Apparently, something about my information-based worldview is discomfiting for you. — Gnomon
It’s the crackpottery. Simple enough. — apokrisis

You're not the only one having difficulty following the reasoning behind the emerging "Information-based worldview". But it's mainly the Quantum Physics & (post-Shannon) Information Theory that are difficult to grok, from a Matter-based perspective. The philosophical conclusions are comparatively simple. And obvious, in retrospect; once you get over the Nothingness hump.

On the Monism thread*1, said "↪Gnomon I try to follow your arguments the best I can. I still don't see how nothing can become the physical universe based on formless potential". He's just as puzzled as you, but less disdainful of a concept he does not understand. So, I linked to a scientific account of the same notion that is discomfiting him : "nothingness", especially "causal nothingness".

On the surface, this article*2 by a prominent Physicist/Cosmologist*3 may sound compatible with a Materialist worldview. But as Nyquist astutely noted : "Nothing...big bang...physical universe, seems something is logically missing in that simple model.". "Nothing" does not compute in the pragmatic model of Materialism. But "nothing with potential for something" is logically necessary to explain the existence of our contingent physical reality. So, the scientist calls it by a sciency-sounding name : "Quantum Field"*4.

Apparently, that "Causal Nothingness" is the "crack" in the pot that you imagine to represent the thesis of Enformationism. Would the same concept make more sense to you, if it came from a distinguished scientist, instead of an insignificant poster on an inconsequential forum? :smile:


*1. Monism : Gnomon post 06-14-2023
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/814957

*2. Quantum nothingness might have birthed the Universe :
We can contemplate the idea of a metaphysical emptiness, a complete void where there is nothing. But these are concepts we make up, not necessarily things that exist.
https://bigthink.com/13-8/quantum-nothingness-birth-universe/
Note --- Is the Quantum Field a "metaphysical emptiness" or a physical nothingness?

*3. Marcelo Gleiser is a Brazilian physicist and astronomer. He is currently Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College ___Wiki

*4. What is a quantum field made of? :
"Quantum Fields can be made of many states of waves and matter"
" Quantum fields are made up of quantum oscillators, an infinity-of-infinities of them."
" physicists tell us that at the deepest level, everything is made up of mysterious entities, fluid-like substances that we call quantum fields"
" So quantum fields aren't physical material objects — they are just mathematical functions that map spacetime events to elements of a field space" ___Google search
Note --- Is a "mathematical function" --- like the quantum wave function --- a material object, or an imaginary concept (i.e. information)?

:clap: :up:

Biosemiosis is based on the physics of dissipative structure. And dissipative structure is also the basis of cosmology. The Big Bang theory describes the Universe as a cooling-expanding structure of dissipation - a system falling into the very heat sink it is making.

[ ... ]

So reality as a whole - the entire shebang from cosmology to consciousness - can be modelled in the fundamental coin of thermodynamic theory. That is why information-entropy has become the basic metric employed by physical and mental theories. It is used in quantum theory. It is also used in Bayesian Brain theory. — apokrisis

:fire:

You don't seem to tire of casting pearls ... Good. :smirk:

Apparently, something about my information-based worldview is discomfiting for you.
— @Gnomon

It’s the crackpottery. Simple enough — apokrisis

:sweat: Amen, brother!

The significance is clear.

"Conventional physics deals only with closed systems, i.e. systems which are considered to be isolated from their environment."
— Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General system Theory (1968) — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, von Bertalanffy is significantly confusing cosmology – the universe as a closed system – with all other phenomena – subsystems – modelled by "conventional physics". :roll:

Apparently, that "Causal Nothingness" is the "crack" in the pot that you imagine to represent the thesis of Enformationism. — Gnomon

I have no problem at all with either the metaphysics or physics of raw potential. Your problem is I understand all this stuff well enough to see that you don’t.

Maintaining the true status of "open" in a biological system, requires that the system's interaction with its environment cannot be modeled as top-down causation, which is the modeling of a closed system. — Metaphysician Undercover

But the biological system is still constrained by the Second Law. It can develop local negentropy because that overall increases the global entropy of the Cosmos.

Biology’s big trick is that it is open for radiation flows by becoming closed for material flows. It can transact pure sunlight because it efficiently recycles its organic matter.

