is that we can see that physical processes are intentional without first assuming that God exists. In physics, we distinguish physical states (the distribution of "matter" broadly considered) from the dynamics or laws specifying how those states develop over time. As I just explained to Wayfarer, these laws inevitably attain ends. We might, for example, say that the evolution of a species was encoded as an end in the initial state of the universe and the laws of nature.

Consider an analogy. Say I have the intention to go to the store. Barring exceptional circumstance, maintaining that intention will get me from my house to the store. In the same way, what gets us from the initial state of the universe to the advent of a species is not simply the initial state, but the continuing and determinate way that state evolves, i.e. the laws of nature. So, the laws of nature are the same kind of thing as my intention to go to the store. This is true independently of theological stance. It is only later, when we ask for an explanation of natural intentionality, that we come to some source, and call it "God."

Hah. I'm usually arguing a case a step more sophisticated. And this is indeed an issue I am wrestling with right now in its most general physicalist sense. — apokrisis

This is a great response. @Wayfarer, @Metaphysician Undercover, @boundless, and I will all be able to say "See, Apokrisis agrees with me."

In short, I argue from the point of view of systems science with its basically Aristotelean understanding of hierarchical order and causality. The key thing is how a new state of global order can only emerge by simplifying the local degrees of freedom as the "stuff" from which the new state of global order is being constructed from...

...You need global constraints to shape the raw material into the functional units which now come together in a natural way to express that global purpose driving the whole show. It is necessary to form or shape the local degrees of freedom to ensure you already start with the "right stuff". — apokrisis

A lot of the things you write about are either over my head or come from a really different direction than my way of seeing things. We've talked about emergence a few times before and one thing that has stuck with me most is the idea of constraints. I was reading about early criticisms of the idea of emergence and it was claimed that it requires backward causation. It struck me how wrong-headed that is. Constraint isn't causation. When I stop my car so I won't run into the car stopped ahead of me, that car doesn't cause me to stop, it keeps me from going.

Life and mind then lucked into codes – genes and neurons – that could act as internal memories for the kind of constraints that would organise them into organismic selves. They could represent physical constraints – which have to exist concretely in space and time – as information that could now be deployed at any place or moment of the organism's own choosing. — apokrisis

You wrote "Life and mind then lucked into codes." That makes sense to me, but I have been confused by some things you wrote in the past. When you wrote about biosemiosis in the context of coding in DNA, I always got the feeling you were talking about the kind of teleosis that Wayfarer et. al. are.

I'm only saying I think it likely that, until these knotty questions are posed, it remains something like "intuitively true" for most Westerners that the sunny Popular-Mechanics view of science is just fine, and deeply reflective of how the world actually operates.

Yes, that's a fair point. Although I think this is precisely because the sunny Popular-Mechanics style realism doesn't fully eliminate teleology or teleonomy; it just sort of lets the issue float out there, unresolved. So, if we're discussing Newtonian physics, likely the rules will be "no teleology allowed." If the article is on the social sciences, then of course there is teleology! If it's biology, it sort of varies (probably not in molecular biology, and probably "yes" in zoology).

I think this is actually a good thing! This sort of view has not allowed what was often originally intended as a merely methodological bracketing exercise to become absolutized into a full blown metaphysics. Maybe it has done this at the cost of inconsistency, or at least ambiguity, but these strike me as the lesser of two evils.

I think this is precisely because the sunny Popular-Mechanics style realism doesn't fully eliminate teleology or teleonomy; it just sort of lets the issue float out there, unresolved. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure. It's not a "Pop-Mech" kind of question, and we can do science for most practical purposes without having to engage with it.

For me also. There's no better way to understand what you believe than to bump up against something you don't believe. — T Clark

:up: Also, note that I am also conscious that sometimes I use terms in an idiosyncratic way. I try to avoid that as much as possible, but our discussion helped me to be more carefult about that.

For what it's worth, I don't call myself a physicalist, although you might. I call myself a pragmatist. — T Clark

No. From this discussion alone I would not have concluded that you are a physicalist or not. Furthermore, IIRC you also made some posts in the past about Taoism from which I would have said that your view isn't physicalist, i.e. a view that ultimate reality is physical. Taoism seems to assert that there is an ultimate reality that transcends conceptual categories.

[BTW, as an aside I don't know if you are familiar with David Bohm's philosophical views (starting from his 1957 book "Causality and Chance" onward). I believe that, perhaps, it's the closest you can get to Taoism among modern physicists.]

That said, it is also true that is some cases it is even difficult to classify metaphysical views in neat categories.

