So strong emergence becomes the emergence of a new level of topological organisation that imposes itself on the materiality that underpins it, and thus allows itself to be that which it is. Some globally persistent new state of order. — apokrisis

If I were to make a physicalist model of the emergence of life, I would think as a sort of 'phase transition', where we have the formation of 'systems', which as you say, are wholes that constrain and influence the 'behavior' of their parts.

So, you go from a situation where the wholes (except the universe) are reducible to a situation where there are structures which are not reducible and the 'world' becomes truly 'divided' into systems which are undivided wholes which are able to give global constraints on their parts and have a relative autonomy from what is 'outside'. But in order to explain such a transition in a model, you need to say that, in some sense, such a transition is a potentiality that, once the right conditions are met, becomes actual.

If such a potentiality is not to be found in the parts of these systems, then the alternative I can think of is that it is to be found in the order of the 'cosmos'. In this case, the emergence of life is a potentiality enfolded in the regularities of the whole universe which remains implicit until the right conditions are met.

I don't think that assigning a property to the 'whole' - indeed, the whole universe - is something alien to physics. In fact, the conservation laws can be thought as being properties of 'isolated systems', rather than a (weakly) emergent features of their parts.

Of course, I have no idea of how such a 'potentiality' could be 'expressed' in a theory. I don't know if it is even possible. But I would say that if the cosmos itself is a whole that can constrain the behavior of its parts, then it is more understandable how at least some features which we associate with life can 'emerge' or, perhaps, it's better to say 'actualized'. Does this make sense to you?

"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. — Dfpolis

This view understands interpretation not as conscious self-awareness, but as a more basic responsiveness to environmental signals — a kind of primitive subject-hood inherent in the way organisms engage with their surroundings, qualitatively distinct from the behavior of non-living matter. All organic life 'interprets' in a way that the inorganic domain does not, so as to preserve itself. The point is not to attribute conscious awareness to single-celled organisms or plants, but to acknowledge that the rudiments of agency — selecting among possibilities in response to internal states and external cues — emerge much earlier in the history of life than previously assumed.

Life is not just self-organizing and adaptive; it is also purposive and sense-making. Even the simplest organisms enact a world of significance in their adaptive and goal-directed activity. They are not merely pushed around by physical forces; they regulate themselves in relation to what matters to their continued existence. — Evan Thompson, Mind in Life (précis)

Most interesting set of comments. I’m sort of attracted to new things my old ways would like to snub but realize quickly they’re not properly qualified for it.

Natural philosophy – as the systems science legacy of Aristotelean metaphysics – got it right. We won. — apokrisis

Yet “I” am still here.

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

Doesn't that require a judgement of whether the change makes a difference or not? Anyway, it appears like you believe that change is not caused, it just happens.

I hold that purely physical systems evolve deterministically, because they have no intrinsic source of intentionality. — Dfpolis

Well, the question would be whether a purely physical system, in any absolute sense, is actually possible. As scientists, human beings can design what they like to think of, as purely physical systems. This is what I talked about earlier in the thread, we can have as our purpose, the intent to remove purpose, and this provides us with the closest thing we can get to objective truth. But the purpose of removing purpose can't quite remove purpose in an absolute way.

So, we have to consider the reality of every aspect of a "physical system", to see how successful we can really be. I believe that the reality of entropy demonstrates that no physical system actually evolves in a completely deterministic way. That aspect of the activity of a physical system, which escapes determinability is known as "entropy". Therefore "purely physical systems" refers to an impossibility, if that implies completely deterministic evolution..

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. — boundless

I didn't actually deny that. I said it was an unsound conclusion. I do not accept it, nor do I deny it. I just think that it is an assumption which has not been adequately justified to be able to make that judgement.

Interesting. Why? — boundless

Look at the passage. It says "the participation of the blessed in the communion with God will forever increase". The only thing which provides for the premise of "forever" is death. After death, we may be united with God, forever.

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? — boundless

The interaction problem was long ago solved by Plato who proposed a third aspect as a medium of interaction.

Conservation laws do not hold, to the contrary, they are always violated. This is the nature of entropy, that part of reality which is in violation of conservation. It's a loss which we just write off, and work around.

The conservation laws are ideals which do not actually represent physical reality, because physical reality doesn't match that degree of perfection prescribed by ideal conservation. As an analogy, consider how the ancient people thought of the orbits of the sun, moon, and planets, as perfect circles. By logic, perfect circles are eternal, so these orbits were eternal circular motions. That was an ideal, which did not actually represent the reality of physical motion, which is less than perfect. Likewise, conservation laws are ideals which do not actually represent the reality of physical interactions, which are less than perfect with respect to conservation.