So it is more open to radiation than bare earth. Rock will scatter and cool sunlight to only about 60 degrees C. A rainforest cools it to 20 degrees C. Life can extract more juice from the solar flux.

But to do this, life must efficiently recycle its material structure. And rainforests are famous for being ecologically closed to the point they manage their own rainfall and need only the thinnest soil.

So life and cosmos can both be modelled in dissipative structure terms. And when it comes to open vs closed, you have to be alert to whether you are talking radiation or matter.

The Big Bang itself has this issue. It started off as a pure adiabatic thermal flow. Just spreading-cooling radiation. But then there was a phase change due to the entanglement of local and global symmetry breakings - an interaction between local gauge fields and a global Higgs field that made fermions massive. A smoothly expanding gas became suddenly a gravitating dust. You had a separation that was a creation of negentropy that now needed to be entropified back to pure radiation.

At the cosmic level, this produced the open dissipative structures we call stars and blackholes. It is going to take a long time to turn the dust of massive particles back to the background thermal sizzle of a quantum vacuum.

Then life repeats the story at its own micro-cosmic scale. We take what the Sun is doing, mix it with the complex remnants of past super-novae which are the further negentropy that results in the crud known as a planet, and cook up a little Gaian mix or photosynthesis and respiration.

Life uses the fuel of sunlight to drive the construction of metabolically structured cells. It self-encloses for materiality so as to beat ordinary physics when it comes to the rate at which a released flow of radiation is being entropically cooled.

The concepts of open and closed are useful in this analysis. But you also then have to be able to follow the practical complexities that help us see what is really going on.

Without understanding it, Gnomon in fact posted this graph of the creation of the negentropic gap from David Layzer, the cosmologist who saw this back in the 1960s.

I have no problem at all with either the metaphysics or physics of raw potential. Your problem is I understand all this stuff well enough to see that you don’t. — apokrisis

Is it possible that your "understanding" is out of date? Not wrong, just outmoded.

I expected posters on a philosophy forum to be well-informed about the evolution of Information Theory since Shannon's statistical definition for a specific purpose : data processing & communication. But I have been disillusioned.

Scientists now know that mathematical Information plays many roles at all levels of reality. It's no longer just inert Data ; it's also Meaning, Causation, Organization, etc. Wherever there is Mathematics or Logic, there is Information. :smile:


What is Information? :
Originally, the word “information” referred to the meaningful software contents of a mind, which were assumed to be only loosely shaped by the physical container : the hardware brain. But in the 20th century, the focus of Information theory has been on its material form as changes in copper wires & silicon circuits & neural networks. Now, Terrence Deacon’s book about the Causal Power of Absence requires another reinterpretation of the role of Information in the world. He quotes philosopher John Collier, “The great tragedy of formal information theory [Shannon] is that its very expressive power is gained through abstraction away from the very thing that it has been designed to describe.” Claude Shannon’s Information is functional, but not meaningful. So now, Deacon turns the spotlight on the message rather than the medium.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html

Is it possible that your "understanding" is out of date? Not wrong, just outmoded. — Gnomon

Nope. The problem is you rabbit on about moddish stuff without having any technical understanding or metaphysical grounding. Thus your "thesis" amounts to nothing more than hand-waving pronouncements like this...

Scientists now know that mathematical Information plays many roles at all levels of reality. It's no longer just inert Data ; it's also Meaning, Causation, Organization, etc. — Gnomon

It's a shame you don't actually take time to study and understand since you seem to be so excited about what is indeed a really interesting story.

You want to hang on to the coat-tails of something while pretending to be a thought leader in it. It should be enough to just actually hang on is coat-tails and show a competence when discussing the latest developments.

But the biological system is still constrained by the Second Law. — apokrisis

This is not an accurate statement. The biological system itself, being an open system, is not constrained by the second law. The second law is not applicable to biological systems, because they are open systems, and the second law is applicable to closed systems only. That is the defining feature of the open system. All irreversible processes within the open system are understood to be subject to the second law, but the system itself is not subject to that law. In the open system there is entropy and negative entropy which is imported, therefore the system is not subject to the second law. Read the quote I provided carefully.

Therefore, the change of entropy in closed systems is always positive; order is continually destroyed. In open systems, however, we have not only production of entropy due to irreversible processes, but also import of entropy which may well be negative.