I doubt Feynman thought "he ontological status 'mass-energy' is a rather controversial topic." That's certainly not what he wrote in that quote you included. — T Clark

I quoted Feynman because he says that the conservation of energy is an 'abstract idea', which IMO implies that he also viewed that energy itself is an 'abstract idea', i.e. a concept that is useful to us but not necessarily something that 'represents' something external.
At the same time, you also find some presentations of the concept that give the idea that energy is actually a 'thing', especially when you hear someone explain how matter and spacetime affect each other in GR.

Until quite recently, it was perhaps quite reasonable to interpret 'mass' as 'quantity of matter'. But with the mass-energy equivalence even mass becomes quite elusive and is now regarded as a synonym of energy. It's also true that some now interpret the mass-energy equivalence in a way that, more or less, suggests that energy is a measure of the quantity of matter.

In any case, I believe that the precise ontological status of physical quantities like 'mass', 'energy', 'momentum', 'electric charge' etc is still a matter of debate among scientists and philosophers.

This is a great response. Wayfarer, @Metaphysician Undercover, @boundless, and I will all be able to say "See, Apokrisis agrees with me." — T Clark

Well, I also agree that @apokrisis made a good post but honestly, I need to re-read it. Many things are above my paygrade in that post. So, before commenting I need some time.

The artillery officer, the war planners, and the politicians are all human. I've never claimed human actions can't have purposes and goals. — T Clark

It is not so easy. Are human ends and purposes completely separated or cut off from the processes and activities of nature? (Leaving aside kicking the ball into the long grass by declaring it ‘metaphysical’.)

Thank you.

Although I think this is precisely because the sunny Popular-Mechanics style realism doesn't fully eliminate teleology or teleonomy; it just sort of lets the issue float out there, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: properties like mass, velocity, or charge lend themselves to unambiguous measurement and quantification. Purposes, goals, and aims, on the other hand, resist formalization — except in the purely mechanistic sense of trajectories or optimization functions. So modern science quietly brackets teleology, not necessarily because it’s false, but because it isn’t easily mathematized. But ‘not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.’

The emergence of codes — systems of symbolic representation that are arbitrary, rule-based, and capable of being interpreted — seems to me not just an evolutionary convenience but an ontological shift, a change of register. There’s a crucial distinction here that Howard Pattee describes (here): even if a system is entirely physically describable, its function — as a code, a memory, or a measuring device — is not derivable from that physical description. It requires selection among alternatives, and that involves interpretation, choice, or constraint relative to a purpose. — Wayfarer

Of course. But then how is that any different in terms of baseline causality when the baseline causality itself is a model of such topological emergence?

As I said, the reductionist stumbles where they get to the bit about what grounds any natural system. If you take a simpleminded constructive approach to the existence of things, then even the existence of raw matter becomes impossible to explain. There always has to be the something that already exists to get existence going in more complex ways. And so the reductionist winds up with the essential mystery of how some ultimate simplicity could itself appear out of ... nothing at all.

Physicalism has this huge explanatory gap if your brand of physicalism is reductionist.

A systems causality already accounts for ultimate simplicity as it says that emergent complexity is what simplifies things in the first place. As Peirce puts it, logically the initial conditions of systematic Being is vagueness or firstness. A chaos of fluctuation that is neither simple nor complex. But as constrained regularities start to form, so does the simplicity of fundamental degrees of freedom begin to show.

This is the story of the Big Bang. Hot possibility became constrained by gauge symmetry. Quantum impulse started to fall into simpler and simpler classical shape. The greatest possible such simplicity – the (U)1 gauge of a photon – was the last to emerge and take over the show. A lot of constraints – such as the complicated way that the scalar Higgs field broke the vector electroweak force, with its SU(2) symmetry – needed to evolve so that the Cosmos as a hierarchical structure could strait-jacket quantum possibility as classical electromagnetism and leave us in a Newtonian realm of what seem the simplest possible excitations. The U(1) that speaks to essentially the symmetry of a circle whose only remaining complication is that it can be either a left-handed or right-handed version of that circle.

So if you demand simple beginnings, only top-down constraints can deliver them. And the story of physicalism already has its own stunning "shifts in register". You have the topological phase transition which is the point where the quantum turns emergently into the classical. Or where the Poincare invariance that sets up Special Relativity as a basic global constraint on dimensionality gives way to the emergence of vector gauge particles – like eventually the photon – as an "inner dimension of quantum spin" that classical Poincare symmetry can't in the end constrain away.