This view understands interpretation not as conscious self-awareness, but as a more basic responsiveness to environmental signals — a kind of primitive subject-hood inherent in the way organisms engage with their surroundings, qualitatively distinct from the behavior of non-living matter — Wayfarer

How is it "qualitatively distinct from the behavior of non-living matter" if such responses can be wholly explained on physical principles? We understand, for example, the electrochemistry of neurons and how they combine to form neural networks responsive to the environment. Indeed, this connectionist theory is the basis of many artificial intelligence programs.

It is a mistake. or perhaps an abuse of language, to confuse complex data processing with interpretation, which seeks to penetrate the intentionality represented by semantic material -- here environmental signals. To penetrate meaning is to become aware of meaning, and awareness is consciousness.

All organic life 'interprets' in a way that the inorganic domain does not, so as to preserve itself. The point is not to attribute conscious awareness to single-celled organisms or plants, but to acknowledge that the rudiments of agency — selecting among possibilities in response to internal states and external cues — emerge much earlier in the history of life than previously assumed. — Wayfarer

This is precisely the error to be avoided. Just as there is no evidence to support consciousness in such creatures, there is no evidence to support the consciousness of alternative courses of action in such creatures. Think about it. One immanent state can only yield one course of action. To have choices, several future states (alternative courses of action) must be immanent. This multiplicity cannot be found in a being's determinate physical state, but it is experienced in our intentional life. We mentally entertain alternatives, which makes them immanent, and then commit to one, which makes it actual. That is how agency works. This requires a mental life supporting awareness of alternatives, for only awareness gives the alternatives existential immanence. In sum, agency requires consciousness.

Well, the question would be whether a purely physical system, in any absolute sense, is actually possible. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I have said, physical systems have material states, and intentional laws. What they do not have is an intrinsic source of intentionality. This seems to apply to the entire universe prior to the advent of conscious beings, and to most of the universe since.

As scientists, human beings can design what they like to think of, as purely physical systems. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course such systems reflect the intentionality of their makers. Still, there is no reason to think they have an intrinsic source of intentionality.

This is what I talked about earlier in the thread, we can have as our purpose, the intent to remove purpose, and this provides us with the closest thing we can get to objective truth. But the purpose of removing purpose can't quite remove purpose in an absolute way. — Metaphysician Undercover

To ignore or abstract from purpose is not to remove it. Abstraction does not make knowledge less objective, only less complete. Ignoring aspects of reality, such as purpose, can be useful when what we abstract away is not relevant, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it yields complete understanding.

That aspect of the activity of a physical system, which escapes determinability is known as "entropy". — Metaphysician Undercover

Entropy measures the number of microscopic states (we do not know) that can produce a macroscopic state we may know. As such it reflects human ignorance, not physical indeterminacy.

Philosophers? Among philosophers everything is always a matter of debate. — T Clark

I disagree.








:joke:

I didn't actually deny that. I said it was an unsound conclusion. I do not accept it, nor do I deny it. I just think that it is an assumption which has not been adequately justified to be able to make that judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I disagree, but I think I understand your view better now.

After death, we may be united with God, forever. — Metaphysician Undercover

OK. But that future state would be a type of 'life', right?

The interaction problem was long ago solved by Plato who proposed a third aspect as a medium of interaction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting. Could you give me a reference, please?

Likewise, conservation laws are ideals which do not actually represent the reality of physical interactions, which are less than perfect with respect to conservation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, this is a big claim. Conservation laws have been repeteadly confirmed in experiments. Of course, I can conceive that they might be wrong, but I have good reason that they are correct or at least point to some kind of constant order.

Regarding entropy, it's not the same thing. As @Dfpolis said, entropy has more to do with our ignorance.

But the question of what all this is for? That’s not a scientific question. It’s a philosophical, moral, or spiritual one. And it’s exactly the kind of question that the language of telos is trying to keep alive — not in a dogmatic sense, but in the sense that human beings and living systems don’t just happen, they mean. — Wayfarer

Seems to prefer the "how?" questions of Physical Science to the "why?" questions of Meta-Physical Philosophy. Ironically, some "how?" thinkers will admit that our evolving world presents the "appearance of purpose"*1, even as they dismiss that "appearance" as an illusion, or delusion.

Physicist Stephen Hawking wrote a book*2 intended to debunk the appearance of design based on evidence for an evolutionary mechanism programmed only by Natural Laws, requiring no programmer. But he seems to have assumed that the rules & limitations that guide the machine to perform its function, simply self-exist in a manner similar to the ancient notion of spontaneous generation of life. Which ignores the common law that "nothing comes from nothing".

Apparently, "why?" questions are taboo for believers in Scientism, because they may open the door for all sorts of spiritual creeds and mystical beliefs. Yet, secular philosophers have no problem separating their Meta-Physical notions (program ; design) from their Physical understanding of how the world works (self-organized mechanism). To tabooers, Teleology seems to be a slippery slope down to a slavish Hell of faith-blinded religious pietism, with mindless zombies bowing & praying to their dictatorial sky-lord. Personally, I no-longer feel the gravity of that un-founded fear. :smile:


*1. The whole point of modern evolutionary theory is that it explains the appearance of purpose (or telos, if you prefer) emerging from a purposeless process. There is nothing within evolution that indicates the existence of telos.
thttps://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-purp ... -evolution
Note --- Nothing in the step-by-step mechanism points to its purpose or ultimate function. Goals & Functions are holistic, not particularistic. Intention is an inference, not an observation. Meaning is mental, not physical.