From observation of the open system, there is evidence that the system itself violates the second law of thermodynamics. So von Bertalanffy describes it as importation from the system's environment. If open systems are modeled as dissipative structures, then it is incorrect to say that such a system is subject to the second law. Furthermore, the means by which entropy and negative entropy are imported into the system is not necessarily known, so we cannot conclude that it must be either upward or downward causation.

Now the issue at hand is the agent which imports the negative entropy into the system, or we could simply say "the cause" of that importation. You can write this agency off to "symmetry-breaking" or some such thing, but this is nothing more than just saying that chance is a causal agent. And that is not logically sound.

The biological system itself, being an open system, is not constrained by the second law. — Metaphysician Undercover

Enough idiocy. A biological system is closed for its materials and open for its energy flow. It sets up the metabolic turbine that an environmental entropy gradient can spin.

That is the difference between a physical dissipative system like a tornado which is helplessly spun into being by a gradient and an organism that can intelligently construct the dissipative structure to tap an otherwise blocked entropy gradient.

Read the quote I provided carefully. — Metaphysician Undercover

Learn some biology.

Now the issue at hand is the agent which imports the negative entropy into the system, or we could simply say "the cause" of that importation. You can write this agency off to "symmetry-breaking" or some such thing, but this is nothing more than just saying that chance is a causal agent. And that is not logically sound. — Metaphysician Undercover

Listen more carefully to what I actually say.

Life is agency in that it harnesses chance. It ratchets thermal randomness to sustain its organismic order.

The Universe wants to entropify. Life says here, let me help you over the humps. The second law gets served in the long run, but life gets to swim in negentropic loopholes it discovers.

Oxidation is a powerful natural force. So life came along and harnessed that for respiration. It even invented photosynthesis to close the material loop and use the inverse operation of fixing CO2 to
ensure the Earth's atmosphere had a stable life-supporting mix of gases.

Bacteria closed the whole planet for materials so a biofilm could live off sunlight while tightly regulating a Gaian O2~CO2 balance that also kept the planet at a steady liveable temperature.

In terms of top-down constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom, this is a direct demonstration of the balancing act that maintains Earth as a Gaian level superorganism.

Life on Earth grows as freely as it can. But collectively it is restricted by the metabolic dichotomy that is the complementary processes of respiration and photosynthesis. The upper limit of the ecological carrying capacity is defined by a narrow range of atmospheric gases and a temperature band that keeps the Earth mostly ice free. Closed for materials in this fashion, the planetary biofilm can then maximise its entropy production in terms of turning 5600 C degree sunrays into 20 degree C infrared radiation.

So life as "agency" is about this Gaian wholeness. There is a will being expressed at the planetary scale just as much as at the local bacterial scale.

The bacteria want exactly this kind of world so that they can thrive. And the world wants exactly these kinds of little organisms – ones that can both photosynthesise and respire – so that such an optimised planet can continue to be the case.

Then in the larger picture, the Cosmos itself wants a planet like Earth to arrive as its Gaian self-stabilising and long run optimum.

Oxidation is the biggest bang for buck going if you are carbon chemistry. And carbon is the biggest bank for buck material if you are talking about a propensity for chemical complexity.

It would woo to suggest that the Cosmos actually has a mind, or a designer. But Darwinian evolution is the agency that ensures life did keep stumbling towards the biggest entropic combination the Cosmos had to offer.

It nearly didn't work out. When bacterial first invented photosynthesis, they produced so much O2, removed so much of the insulating atmospheric methane blanket by oxidation, that they nearly killed life as the Earth froze into a snowball. Fortunately the chemistry could be inverted and a stable dynamical balance could result. The O2 could be eaten and CO2 excreted instead.

Is this your confusion? Individual organisms might seem to answer to your simplistic definition of openness. They transact raw materials with their environments. But then the environment itself is a Gaian superorganism. Life is now woven into the material cycles of the planet itself.

Without life, Earth would not have an oxygen rich atmosphere and all its water would have boiled off due to a lack of a protective ozone layer. The chemistry of the planet wouldn't be the same.