The whole of physics is about hierarchies of topological transitions where the addition of further levels of constraint keep making reality more and more atomistic or mechanical in nature. Reductionism seems true as it so wonderfully captures the apparent simplicity of life at our highly constrained scale of being – existence at the level of a world of "middle-sized dry goods". A world of material objects bumping about in an empty vacuum.

But dig into this physicalism and it all starts to fall apart rather quickly. The reductionist has to find this a great mystery. A systems theorist says instead that is only what should be expected. It is hierarchy theory all the way down until you reach Peircean-strength vagueness.

So you are expressing surprise that information can take control in a world based on entropy. But the systems view says that by definition, what is not constrained is free to happen. And if it can happen, it must happen.

So if the physics results in some powerful local entropic gradient – like a sun shining down on an orbiting planet – then if a dissipative structure can arise to "eat" that energy flow, it will. The rocky surface of the Earth already does that job, turning 5000 degree sunlight into 70 degree C infrared radiation being bounce back into outer space. But the evolution of a planetary biofilm – a bacterial self-constructing life form – can manage rather better and take that radiation cooling down to a global average of 20 degrees C.

Given the readiness of the physical world to invest in such biological structure, the telic pressure for life to arise becomes irresistable. Yes, for such an information-based machinery to evolve is quite a leap in terms of complexity. But equally, if it could happen, it had to happen. The desire was there and there was nothing physically-preventing the evolution of that kind of biological hardware.

Physicalism is essentially permissive because it is also essentially constraining. It focuses the definite freedoms of nature by removing all the redundancies. Anything that the historical accumulation of complications does not restrict then become the sharply felt possibilities that get concretely expressed.

All that life and mind do is extend this game from a purely entropic realm – one without a self-model – to the more complex situation of a system – an organism – that uses a self-model so as to arrange the physics of the world to its liking.

The organism is ultimately bound by the same universal imperative – thou shalt entropify. And it develops a sense of self only to the degree that this increases its success as an entropy producer.

Humans prove this fact to the degree we have grown heedlessly self-centred with the most colossal carbon footprints. :grin:

It is not so easy. — Wayfarer

It is exactly that easy

Leaving aside kicking the ball into the long grass by declaring it ‘metaphysical — Wayfarer

I declare it metaphysical for two reasons. First, because it is. Second, because if I treated it as if it were supposed to be some sort of actual description of the real world, it would be impossible for me to take it seriously.

Taoism seems to assert that there is an ultimate reality that transcends conceptual categories. — boundless

Yes, that’s how I see it.

BTW, as an aside I don't know if you are familiar with David Bohm's philosophical views — boundless

Not really. I’ve heard his name here and there on the forum, but I don’t really know what his beliefs were.

I quoted Feynman because he says that the conservation of energy is an 'abstract idea', which IMO implies that he also viewed that energy itself is an 'abstract idea', i.e. a concept that is useful to us but not necessarily something that 'represents' something external. — boundless

Are speed, distance, time, and force abstract ideas? Do they exist? How about goals, purposes, and intentions?

In any case, I believe that the precise ontological status of physical quantities like 'mass', 'energy', 'momentum', 'electric charge' etc is still a matter of debate among scientists and philosophers. — boundless

I don’t think there’s any serious debate among scientists. Philosophers? Among philosophers everything is always a matter of debate.

Each individual member of the army must have the desire to follow the plan, and be a member of the army, or else they go rogue. So final cause must be portrayed as inherent to the local freedom of each part, rather than as a global constraint. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a rubbish argument. What distinguishes the coward from the conscientious objector? You are introducing "desire" as a vague preference that could be construed in many ways. What social framing are you going to impose on the situation to make it clear how one is going to interpret the idea of "going rogue"?

My argument is that causality is hierarchical. So finality would "inhere" in the parts – or rather shape the scope of freedoms possessed by those parts – to the degree those parts were actively part of the collective system.

Your mistake is to try to turn this relational story back into the substance-based ontology of the material reductionist.

we must follow the reductionist principles, which are correct, to their base, where we find that something further, the immaterial intent is beyond that, as the thing which creates or produces matter itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Shake hands with God. The prime mover.

No thanks.

A systems causality already accounts for ultimate simplicity as it says that emergent complexity is what simplifies things in the first place. As Peirce puts it, logically the initial conditions of systematic Being is vagueness or firstness. A chaos of fluctuation that is neither simple nor complex. But as constrained regularities start to form, so does the simplicity of fundamental degrees of freedom begin to show.