*2. Stephen Hawking's Book – The Grand Design attempts to disprove the existence of God using Science and Mathematical models. In this book, it is claimed that the Universe is a result of the Laws of Physics alone, and God is not needed to explain how it began.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=the+grand+design
Book Review : At best this book attempts to explain from a Physicist’s perspective, yet it fails to do so at so many other different levels. Thus it is incomplete and conjecture at best. Something as elegant, sophisticated, complex, and aesthetically beautiful, and massive in scale as large as the universe could not have materialized just spontaneously on its own.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stephen-hawkings-book-grand-design-review-farzan-j-chishti

Senryū. :smile:

These do not generally include a season word and they are often cynical — javi2541997

I knew I could count on you. Thanks.

This view understands interpretation not as conscious self-awareness, but as a more basic responsiveness to environmental signals — a kind of primitive subject-hood inherent in the way organisms engage with their surroundings, qualitatively distinct from the behavior of non-living matter
— Wayfarer

How is it "qualitatively distinct from the behavior of non-living matter" if such responses can be wholly explained on physical principles? We understand, for example, the electrochemistry of neurons and how they combine to form neural networks responsive to the environment. Indeed, this connectionist theory is the basis of many artificial intelligence programs. — Dfpolis

The enactivist approach doesn’t deny the role of electrochemistry or physical principles active in living organisms. But it emphasises that the behaviour of organisms is not wholly explainable by mechanism - which is a metaphor - but as a self-organizing, value-directed engagement with the world.

AI programs may simulate intelligence, but they aren’t beings — they don’t enact a world from within. They're not alive, and the distinction is crucial (I have a draft on this topic.)

That’s the point phenomenology and enactivism insist on: that organisms are subjects, not just systems. They have to negotiate their environment in order to survive and to maintain homeostasis. And homeostasis is not represented in the principles of physics.

Aristotle’s hylomorphism (form + matter) is explicitly non-reductive. The form of a living being is not a shape, but a principle of organization and activity — a telos. A heart isn’t just a pump; it's something that beats for the sake of circulating blood within an organism. That “for the sake of” is not captured by efficient causality alone. He opposed Democritus precisely because atomism treated form as accidental, whereas Aristotle saw form as essential — the organizing principle that makes something what it is.

“Soul is the first actuality of a natural body that has life potentially.” — De Anima, II.1

One immanent state can only yield one course of action. To have choices, several future states (alternative courses of action) must be immanent. This multiplicity cannot be found in a being's determinate physical state, but it is experienced in our intentional life. — Dfpolis

If organisms were nothing but deterministic physical systems, how would anything ever have evolved? Evolution doesn’t work on pre-programmed machines — it works on organisms that can vary, explore, adapt, respond in ways that are not reducible to mere stimulus-response mechanics. Again this is where Aristotle was prescient - he saw that the principles which govern organisms must allow for things to both change and yet somehow retain their identity. Darwin wrote that Aristotle 'shadowed forth' the idea of evolution (although not, of course, of natural selection.)

Ironically, your own point — that “one immanent state can only yield one course of action” — undermines the possibility of behavioral variation, which is essential for natural selection. If a given physical state leads only to one behavior, then there’s no room for differential response — and without that, there's nothing for evolution to select from. The very possibility of evolution requires that multiple courses of action can emerge from structurally similar, or even “identical,” physical configurations. That’s not just a point about consciousness — it’s a foundational insight for biology.

physical systems have material states, and intentional laws. What they do not have is an intrinsic source of intentionality. This seems to apply to the entire universe prior to the advent of conscious beings, and to most of the universe since. — Dfpolis

I would say ‘prior to the advent of life’ - which is self-organising in some fundamental way.

Anyway, it appears like you believe that change is not caused, it just happens. — Metaphysician Undercover

Finally you might be getting it. :up:

Cause is about the constraint of fluctuation. The world seems organised and intentional because in the end, not everything can just freely happen. Order emerges to constrain chaos.

As quantum field theory says, Nature is ruled by the principle of least action. All paths are possible, but almost all the paths then have the effect of cancelling each other out. That Darwinian competition selects for whatever path is the most optimal in thermal dissipative terms.

And this is a fact proved to many decimal places. Quantum calculations of physical properties like the magnetic moment of an electron take into account all the more attenuated background probabilities that faintly contribute to the final measured outcome. The tower of cancellations that results in the final sum over histories.

So it is not about what I might believe. It is about what science knows.