The Universe wants to entropify....the Cosmos itself wants a planet like Earth — apokrisis

But:

It would [be] woo to suggest that the Cosmos actually has a mind, or a designer. — apokrisis

However:

Darwinian evolution is the agency — apokrisis

Is it though? I question whether evolution is an agent at all. Natural selection acts to prevent things happening, to filter things out, but it doesn't create. The only agents involved are organisms. If anything, the attribution of agency to evolution is a remnant of theism, where now instead of the Divine Architect, agency is attributed to the process that has ostensibly replaced Him.

I question whether evolution is an agent at all. — Wayfarer

Maybe I should have used scare quotes. I meant it is the general top-down constraint acting to shape the upwardly constructing degrees of freedom.

So yes, it winnows variety so that all the actors in an ecosystem fit together in a mutually optimising way. But then those local actors can be creative in their resulting developmental trajectories. They can do their best to beat the odds when it come to reproducing.

So agency - if we must use the word - boils down to a capacity to make choices. Constraints create a space of such choices. Actors then react to their constrained environments by making choices - informed or otherwise.

From nature’s point of view, it doesn’t in fact matter that organisms make particularly smart choices. It is enough for evolution that they just definitely either do one thing or it’s other.

If an organism chooses the wrong option, then the selection algorithm can tilt action towards the opposite choice the next time. But if responses are merely vague and confused, neither one thing nor the other, then nothing can really be learned.

Agency at its simple level is just the bacterium swimming in a straight line as it keeps moving towards the scent of food and then switching to random tumbling when it has lost the scent.

We don’t have to invoke any kind of divine inner spark. Just a molecular switch that flips the spiralling flagella from entangled straight line motion to disentangled and tumbling mode.

So agency - if we must use the word - boils down to a capacity to make choices. — apokrisis

I think we must, as we're agents. Choice doesn't come into what crystals do, but it comes into what the most basic organisms do, even if in a very simple manner. That's the sense in which life introduces new horizons of possibility.

We don’t have to invoke any kind of divine inner spark. Just a molecular switch that flips the spiralling flagella from entangled straight line motion to disentangled and tumbling mode. — apokrisis

Bacteria will not reflect on their situation, but we are able to do that, so it has significance for us. And the analogy is a misleading one, in that a switch has absolutely no agency, it is both constructed and operated by an external agency, whereas the choices an organism makes are determinative of its continued survival. Doesn't matter to a switch, what happens, but it matters a hell of a lot to an organism. This whole question of agency and physical causation is one of the central philosophical dilemmas. To turn over the whole question to impersonal laws, like thermodynamics or atomic physics, is in a way to dodge the question that our particular point in the evolutionary cycle has brought us to. It's to wash our hands of the responsibility we must take for our own choices.

Doesn't matter to a switch, what happens, but it matters a hell of a lot to an organism. — Wayfarer

An organism is a network of counterfactual switching. It is constructed of the very possibility to flip between polar opposites at any level of its hierarchical organisation.

Counterfactual clarity is the basis of meaningful agency. You can pick a particular direction only to the degree you can exclude all other alternatives. What you do, and what you thus don’t do in any moment, are the complementary aspects of making “a choice”.

And it is the same dichotomistic logic down at the level of sensory receptors or enzymatic regulation. You have to be able to make a choice, and indeed not choose that in the most definite sense by doing its very opposite, to in fact have choices, and thus what we think of as creative agency or freewill.

To turn over the whole question to impersonal laws, like thermodynamics or atomic physics, is in a way to dodge the question that our particular point in the evolutionary cycle has brought us to. It's to wash our hands of the responsibility we must take for our own choices. — Wayfarer

Why must we take responsibility? It is enough to suffer the consequences. You have an inflated sense of the power of the individual in a world of near eight billion people. If you want to debate the shaping hand of morality, let’s get real about what really drives modern social structure. Examine political economies rather than appeal to folk to consult their conscience.

And it is the same dichotomistic logic down at the level of sensory receptors or enzymatic regulation. You have to be able to make a choice, and indeed not choose that in the most definite sense by doing its very opposite, to in fact have choices, and thus what we think of as creative agency or freewill. — apokrisis

As I said earlier, trying to explain way too much, way too simplistically.

