tornados are not alive, and are thereby literally inanimate, since they don’t have that which is essential to defining physical life: a metabolism. This just like animated cartoons are literally inanimate—though we term them animations and say they are animated. Language can be an ambiguous thing, granted—especially since so much of it is metaphorical. — javra
life is "metabolism" or dissipative structure with a bit of extra DNA organisation — apokrisis
. It is the new universal basis for the scientific measurement of nature. — apokrisis
What about providing a basis for values? — Wayfarer
What's the significance of 'dissipative'? — Wayfarer
So what is it about the values of satanism, for instance, that convinces us of its claims to being a superior basis for philosophy? — apokrisis
Where in the great anthropological variety of transcendent belief structures and moral values am I going to find "the right one"? — apokrisis
So it says that the animate and the inanimate are alike in being hylomorphically semiotic. There is formal and final cause acting by way of top-down constraint to shape substantial being. And what is new here is proposing a mechanism - semiosis - by which that interaction generally happens. — apokrisis
And generally, all inanimate systems - especially those that grow, move, self-organise and self-optimise to meet the global purpose of the second law - can be understood as dissipative structures. Which means they must be informationally negentropic to be able to maintain the entropic flows that sustain them. I mean, keep them inanimately alive. — apokrisis
That is something each has to decide, and it's a risk. We might get it wrong, and that is part of what we have to deal with (which is one of the lessons from existentialism). — Wayfarer
Do you believe that a tornado practises semiosis? I think that this is totally unfounded, and therefore your dissolution of the division between animate and inanimate is also unfounded. — Metaphysician Undercover
We have begun to talk in constructs that we can physically measure. — apokrisis
What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments.
At this point, I part company at 'pan-semiosis', as I think that illegitimately takes aspects of Peirce's philosophy, which was overtly idealist, and then substitutes what he meant by 'mind' with the second law of thermodynamics. — Wayfarer
But consider an organism that has never reproduced during the entirety of its lifespan; it would hold no biological fitness but would yet have been alive. — Javra
I said what I believed is that a tornado is the product of semiosis. As a dissipative structure, it is formed almost entirely by constraints outside of itself. It has no self-stabilising level of memory. So it can't "practise" semiosis. — apokrisis
Natural Life
1. The natural condition extending from cell division to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients, respond to stimuli, mature, reproduce, and adapt to the environment through semiosis.
2. The duration of an organism's natural existence. — Galuchat
Worker bees serve as another example of life that does not reproduce. Less genetically predetermined but nevertheless real is the non-reproduction of most wild canids that are not themselves alpha mates. — Javra
Perhaps you can with materialism, but not with mysticism. This is because mysticism is, or is as far as I am concerned, not necessarily concerned with materials. It recognises them as vehicles and realises that the presence of vehicles cannot, with our present degree of knowledge be explained. Following from this is the acknowledgement that the second law is an effect of those vehicles.I of course have explained many times how both materialism and mysticism are in fact disguised dissipative structure. They both are simply reflections of human social entrainment to the desires of the second law of thermodynamics.
There is, of course, the caveat of the limitations of the human perspective. Along with this any mature philosophy ought to factor in the possibility that human experience is a construct, a confection hosted by a reality of which those humans are not aware.That is Peirce's epistemology in a nutshell. And then that was his pansemiotic metaphysics - his definition of the summum bonum as the universal growth of reasonableness.
As any mature philosophy would.That's the rhetorical advantage of founding your "metaphysics" in the ineffable. No one can call you out for your failure to speak about it meaningfully, let alone provide the material evidence. ;)
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