If such a potentiality is not to be found in the parts of these systems, then the alternative I can think of is that it is to be found in the order of the 'cosmos'. In this case, the emergence of life is a potentiality enfolded in the regularities of the whole universe which remains implicit until the right conditions are met.

I don't think that assigning a property to the 'whole' - indeed, the whole universe - is something alien to physics. In fact, the conservation laws can be thought as being properties of 'isolated systems', rather than a (weakly) emergent features of their parts.

Of course, I have no idea of how such a 'potentiality' could be 'expressed' in a theory. — boundless

The electro-magnetic Potential of an AA battery is "found" in the order (organization ; structure : chemistry) of the metals & bases within. But scientists can't see or measure that statistical possibility (property) in situ, yet they can measure the Current flowing in a complete (whole) circuit, of which the battery is the power source. From that voltage measurement, they infer the latent prior potential. As you implied, the Potential is in the whole system, not the parts.

A human person is said to have Potential if she has the necessary qualities (intelligence, training, motivation) that can be put together for success in her future life trajectory. The Potential (power to succeed) is not in the parts, but emerges from the interaction of those elements. Cultural success emerges from applied human Potential. Similarly, the holistic process we call "Life" emerges from a convergence of natural laws & causal energy & material substrates that, working together, motivate inorganic matter to grow, reproduce, and continue to succeed in staving off entropy. Likewise, a Cosmos has Potential if it exhibits creative qualities (Causation), and an inclination toward some future state (arrow of time).

Cosmic Potential*1 was expressed in theory by Plato (Forms ; world soul ; demiurge : necessity). None of which would be accepted by modern scientists, to explain the gradual & eventual emergence of a habitable planet from an ancient ex nihilo explosion of omnidirectional Energy, and its limiting Laws. So, I have posited a thesis of Cosmic Potential (EnFormAction*2) that combines Thermodynamics with Information Theory to explain, philosophically, how & why questioning beings have emerged from a universe of 27% Dark Matter, 68% Dark Energy, plus a remainder of 5% ordinary matter that we can detect with our senses and our sensors. :nerd:


*1. In Plato's cosmology, the "cosmic potentiality" refers to the underlying, non-physical principles that shape and govern the universe. It's not a tangible, measurable entity, but rather a set of ideal forms and mathematical relationships that provide the blueprint for the physical world.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=plato+cosmic+potential

*2. EnFormAction :
Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. It’s the creative force (aka : Schopenhauer's Will) of an axiomatic eternal First Cause that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Note --- Scientists call that causal Will by various names, such as Energy, Power, Force, Vitality. They can't say what it is (what it's made of), they merely infer its abstract existence from its effects on matter.
Note2 --- I also call that implicit "source of possibility" an eternal Pool of Potential. But Potential alone, without Intelligence & Intention could not impart Purpose to the Actual Cosmos.

But I would say that if the cosmos itself is a whole that can constrain the behavior of its parts, then it is more understandable how at least some features which we associate with life can 'emerge' or, perhaps, it's better to say 'actualized'. — boundless

The Universe is a hierarchy of constraints. But note that constraints are more a passive than an active thing. It is like putting a fence around a flock of sheep. The fence is just there, but by its presence the sheep are more limited in their free action.

So the basic symmetries of Nature – the Noether symmetries that create the conservation laws – act like boundaries on freedoms. Spacetime is a container that expresses Poincare symmetry. It says only certain kinds of local zero-point fluctuations are possible. All others are prevented.

But then luckily for us, gauge symmetry means these fluctuations can still become quite complex. Point-like particles can have spins that range from 0, 1/2, 1, 3/2, 2 – those five values. And from that we can extract the Standard Model of particle physics.

So from what the global constraints that Poincare symmetry can't prevent – a residual variety of locally gauged spin states – we wind up with a hot big bang Universe that develops quite a bit of chemical complexity on its way to eventual prolonged heat death.

As a model of causality, this emphasises contextuality. What develops is every stricter limitation on variety. But fencing things in also focuses what remains trapped inside. As global constraints sharpen, so too do the local freedoms that evade these constraints.

Physicists of course don't talk about sheep in pens. But quantum physics does like to talk about pendulums or weights on springs. A field of oscillators. Create a cavity and you will find its interior must resonate at that frequency. Its fluctuations can't be eliminated. But they can be made to line up into a neat little sine wave. Or particles as described by a gauged spin state.

I really think your physicalist biosemiotic theory could be leavened with some phenomenology. — Wayfarer

A silly comment when Peirce explicity developed his semiosis by starting from phenomenology and extrapolating to logic and metaphysics. Remember how you like to seize on "objective idealism" as if Peirce's careful triadicism – or hierarchical causality – can be heedlessly reduced to your brand of dualism? The two forms of Cartesian substance.

So again, yes to an epistemic cut, but no to an ontological cut. Life and mind exist within the physical world and its generalised thermodynamic imperative. The Cosmos only exists because it expands and it cools. Life and mind the insert themselves into this larger story by accelerating the entropification.