Enough idiocy. A biological system is closed for its materials and open for its energy flow. It sets up the metabolic turbine that an environmental entropy gradient can spin. — apokrisis

You are the one preaching idiocy. As a living, acting organism, I am a biological system. I eat my dinner, therefore this biological system is not closed for materials. Your proposed material/energy distinction is simply inapplicable here.

Life is agency in that it harnesses chance. It ratchets thermal randomness to sustain its organismic order.

The Universe wants to entropify. Life says here, let me help you over the humps. The second law gets served in the long run, but life gets to swim in negentropic loopholes it discovers. — apokrisis

Are you preaching vitalism? That's the way you are talking, "life is agency...it ratchets...", "life says...". You have simply replaced the ancient term, "the soul" with "life", to distance yourself from theology. We could effectively replace one for the other without a change in meaning. I'm not opposed to vitalism in general, and speaking of "life" or "the soul" as this type of agency, that is how Aristotle defined "the soul". But then there is the magical thinking you employ in an attempt to make vitalism consistent with the principles of physics, such as those "negentropic loopholes it discovers". This type of magical thinking is what I am opposed to. Do you not recognize a "negentropic loophole" as nothing other than magic?

All irreversible physical processes are entropic. That means any and every temporal process is entropic. What on earth are these magical, nontemporal, "loopholes" which life has discovered. I didn't see any of that magic in Pattee's material.

In terms of top-down constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom, this is a direct demonstration of the balancing act that maintains Earth as a Gaian level superorganism. — apokrisis

Is the magic based in "bottom-up degrees of freedom"? Instead of portraying life as an agent which produces bottom-up constraints through a form of causation which escapes the principles of physics (which is consistent with classical vitalism), you propose magical loopholes that the soul discovers. But the magical loopholes are really nothing but mathematical sophistry, created from deficiencies in the way that mathematics deals with infinity. In other words, your boundary condition is infinite degrees of freedom, and this false boundary condition allows for the positing of magical loopholes anywhere that the system approaches the boundary.

I meant it is the general top-down constraint acting to shape the upwardly constructing degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

This statement you made to Wayfarer is inconsistent, somewhat incoherent. Constructions are constraints. "Degrees of freedom" cannot construct. This is why there is a need for an agent which produces bottom-up constraints, in the manner of bottom-up causation. With phrases like this, it appears to me that you recognize, and clearly acknowledge (being the very intelligent person that you are), this need for constraints which are caused, and created in a bottom-up way. But this logical need interferes with your naturalist bent, so you try to sweep it under the carpet. Then you are left relying on the magical thinking of discovering "negantropic loopholes".

The bacteria want exactly this kind of world so that they can thrive. And the world wants exactly these kinds of little organisms – ones that can both photosynthesise and respire – so that such an optimised planet can continue to be the case. — apokrisis

You have not shown how "the world", as an inanimate planet, you described as having an O2/CO2 Gaian balance, has taken on the magical agency of life (a soul), so that you can speak of it in terms of seeking those magical loopholes. This appears to be a huge problem in your metaphysics, you assign to life this magical power of agency (the capacity to discover negentropic loopholes), then you jump the gap to inanimate objects and assign the same magical power to them as well. Of course, that leaping of the gap is only provided for because the "negentropic loopholes" are a feature created by the mathematical axioms employed, and the same mathematics is applied to both the animate and the inanimate. This allows that the magical loopholes can be said to exist within both the animate and the inanimate. The statement that they have real existence is just a falsity though because the loopholes are a fault of the mathematical laws (the map), not the world itself (the terrain).

Individual organisms might seem to answer to your simplistic definition of openness. They transact raw materials with their environments. But then the environment itself is a Gaian superorganism. Life is now woven into the material cycles of the planet itself. — apokrisis

You clearly have no idea of what von Bertalanffy had in mind with the distinction between open and closed systems, therefore your understanding of general system theory is deeply flawed. Your categorizations are nothing but abuse of the theory, which makes it appear ridiculous. But the ridiculousness is not in the general system theory itself, as composed by von Bertalanffy, it is in your abusive application.