This is the story of the Big Bang. — apokrisis

Thanks — I follow the systems logic you're articulating (well, up to a point) but I think there's something more that needs considering: the emergence of interpretation, signs, meaning. Once codes arise — symbolic systems that are rule-based, context-sensitive, and capable of being read — we've crossed a threshold. This isn't just more complex thermodynamics; it's the birth of agency.

If organisms interpret signs and act based on goals, then something new is in play: not just constraint, but intention. This shift isn't captured by the idea that life merely “entropifies better.” That framing suggests a kind of nihilism — reducing agency, purpose, and value to entropy-optimization strategies. It risks explaining meaning by dissolving it. So the question can be asked: are you actually dealing with the problems of philosophy? I mean, the problem of agency is surely central to the question of human identity.

Given the readiness of the physical world to invest in such biological structure, the telic pressure for life to arise becomes irresistable. Yes, for such an information-based machinery to evolve is quite a leap in terms of complexity. But equally, if it could happen, it had to happen. The desire was there.... — apokrisis

...hence also the intention! Saying "it had to happen" isn't that far from saying "it was meant to be." And once you admit something like "desire" into the lexicon — even metaphorically — you're no longer in a purely entropic domain. You're on the threshhold of semiosis, value, and, again, agency. In fact I think the question can be asked if semiotics is really a physical phenomenon at all. As Marcello Barbieri argues, the emergence of biological codes — such as the genetic code — was not merely an incremental extension of chemical complexity but an ontological leap. Codes linking signs to meanings are not derivable from physical laws alone. That’s what makes them novel — and marks the boundary between life and non-life, mechanism and meaning.

(Although I will hasten to add, I only heard of Barbieri in the first place through researching your posts on biosemiotics.)

Hot possibility became constrained by gauge symmetry. — apokrisis

Ok.

Ok. — Banno

Oh, Banno… you’re so cute.

Oh, . it's just such a tidy koan.

it's just such a tidy koan. — Banno

It also makes a good first line for a haiku, or whatever those haikus that aren’t really haikus are called. Hey, Javi [@javi2541997], what’s the right word?

And I don't beleive that questioning those things you mentioned is enough to abandon the concept of the 'universe' as a totality. — boundless

We disagree then.

How do you explain the arising of life? — boundless

I don't. And, I don't think anyone can. But I don't pretend.

How do your points here about the past square with what you said before with respect to our understanding of cosmology, biology etc? — boundless

Do you think that you apprehend inconsistency in what I wrote? If so, please point it out to me so I can address it.

I believe that reductionism is wrong but reductionism is not the only possibility for a physicalist. — boundless

As you'll see from my reply to apokrisis, I believe in reduction, but not in physicalism. I believe that reduction is what ultimately demonstrates the necessity of dualism, which I believe in. The modern trend for physicalists is to turn away from reductionism, because it cannot succeed without dualism. At the base of material existence is the immaterial, as cause. So I think that this turning away from reductionism, is a mistake. The physicalists cannot bear the consequences, the necessity of dualism which reduction leads to, so instead of facing that reality, they retreat to a new form of physicalism, which, as it is physicalism, is equally mistaken.

On the other hand, I believe that St. Gregory of Nyssa had a quite dynamic understanding of the state of the blessed (which he called 'epektasis'), where the participation of the blessed in the communion with God will forever increase. In a sense, this means that the desire for the Good will never be satisfied. But at the same time, the blessed do not fall away from the communion because they know that they can't find ultimate peace, happiness and so on anything except God. In a sense, however, I would say that even in this dynamic model the blessed yearning for the good is satisfied in the sense that they stopped to seek elsewhere the source of their happiness. Would you agree at least with this? — boundless

It still looks like death to me.

Force and interaction are synonyms in physics. — boundless

Not at all.

Please do not give your interpretation of my position, as you do not understand it. — Dfpolis

Sorry about that. I just stated what I remembered you telling me in a discussion we had a couple years ago.

In the same way, what gets us from the initial state of the universe to the advent of a species is not simply the initial state, but the continuing and determinate way that state evolves, i.e. the laws of nature. — Dfpolis

Do you not believe in real possibility, real choice? If you believe that the universe unfolds in a determinate way, then you deny the possibility of real choice.