To do this, life and mind of course have to be able to wall themselves off as small pockets of negentropy – refuges constructed of information. Organisms have to be embodied. They must build a physical structure that is a molecular machinery with a metabolism that can digest their surrounds.

Biosemiosis is about how to recognised the continuity of the underlying thermal imperative while also properly accounting for the exact nature of the mechanical trick which allows an organism to form by milking entropic flows for its "own purpose".

A body is nothing more that a physical structure that can rebuild itself just slightly faster that it falls apart. A human uses as much power as a weak light bulb. It doesn't demand a lot of energy to keep one step ahead of the generalised decay rate of our environments.

But then there was nothing stopping humans developing more exalted notions about their purpose in being alive. Indeed if they could start ploughing fields and digging oil wells, there suddenly seemed no limit to how high they might fly.

The cult of endless growth is now a basic habit of thought baked into modern society. Philosophy in the popular understanding has become largely entrained to supporting this collective delusion.

There. Is that enough phenomenology for you? The reasons for why you experience reality in the way that you do. The insistence on personal transcendence. The requirement for an ontological-level separation from the brutish constraints of a thermally-organised world. :roll:

Life and mind the insert themselves into this larger story by accelerating the entropification. — apokrisis

But notice that 'insert themselves' implies agency.

Organisms have to be embodied. They must build a physical structure that is a molecular machinery with a metabolism that can digest their surrounds. — apokrisis

Why must they? What imperative drives that? Oh - that's right. It's something that could happen, therefore it did.

A body is nothing more that a physical structure that can rebuild itself just slightly faster that it falls apart. — apokrisis

There's your materialism showing again.

There. Is that enough phenomenology for you? — apokrisis

It's not phenomenology at all. There's a glaring omission in your model, as philosophy, but as it's situated squarely in the middle of the blind spot of science, I'm guessing it's something you wouldn't recognize. That blind spot is the consequence of the methodical exclusion or bracketing out of the first-person ground of existence.

Incidentally, with respect to Peirce's phenomenology, he said '‘…to decide what our sentiments ought to be towards things in general without taking any account of human experience of life, would be most foolish’ ~ C S Peirce, Philosophy in Light of the Logic of Relatives. Yet in your model, human experience only exists by happenstance, and then only to expedite entropy.

I'm not proposing dualism.You interpret what I'm saying through that perspective, because the mindset you're working within is post-Cartesian, which started off by dividing the world into mind and matter, and then rejected the model as incoherent (which it is) - leaving only matter. But I'm not trying to re-introduce mind as a 'thinking substance'. What I'm saying, on the contrary, is that nothing is purely physical, that the physical itself is itself an abstraction from experience. And where do abstractions dwell?

But notice that 'insert themselves' implies agency. — Wayfarer

I'm not disputing agency. I'm defining it properly in terms of naturalistic metaphysics.

Oh - that's right. It's something that could happen, therefore it did. — Wayfarer

If you want to be right, then get it right. The maxim is: "If it can happen, it must happen". If something is not forbidden, it will occur.

This contrasts with the more usual, if something happens, it was made to happen.

There's your materialism showing again. — Wayfarer

Or my brand of materialism. Just like my brand of agency, etc.

I am concerned about how our common terms ought to be better understood. You just sling them around as terms of abuse or a banner to rally to.

Yet in your model, human experience only exists by happenstance, and then only to expedite entropy. — Wayfarer

That is nothing like my model. You continue to strawman everything I say.

What I'm saying, on the contrary, is that nothing is purely physical, that the physical itself is itself an abstraction from experience. And where do abstractions dwell? — Wayfarer

Yes. Where do they dwell? Follow your own argument through.

What I'm saying, on the contrary, is that nothing is purely physical, that the physical itself is itself an abstraction from experience. And where do abstractions dwell?
— Wayfarer

Yes. Where do they dwell? Follow your own argument through. — apokrisis

There are many things, abstractions among them, that are only perceptible by nous. They don't, therefore, dwell anywhere, in the literal sense, as they're not bound by time and space. But real, nonetheless. Hence, 'mind-created world'.

I do not mean that universals exist, but they are real. Real, I say, in the sense that they are not figments of the mind but have an objective being, though not a material existence. — C S Peirce Collected Papers, CP 1.27

If something is not forbidden, it will occur. — apokrisis

By what, by the way? We used to think that the laws of physics forbade powered flight.

We used to think that the laws of physics forbade powered flight. — Wayfarer

You mean history shows we ignored the folk dumb enough to claim that. As soon as gliders and motors showed some concrete promise, there was a rush to patent the early concepts.

On the other hand, patent offices have the good sense not to accept schemes for perpetual motion machines. The laws of thermodynamics do "forbid" those at root ... if you insist on smuggling anthropomorphism into your choice of words as a back-door means of evidencing the beliefs you wish to believe.