Nope. The problem is you rabbit on about moddish stuff without having any technical understanding or metaphysical grounding. — apokrisis

I see. My lack of authoritative credentials is a stumbling block for you. But that's why I link to people who have credentials in relevant areas. I even include a pertinent excerpt along with the link, so you don't have to read a technical webpage. I don't know what else I can do to communicate some novel ideas in science & philosophy with you. Nevertheless, I'm still willing to reply to any comments you direct to me. You know how persistent rabbits are. :smile:

PS___Despite the failure to communicate, I have enjoyed the stimulation of your goading : it forces me to trim the fat from my thesis, and get down to the meat.

This seems to be another one of those threads where posters, who are well read in certain areas of science & philosophy, end-up talking past each other from separate-but-adjacent wells-of-knowledge. Ironically, although he disparages my own unconventional worldview, a lot of what says in the vocabulary of his Biology-centric worldview, actually makes sense in terms of my own Information-centric worldview --- which goes back to a time before Biology emerged from Physics. Perhaps it's an accent thing --- like English & German languages, historically related, but we still need interpreters to facilitate communication. Here's a few quotes & notes from his post to you above :

*1. "Life is agency in that it harnesses chance".
Note --- To harness chance is to organize randomness. But natural or cosmic agency is a no-no in the accidental philosophy of Materialism. Yet, self-organization requires the ability to bring order out of chaos. However, to postulate a self-existent First Cause or uber-Agent --- who provides the Cause & Laws necessary to guide a randomized non-living system toward the emergence of living organisms --- sounds like woo-mongering to some on this forum.

*2. "The Universe wants to entropify. Life says here, let me help you over the humps. The second law gets served in the long run, but life gets to swim in negentropic loopholes it discovers."
Note --- Is this an extrapolation of the Gaian hypothesis, to assert that the natural universe is not only self-regulating, but also self-organizing, and has a Will, a Direction, a Goal, almost like a human agent? I sometimes refer to the Gaia hypothesis to illustrate how the universe functions as-if a living organism. Perhaps I don't take it as literally as he does. In place of "to entropify" I would use the term "to enform", and in place of "negentropy" I coined the term "EnFormAction". Different vocabularies for different folks.

*3. "So life as "agency" is about this Gaian wholeness."
Note --- Holism is an essential concept to explain how Generic Information changes Form via sequential Phase Transitions. And the power to transform matter into Life & Mind might pre-date or transcend the emergence of Gaia from non-living insentient matter in the Big Bang beginning. I guess it depends on just how Whole Gaia is assumed to be : encompassing even space-time?

*4. "It would woo to suggest that the Cosmos actually has a mind, or a designer. But Darwinian evolution is the agency that ensures life did keep stumbling towards the biggest entropic combination the Cosmos had to offer."
Note --- Is he implying that the mindless Darwinian mechanism functions as-if it was an intentional agent, or designer, manipulating matter & energy into living organisms, some with minds of their own? When I make similar inferences, the boo-woo-birds start squawking. Just how Holistic do you have to be to qualify as a wooer? Does Biosemiotics/Gaia hypothesis stop just short of the woo line?

*5. "Is this your confusion? Individual organisms might seem to answer to your simplistic definition of openness. They transact raw materials with their environments. But then the environment itself is a Gaian superorganism. Life is now woven into the material cycles of the planet itself."
Note --- Is a "super-organism" super-natural?
I can agree with some of those statements, but his disparaging attitude toward your & my -- not so different -- ideas indicates that he may have responded to harsh woo-bashing on this forum by withdrawing into a hard shell of doctrinaire Biosemiotics --- turning a theory into a dogma. Then wielding the woo-stick on other non-conformers. :smile:

The rustle of sweet wrappers heard from the cheap seats.

I eat my dinner, therefore this biological system is not closed for materials. — Metaphysician Undercover

If you were a Chinese peasant with paddy fields to manure, you would know that material recycling is what nature does.

But keep blathering away. :yawn:

My lack of authoritative credentials is a stumbling block for you. — Gnomon

Stop making excuses for yourself. It is your lack of credible analysis and understanding of the subject matter itself.

If you were a Chinese peasant with paddy fields to manure, you would know that material recycling is what nature does. — apokrisis

You're not making any sense apokrisis, just demonstrating that you have no understanding of the first principle of general system theory, the distinction between open systems and closed systems.

"Degrees of freedom" cannot construct. — Metaphysician Undercover

If I may... Step 1 to understanding @apokrisis is to swap the idea of "causes" for the idea of "prevents".