My problem is with all this talk about teleology without God. — T Clark

I agree, I have the same problem. This teleology without God is the "new physicalism". It appears to me, that traditional physicalism, which was basically reductionism, ran into a problem. At the base was found to be possibility, which necessitate the assumption of choice. And classical metaphysics had already posited divinity to account for the foundational choices. Physicalists of course will not accept a divinity, so the modern trend is to reject reductionism because it leads to the reality of the immaterial. Now, physicalists like apokrisis will assign some sort of "telos" to global constraints, making the basic choice not a true choice, but a constrained act. But this is not compatible with intention as we know it, which is found in the freedom of the individual to choose, not in the constraints of "the society" in general. The constraints of society do not cause the individual's choices and actions.

If you take a simpleminded constructive approach to the existence of things, then even the existence of raw matter becomes impossible to explain. — apokrisis

This is why the divinity is needed to explain the existence of matter. Matter being that which stays the same as time passes. But instead of recognizing the need for final cause at the base, to account for the existence of matter itself, the physicalist abandons the whole reductionist enterprise, and proposes a bogus form of telos, as the concept of "global constraint". However, this fails as states "Constraint isn't causation". So you don't actually avoid the need for an external final cause, the divinity, you hide it by proposing a bogus teleology which is not actually causal.

This is a rubbish argument. What distinguishes the coward from the conscientious objector? You are introducing "desire" as a vague preference that could be construed in many ways. What social framing are you going to impose on the situation to make it clear how one is going to interpret the idea of "going rogue"? — apokrisis

Desire is what drives final cause. And there is no need for "social framing" as this motivation to act transcends all social frames. Are you afraid to face this reality?

So finality would "inhere" in the parts – or rather shape the scope of freedoms possessed by those parts – to the degree those parts were actively part of the collective system. — apokrisis

By your own words, constraints are global. So it's contradictory to say that what shapes (constrains) the freedom of the parts, inheres within the parts, as you seem to be saying here.

Shake hands with God. The prime mover.

No thanks. — apokrisis

You ought to try it. At least the concept of "God", as First Cause, is consistent with the truth, according to the knowledge which we have. This is unlike your idea of "top-down constraints" which provides no actual cause.

Once codes arise — symbolic systems that are rule-based, context-sensitive, and capable of being read — we've crossed a threshold. This isn't just more complex thermodynamics; it's the birth of agency. — Wayfarer

But biology crosses this threshold at the level of the molecule that can be read as a message. Hierarchy theory was how theoretical biologists made sense of the thermodynamical basis of life and mind for a good reason. The genetic code is the easy bit to understand. How genes can be "read/interpreted/implemented" is then what the field focuses on with biosemiosis.

So you can say "agency" is just something absolutely different in kind. But then biology can shrug its shoulders and say they see this magic property in every enzymatic reaction. Codes build the molecular machinery that can clamp chemistry in exactly the right positions so that quantum tunneling takes over and achieves an entropic step that would be "impossible" for regular classical chemistry.

You make the usual big deal that something smells about physicalism because there is this explanatory gap between the quantum and the classical realms of substantial existence. And yet – as I have repeated often enough – biophysics now spells out exactly how life, and therefore mind, exists by being able to sit right on the quasi-classical junction between these "two worlds", mining quantum uncertainty for the purpose of achieving classically stable outcomes.

The explanatory gap instead turns out to be the missing link when it comes to "agency". If quantum physics has a measurement problem because apparently measurements must be something that happen in a human head, well now biology says decoherence of thermal potentials is no big deal as your whole body is a hierarchy of decoherent action. Every part of every cell is dancing the dance of flipping quantum-level switches on entropy flows. We microregulate chemistry right at the nanoscale by "making measurements" in informational fashion.

So step one for biology was realising that life did in fact have its symbol-processing secret. Step two is reconnecting that informational story to the material world as it "truly is". And the topological change in state that is the boundary between the quantum and the classical is exactly where life and mind inserts itself into the thermally-constrained physics of the world.

Thermodynamics of course is being rewritten too. You say:

This isn't just more complex thermodynamics; — Wayfarer

But you are still thinking of thermodynamics as the science of closed systems gone to their heat death equilibrium. The formerly warm bath now forever gone cold. Biologists rely on the new science of dissipative structure and topological order – as cosmologists have also started to do.

A dissipative structure is a system that self-organises so as to be able to accelerate an entropic process. It spends energy on constructing the machinery that will then unlock, or at least waste faster, some environmental entropy gradient. This is an entirely new vision of thermodynamics. One that is more complex in the proper topological sense. Not merely just more complicated.

Collections of things can get complicated. It takes the emergence of hierarchical order to make things more complex – complicated in the causal sense and not just the constituent sense.