There are many things, abstractions among them, that are only perceptible by nous. They don't, therefore, dwell anywhere, in the literal sense, — Wayfarer

What is nous when it is at home? Where does the rational intellect reside? Could it be in Peirce's community of pragmatic inquirers. People willing to construct falsifiable beliefs that can actually be publicly tested by conformity with the evidence?

So abstractions exist in minds? But there are then trained minds and untrained minds. As an epistemological fact – but not an ontological one! – these do indeed create quite different versions of what they might consider "reality".

There is the phenomenological experience of those of us for whom the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking might truly have a look and a feel of some Platonic reality. It is a full sensori-motor experience.

Then there are those who just hear the words, see the equations, and experience simply a bunch of confusing marks on a page. No world springs up in their mind that speaks to the abstractions to which these symbols might hold the key.

I do not mean that universals exist, but they are real. Real, I say, in the sense that they are not figments of the mind but have an objective being, though not a material existence. — C S Peirce Collected Papers, CP 1.27

Exactly. In the spirit of Aristotle, the natural philosopher and systems thinker argues that substantial reality is the hylomorphic interaction of its matter and its form. That is, its global constraints and its local degrees of freedom.

Each side of this dichotomy is the proper cause of the other. So together, they become the co-arising.

Form shapes the matter and that shaped matter constructs the order specified by the constraining form. It is a neat feedback loop. Or more properly, a neat hierarchical set-up. Substantial being is what you get once you have a lower bound set of material freedoms in interaction with a globalised cogent state – a state of rational order so pervasive that it puts strict limits on everything.

Which is why physics is obsessed with symmetries. Dimensionality itself already strictly limits the freedoms that can exist. If you understand symmetry maths you can just see the truth of that in direct mind-grasped way.

But symmetry maths is to be found in that particular community of pragmatic inquiry. You need to become a paid-up member if you want a phenomenological level view – the one that feels maximally objective as it is at least not patently hostage to our everyday subjectivity.

Nice to read your way of explaining things again Apokrisis. But we are still at the impasse. The we in us is still the ghost in the machine.
How is this world not a world of zombies? Because there is no need for the we in us to be present. It all works as a well oiled machine without us.

Apokrisis’s explanation is effectively that the movement and life force we observe is like water flowing downhill. It doesn’t need an animating force, it naturally flows to the lowest point. The whole biosphere is just another cascade of entropy and once there is no gradient left, the world will return to stillness and we will be just ghosts.

The we in us is still the ghost in the machine. — Punshhh

Which will, however, not outlive it. The ghost is neither the machine, nor anything apart fro it. A figment, in fact.

You mean history shows we ignored the folk dumb enough to claim that. — apokrisis

Some of whom were eminent scientists.

There is the phenomenological experience of those of us for whom the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking might truly have a look and a feel of some Platonic reality. It is a full sensori-motor experience. — apokrisis

The hallmark of phenomenology is its emphasis on the first-person character of experience. It begins by seeking to retrieve this dimension, which had been methodologically excluded by the quantitative orientation of modern science. This is the central concern of the opening section of Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences — to show how the lived world (Lebenswelt), the world as it is experientially given, was eclipsed by the objectifying methods of natural science. Hence Husserl's remark that Galileo was both a 'revealing and concealing genius'.

(Phenomenology, in this sense, is more than a philosophy of subjectivity, but a disciplined attempt to return to the conditions of meaning and appearance that make objective knowledge possible in the first place. It does not reject science, but seeks to clarify its experiential and conceptual ground.)

But the point of the mind-created world idea is that we do of course see reality through mental constructs and theories, as well as sense-perception. It is the mind which synthesises these into the unity of subjective experience. And the sense of what is physical relies on that, which is not itself physical. That is the world as it is lived by us, the lebenswelt. Mental and physical, mind and world, are all aspects of that.

As far the epistemic cut is concerned, I think that it signifies an ontological discontinuity, as well as an epistemic one. It reflects a real discontinuity in nature herselt: between matter and meaning, mechanism and interpretation, dynamics and semiosis. But you will reject that because it suggests dualism, which you've made your distaste for abundantly clear - again because of the shadow of Descartes.

What is nous when it is at home? — apokrisis

Where is the number seven? The law of the excluded middle? The Pythagorean theorem?

One of the texts I'm reading is The Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas (1966). The first essay in that anthology is about the fact that in the pre-modern world, life was seen as the norm, and death seemed an anomaly - hence the cults of the 'risen Christ' and similar religions. With the Renaissance, this began to invert, so that finally, dead matter is seen as the norm, and life the anomaly, something which has to be explained. And I think that's what your model does. But the problem is that there is really no room in it for the human being. Beings are just kinds of heat-sinks, mechanisms by which entropy seeks the path of least resistance. And that's why the only logical outcome of the model is death. After all, if the physical is all there is, then that is all that can be expected.

The we in us is still the ghost in the machine. — Punshhh

Biosemiosis inverts this framing. We are the machinery that can constrain the world to our own advantage.

We are modellers of the world for the purpose of regulating the world in a way that it must keep rebuilding and even replicating the delicate biological machine that is "us".

And moveover it feels phenomenologically like something to be such a machine – or more correctly, such a modelling relation – as the model is a model of an "us" in its "world".

That is the semiotic story. What we experience is the Umwelt of our own construction. A point of view that is a self in pragmatically-intentional interaction with its environment.

Consciousness boils down to the habit of predicting the state of the world in every next moment ... so as to be then capable of being surprised by what happens instead and thus learning to make better predictions the next time round.

This is just basic enactivism or Bayesian reasoning. The self is the place from which the expectations arise in the modelling relation and the world is the place from which those expectations are to some degree or other confounded, contradicted, bemused, surprised of – best case – rendered ignorable.

So the standard lay view is that consciousness is about a brain that extracts a view of the world from incoming data. A modern embodied approach to cognition flips it the other way round. We develop a robust sense of self to the degree we can already anticipate everything that the world might be just about to do. We feel purposeful and in control to the degree we can in fact ignore the world – not even need to be consciously aware of it.

The sense of self is that part of the modelling relation which is already secure in its own predictive integrity. The world only intrudes into our stream of thought only by being surprising or unexpected in some way that we might find important or worth learning from.

You see this innate ability to filter out the world by coming at it with rock-solid preconceptions a lot on this forum. When the stakes are low, no one needs to learn anything new.

So we are not meat machines or Cartesian automatons. Biosemiosis says we are a kind of machine in that we can impose a machinery of decisional switches on our world. We can model our worlds in terms of information about the kinds of things we want to happen in the next instant, and then switch tracks to the degree it matters if they don't happen. Stop in surprise for half a second and generate a new set of expectancies. Rinse and repeat.

And a strong sense of self emerges from this prediction-based processing. We know we are the "we" who generated a sense of a world as it was just about to be. Then we are still the "we" who has to halt and start again if the world glitched and we had to restart it from a refreshed point of view.

If we really get to the point that we are almost completely filtering out the world, then we actually begin to lose that usual sense of self. We forget about being in the world and so aren't even now being reminded that we are also in "ourselves".

The Zen ideal for some reason. Sensory deprivation tanks cause the ego to dissolve. It is by having to push against the world that we also feel the us that is pushing. Once the world becomes fully ignorable, so also does our self-image lose its sturdy outline.

Some of whom were eminent scientists. — Wayfarer

But as Gemini told you: "The main reasons for their doubt often centered on the perceived lack of a sufficiently powerful and light engine, or an incomplete understanding of aerodynamics (particularly the concept of airfoil lift)."

Your claim was that these scientists said the laws of physics forbade powered flight. As Gemini makes clear, they were doubting that the craft could be made light enough, or the engines strong enough, to achieve heavier-than-air flight. Balloons with propellors were the limit of what seemed feasible.

So nothing was said about the laws of physics. What was being argued was the practicalities of material engineering.

The hallmark of phenomenology is its emphasis on the first-person character of experience. — Wayfarer

Thanks for the lecture. But Peirce got it right by showing how the real story is about the hierarchical order of first, second and third person perspectives. First person leaves you stuck on the platform of idealism long after the train of useful discourse has departed the station.

Where is the number seven? The law of the excluded middle? The Pythagorean theorem? — Wayfarer

Why don't you tell me where you think they are?

Maths finds them not in Platonia – some supernatural museum of ideas – but in the necessary geometry of Nature. The forms that must rule a Cosmos as they are the symmetry and symmetry breaking operations by which dimensional Being itself can arise.

As Peirce taught, logic itself self-assembles in hierarchical fashion. Order isn't transcendentally imposed. It emerges from a Darwinian struggle to get anything done at all. The Comos exists as the universal growth of reasonableness. A geometry of free relations that has its own structural inevitability.

No need for a maker. Chaos can't help but fall into ordered structure. Anaximander saw that right from the start.

With the Renaissance, this began to invert, so that finally, dead matter is seen as the norm, and life the anomaly, something which has to be explained. And I think that's what your model does. — Wayfarer

Jesus Christ. The Renaissance was a moment in time. The rediscovery of Greek atomism was inspirational. It crystalised the reductionist mindset. Differential equations were invented and the Western world went Newtonian. The industrial age was unleashed.

But we have had 600 years of scientific and mathematical progress since then. Catch up a bit. Much of what I'm talking about concerns the past 50 years of intellectual advance – the era when we properly got back to Anaximander and the metaphysical revolution he inspired.