So the question can be asked: are you actually dealing with the problems of philosophy? I mean, the problem of agency is surely central to the question of human identity. — Wayfarer

As a natural philosopher, I look for naturalistic accounts of existence. And the great thing is that this approach allows one to explain not just what agency is but why agency needs to be treated as a transcendental property by systems of human social organisation. Transcendence is an essential myth for enabling humans to live as if they were indeed constrained by some higher authority which intends to greatly limit the scope of their personal freedoms.

This is just basic political science. All complex societies need to place even their kings under some higher transcendental principle. It could be commanding gods, it could be the rationality of a constitution, it could be the unquestionable facts of a moral logic. But no large society can exist in stable and productive fashion unless it invents for itself the top-down level of constraints – the bounding information – to which it can swear absolute fealty.

Transcendence needs to be mystical as it has to be "beyond human". With the Enlightenment, we did sort of try just believing in the transcendence of rational pragmatism. But that never really dealt with the way that the same demystifying scientific spirit was busy unlocking the Pandora's box of fossil fuel and all the runaway industrial age thermalisation that could follow. So we half started crafting the well organised society and then that project got run over by the steamrolling economic forces of manufacturing and financialisation.

Economics is about organising the wholesale entropification of the planet. Dollars are how we encode the value of all that results. Rationality opened the door for entropy and it came galloping through. Now we worship entropification in rather direct and obvious fashion. It became the transcendental principle that rules the human world.

So you say I somehow ignore the central problems of philosophy? I as usual reply that I see them as all fully figured out. And barely understood by anyone.

Which is no surprise. Entropy is in charge of the show. Pragmatic rationality had to die to allow that next step in the human condition to be fully realised. Neoliberalism finally stripped away the sensible constraints and we've been off to the races ever since.

And is this the metaphysical project you want to support? Of course not. But then it is not a genie that can be put back in the bottle by a return to the mystic transcendent principle of some earlier agricultural social order where it was just empires of wheat rather than corporations of oil that the entropic bonanza driving the show.

And once you admit something like "desire" into the lexicon — even metaphorically — you're no longer in a purely entropic domain. — Wayfarer

As I say, if I have to wave a specific banner, it would be dissipative structure. That is thermodynamics as a semiotician and hierarchy theorist would recognise it.

As Marcello Barbieri argues, the emergence of biological codes — such as the genetic code — was not merely an incremental extension of chemical complexity but an ontological leap. — Wayfarer

And yet it was Barbieri who correctly focused in on the ribosome as the precise connection between the biological information and its entropic consequences. The molecular machine that makes the molecular machinery.

In stunning self-confirming fashion, the ribosome itself recapitulates the evolution of biosemiosis. The most primitive parts of a ribosome are made out of RNA. And then as it learnt how to start sculpting the proteins it was producing, it added on the simple strands, them the more complex twists, that turned the ribosome from a rudimentary constraining tunnel made of RNA to a fantastic bit of precision engineering with a large collection of proteins components that could add enzymatic steps like splicing and proof-reading the protein strands it was producing.

So you might want to keep finding great gaps in knowledge that speak to there being "two totally different things". But science progresses fast. And biosemiosis cashed out in a big way when we discovered that biology is basically about classical machinery that is able to regulate quantum potentiality for its own private purpose. Life can live on the edge of critical instability – the quasi-classical realm where classical stability is "half-melted" and it cost next to nothing to tip a chemical reaction in some other direction.

Physical existence came with the quasi-classical possibility to be switched on and off in a mechanical fashion. And being possible, this is what had to happen. Systems of switching evolved.

RNA was in at the start as a dual-purpose deal. It was both the code and the structural material – and a bit shit at both. But once a feedback loop got started, these two functions were properly split apart and became the actually separated worlds of DNA and proteins. Coding as informational constraint and building material as structural constraint became divided in terms of the chemistry best suited to serving those functions. A vague causal division became a physically decisive one. The ribosome became its own fossil record that tracked this evolutionary change.

Codes linking signs to meanings are not derivable from physical laws alone. That’s what makes them novel — and marks the boundary between life and non-life, mechanism and meaning. — Wayfarer

How could information regulate matter unless there was this epistemic cut?

What you are quibbling over is to what extent this is also a true ontological cut – as the conventions of realism/idealism, or mind/world, would seem to require of folk who like to consider themselves card-carrying philosophers.

I as usual just argue that holism rules. And that holism itself depends on the ontological fruitfulness of dichotomies. That is symmetry breakings and the topological transitions that symmetry-breaking brings.