The hallmark of phenomenology is its emphasis on the first-person character of experience.
— Wayfarer

Thanks for the lecture. But Peirce got it right by showing how the real story is about the hierarchical order of first, second and third person perspectives. First person leaves you stuck on the platform of idealism long after the train of useful discourse has departed the station. — apokrisis

Peirce didn’t treat Firstness as something to be discarded — it’s not simple subjectivity or a leftover from idealism. It refers to the irreducible immediacy of experience — qualities as they are felt or intuited before they're interpreted or acted upon. That’s not something that can be explained away by pointing to Thirdness (rules, mediation) or even Secondness (facts, brute reaction). 'Peirce usually attempts to explain firstness, in general terms, as quality or feeling'. Hence, first-person. (Qualia, in fact!) Without Firstness, nothing shows up to be reacted to or interpreted in the first place.

Where is the number seven? The law of the excluded middle? The Pythagorean theorem?
— Wayfarer

Why don't you tell me where you think they are? — apokrisis

They are principles and ideas which can only be grasped by reason, intelligible objects. So they're not existent, but they're real, in that they're the same for all who think:

I do not mean that universals exist, but they are real. — C S Peirce Collected Papers, CP 1.27

The Cosmos exists as the universal growth of reasonableness. — apokrisis

Agapasm... is that mode of evolution in which the original germinal idea, in growing, continually puts itself into deeper and deeper harmony with its own nature, not as a mere development of a mechanical necessity but by virtue of a sympathetic and benevolent attraction, an agapē, an outgoing love. — Collected Papers, CP 6.287

Differential equations were invented and the Western world went Newtonian. The industrial age was unleashed. — apokrisis

Appeals to progress don't begin to address the philosophical point at issue.

Peirce didn’t treat Firstness as something to be discarded — Wayfarer

Where did I say it was discarded? It gets incorporated into the wholeness of triadic interpretance.

Redness becomes something we can name – a species of the class "qualia" – once we learn to look at the world in a certain light. It becomes the colour of a stop sign, a hue in a set of crayons, the opposite of green, etc.

That which is initially some unfiltered instant becomes sharply framed in terms of its particularity within a setting of generality. Firstness as an initial vagueness is transmuted into Firstness as some crisply fixed quality held within a system of interpretance. It becomes seen as a particular instance of the general thing we have learnt to label as "redness".

Nominalism. Just what Peirce wasn’t.

Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit general and abstract entities as [immaterial] reals without attributing to them direct (efficient) causal powers. Peirce held that these non-existent reals could influence the course of events by means of final causation (conceived somewhat after Aristotle's conception),and that to banish them from ontology, as nominalists require, is virtually to eliminate the ground for scientific prediction as well as to underwrite a skeptical ethos unsupportive of moral agency. — Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism (review)

Chalk and cheese.

this is indeed an issue I am wrestling with right now in its most general physicalist sense. — apokrisis

I want to try and draw a line here. You came into this thread advocating physicalism, which as you know I disagree with. When I challenged it, you said

Remember how you like to seize on "objective idealism" as if Peirce's careful triadicism – or hierarchical causality – can be heedlessly reduced to your brand of dualism? The two forms of Cartesian substance. — apokrisis

Well, first of all, Peirce is known as a theistic idealist and often said as much:

I am an absolute idealist of the Hegelian type, though not a follower of Hegel. I believe the whole universe and all that is in it is a divine mind, realizing its own ideas, partly by direct creation and partly by the development of its own germs in the minds of its creatures.
— The Monist, Vol. 15 (1905)

I'm not an advocate for dualism, but I think it has a big influence on the conversation. Because, the lurking question is: if not physicalism, then what? That is a question that you don't want to deal with, because the implications must be, to your mind, some kind of dualism, and that territory is forbidden. Pattee says that straight out in the first part of Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis. (Peirce also rejected Cartesian dualism.)

From a draft I'm working on:

'One of the most far-reaching consequences of Descartes’ dualism was not just philosophical but cultural: it effectively divided the world between *res extensa*, the extended, measurable substance that would become the domain of science, and *res cogitans*, the thinking, immaterial substance reserved for religion and theology. At the time it was formulated, this demarcation helped defuse tension between the rising authority of mechanistic science and the theological dominance of the early modern Church. Matter could be studied freely, so long as the soul remained untouched (and that was an explicit entry in the original Charter of the Royal Society.) But the cost of this division was steep: it left the mind stranded outside the physical world, and set the stage for centuries of debate about how—or whether—it could ever be brought back in. Physicalism had to insist that mind is the product of material causation, via neurology and evolution - it could have no reality in its own right, for these very reasons. And that still is probably the majority view. '

That is why the two fields of phenomenology and embodied cognition (or enactivism) are so important. They're not either physicalist or idealist (although phenomology was undoubetdly descended from Kantianism.) That is an emerging paradigm that has many areas in common with biosemiotics, although not so much with the physics-driven 'theories of everything' which you spend a lot of time writing about.

That's what I think is the cultural impetus behind the appeals to physicalism and antagonism towards anything perceived as spiritual or idealist. It's the consequence of this division.