If you want to understand semiosis, this is why it winds up back at the triadicity of Peircean logic and hierarchical causality. You start with the "oneness" of vagueness, extract the "twoness" of the dichotomy that can part its waters on complementary fashion, and then watch how it grows to form the causally-balance wholeness that is a state of stable hierarchical order.

You can't keep advancing a semiotic argument here and yet fail to see that semiosis itself puts the dichotomy at the heart of everything. For the physical realm to take a further step up in its topological order, it had to discover the Hegelian "other" which was its own negation. Just by being "the physical" it already spoke to the possibility of "the immaterial".

The task then is not to get strung up in the usual Hegelian simplicity about how the "immaterial" ought to be cashed out. Science's job has been to show how physics is way less material than Newtonianism might have conceived of it, and how life and mind are also way less "spiritual" than the Catholic Church – as an instrument of agriculture-age social power – liked to look at it.

And as I keep saying, biosemiosis can tell you all about how the epistemic cut is actually implemented in everyday flesh and blood terms. It ain't an ontological-level dualism. It is just a very highly developed epistemic dualism. A cut that forced events like RNA's primitive level of functionality being handed over to a proper coding machinery, coupled to a proper structural material, leaving RNA to act as the shuttling messenger between the two sides of this dichotomised equation.

Incredible as it might seem, all the mysteries have just evaporated over the past 20 years when it comes to life and mind science. Natural philosophy – as the systems science legacy of Aristotelean metaphysics – got it right. We won. :razz:

This is why the divinity is needed to explain the existence of matter. Matter being that which stays the same as time passes. — Metaphysician Undercover

Piffle. Things stay the same when further change ceases to make a difference. Once things hit the bottom, they can't fall any further.

In that light, the true problem for metaphysics is answering the question of how instability can get started. And this in turn leads back to some notion of Apeiron or Vagueness. A state of unlimited everythingness that is exactly the "right stuff" if you understand causality in terms of the evolution of systems of hierarchical constraint.

But then biology can shrug its shoulders and say they see this magic property in every enzymatic reaction — apokrisis

Biologists do that. Biology doesn't shrug.

biosemiosis cashed out in a big way when we discovered that biology is basically about classical machinery that is able to regulate quantum potentiality for its own private purpose. — apokrisis

Right - the beginning of intentionality, as I said in the OP. The origin of the self-and-world divide.

I really think your physicalist biosemiotic theory could be leavened with some phenomenology. It's a missing element, as far as the philosophical content is concerned.

I'm neither 'quibbling' nor 'hung up'. And this is a philosophy forum, with a broader remit than science.

Reading more from Barbieri's A Short History of Biosemiotics, this passage caught my eye:

Hermeneutic Biosemiotics

In Readers of the Book of Life (2002), Anton Markoš has proposed a view of the living world that is based on interpretation, like sign biosemiotics, but that was inspired by the hermeneutic philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer, and has become known as biohermeneutics or hermeneutic biosemiotics...

The starting point of Markoš’s approach is the problem of ‘novelty’. Do genuine novelties exist in nature? Did real novelties appear in the history of life? In classical physics, as formulated, for example, by Laplace, novelty was regarded as a complete illusion, and even if this extreme form of determinism has been abandoned by modern science, the idea that nothing really new happens in the world is still with us. It comes from the idea that everything is subject to the immutable laws of nature, and must therefore be the predictable result of such laws. There can be change in the course of time, but only relative change, not absolute novelties.

Against this view, Markoš underlined that in human affairs we do observe real change, because our history is ruled by contingency, and entities like literature and poetry show that creativity does exist in the world. He maintained that this creative view of human history can be extended to all living creatures, and argued that this is precisely what Darwin’s revolution was about. It was the introduction of contingency in the history of life, the idea that all living organisms, and not just humans, are subjects, individual agents which act on the world and which take care of themselves. Darwin did pay lip service to the determinism of classical physics, but what he was saying is that evolution is but a long sequence of “just so stories”, not a preordained unfolding of events dictated by immutable laws (Markoš et al. 2007; Markoš et al. 2009).

According to Markoš, the present version of Darwinism that we call the Modern Synthesis, or Neo-Darwinism, is a substantial manipulation of the original view of Darwin, because it is an attempt to explain the irrationality of history with the rational combination and recombination of chemical entities. Cultural terms like 'information' and 'meaning' have been extended to the whole living world, but have suffered a drastic degradation in the process. Information has become an expression of statistical probability, and meaning has been excluded tout court from science.

Darwin has shown that the history of life is as contingent as the history of man, and Heidegger has shown that man can create genuine novelties because he can interpret what goes on in the world. From these two insights, Markoš concludes that all living creatures are interpreting subjects, and that all novelties of the history of life were brought into existence by acts of interpretation.

Much more my cup of tea. :halo:

or whatever those haikus that aren’t really haikus are called. Hey, Javi [@javi2541997], what’s the right word? — T Clark

Senryū. :smile:

These do not generally include a season word and they are often cynical.

Do you not believe in real possibility, real choice? If you believe that the universe unfolds in a determinate way, then you deny the possibility of real choice. — Metaphysician Undercover

I hold that purely physical systems evolve deterministically, because they have no intrinsic source of intentionality. However, we are not purely physical. We are sources of new intentionality (co-creators of the future). Thus, our intentionality modifies that of the laws of nature to produce personal action. This is possible because the brain has evolved as a control system, and it is the nature of such systems to produce large outputs from small inputs. Thus, small perturbations by our intentions can produce macroscopic behavior.

"Markoš concludes that all living creatures are interpreting subjects, and that all novelties of the history of life were brought into existence by acts of interpretation."

There is no reason to think that most non-human creatures are conscious of anything. Positing that they are is a pure, unsupported extrapolation. It is much better to confine our conclusions to those supported by evidence.

Not really. I’ve heard his name here and there on the forum, but I don’t really know what his beliefs were. — T Clark

Ok, I think you would find his thoughts germane.

Are speed, distance, time, and force abstract ideas? Do they exist? How about goals, purposes, and intentions? — T Clark

I have a very clear experience of having goals, purposes, and intentions. Perhaps, I am deceving myself but I would take my immediate experience as a strong evidence for that.

Regarding forces, well, our understanding of them changed dramatically over the centuries. Clearly, one can't hold the Newtonian model of forces literally nowadays. That concept of force is without a doubt useful, but it doesn't seem a faithful description of something real.

Regarding distance, speed, time well, I would say we have to be carefule here. Our experience of change is as real as our experience of having goals, I would say or even more immediate. Notice however that perhaps 'time' in physics isn't necessarily the same thing of that. Honestly, however, it is difficult for me to imagine a physics 'without time'. How could one even think of a 'dynamics'?

Distances is a different business. In the newtonian model, space is absolute and distances are also absolute. But perhaps distances are more like relations between things. So, I guess this doesn't mean that are 'abstract ideas' but, still, it doesn't seem obvious to me what is the right way to understand them.

Anyway, in general, I think that it is difficult to pin down the 'right interpretation' of what physical quantities really are.

I don’t think there’s any serious debate among scientists. Philosophers? Among philosophers everything is always a matter of debate. — T Clark

Well, perhaps many scientists are simply uninterested in these topics. But, again, if you think of, say, relativity reflecting on what distances are have been fundamental for development of science.

We disagree then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes!

I don't. And, I don't think anyone can. But I don't pretend. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok, I see, thanks. When I remarked about the 'refinements' I meant that IMO the arising of life is still partly unexplained. So, I sort of agree here.

Do you think that you apprehend inconsistency in what I wrote? If so, please point it out to me so I can address it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, it seemed to me that you said that scientific theories are good for explaining the past but you also denied that there is a time 'before' the arising of life.

It still looks like death to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting. Why? I mean, I can understand having misgivings about a static state as being 'life' but a 'dynamic state' can be regarded as life. What do you find objectionable here? I think that it is also a pretty universal theme that the 'multiplicity' of goals we have in our life here is a detriment.

As you'll see from my reply to apokrisis, I believe in reduction, but not in physicalism. I believe that reduction is what ultimately demonstrates the necessity of dualism, which I believe in. The modern trend for physicalists is to turn away from reductionism, because it cannot succeed without dualism. At the base of material existence is the immaterial, as cause. So I think that this turning away from reductionism, is a mistake. The physicalists cannot bear the consequences, the necessity of dualism which reduction leads to, so instead of facing that reality, they retreat to a new form of physicalism, which, as it is physicalism, is equally mistaken. — Metaphysician Undercover

I see. To be honest, I am torn. On the one hand, I am inclined to agree with you here. Given the success of reductionism, it is reasonable to think that the 'physical' is reductionist. I am not sure, however, if the 'physical' is necessarily reductionist.

I do agree with you that reductionism fails with life and mind and this is a big issue that physicalists have to face.

As I said before, I am not myself a physicalist. Dualism has its own advantages but it's not without problems. For instance, how can we explain the mind-body interactions if the mind and body are different substances? Would such an interaction 'respect', say, the conservation laws that seem to always hold?