Whatever has happened is not what was caused to happen; it's whatever was not prevented from happening. Certainly for evolution, this ought to be obvious: variation happens wherever and to whatever degree it can, and insofar as one variation gains predominance in the next generation, to that degree there is some new constraint -- and new options -- as we go around again. Related mechanisms, which is to say, similar behaviors, can be found in other sorts of systems, without evolution's particular twist involving replication.

The gist of it is that -- particularly considering the time-scales and populations involved -- whatever can happen, will. And "can" here is glossed as "not prevented by some (generally top-down) constraint", and keeping in mind how change gets locked in, at least to some degree and at least temporarily, so we're never talking about everything conceivable happening, but only what is a genuine possibility under current conditions.

In this sense, yes indeed, degrees of freedom construct. It's their job.

(Pretty close, apo?)

As usual, you just don't listen to what I've said. So no point continuing.

Life evolved metabolic power by learning to recycle its materials and thus learn to be able to live off just sunlight and water. The ways it was either open or closed became increasingly organised to maximise the gap between its capacity for entropic throughput and its need to repair the inevitable entropy damage to its own negentropic material structure.

Everything in the body is falling apart. But you don't want to let it escape the bounds of the body if you can help it. You want to resuse it to rebuild the body again.

The opposite is the case for the entropic flow from source to sink that is then spinning the wheels of this system. You want to have a bodily structure that can suck in environmental negentropy at one end and blast it out the other as entropy. Breaking things down and shoving them back out is the flip side of the same metabolic equation.

So a dichotomy is what creates a distinction between the energy driving the machinery, and the matter constituting the machinery to be driven. The greater the division, the higher the power rating of the organism.

And the same goes for ecosystems as a whole. They have to scale up the recycling of the materials at the planetary level of biology. It becomes one big Gaian organism.

You are still stuck on page one of the thermodynamical analysis. Open vs closed in the context of the physics of steam engines – hot vessels in cold sinks – is just to get you going.

(Pretty close, apo?) — Srap Tasmaner

Yep. :up:

The systems approach is based on the four Aristotelean causes. So it dichotomises the notion of causality into two complementary types of cause. The top-down action of formal/final cause, and the bottom-up action of material/efficient cause. (Each of these causal pairs being further dichotomised as the general and particular of their kind.)

We can then talk about this more simply, more naturally, in terms of global constraints and local degrees of freedom. That is how physics itself is set up. Differential equations which encode constraints as holonomic constants and freedoms as contingent variables.

And in turn, we can get even closer to ordinary language by talking about constraint or limitation versus construction. We can see how there are two kinds of cause in that either an action is being prevented, or that action is being left free to happen.

And being free to happen, it must happen – with some regularity. But then for the global constraints to survive, this free generation of local actions must also be reconstructing rather than eroding that larger world that is allowing them to exist by not ruling them out.

It is a virtuous autopoietic loop. The right kind of limiting constraints must evolve to produce the right kind of constructive actions. That is, the ones that rebuild the system of constraints in some general, statistically robust, way.

Evolution describes just this. What works is what out-reconstructs what doesn't. In the beginning, everything seems possible. But as everything starts to happen, it interacts in every possible way. This eventually selects for whatever balance of local and global causality works – which has the hylomorphic order that proves stable and lasting rather than unstable and quick to perish.

So causality broadly is a unity of opposites – the partnership of downward-acting constraints and upwardly-constructing degrees of freedom. The overall goal of this system's causality is to discover a persistent dynamical balance.

And so the Universe itself must exist as an evolutionary solution to this riddle of self-organised persistence. Its system of laws and particles was the one that won the Darwinian race in the metaphysical space of all possibilities.

You make some very interesting points I missed:

But then for the global constraints to survive, this free generation of local actions must also be reconstructing rather than eroding that larger world that is allowing them to exist by not ruling them out. — apokrisis

And of course they might not. Sometimes there are runaway processes and you end up with Easter Island. Thus:

The right kind of limiting constraints must evolve to produce the right kind of constructive actions. That is, the ones that rebuild the system of constraints in some general, statistically robust, way. — apokrisis

Which might not happen in one go, because at this level in the hierarchy there is also construction and selection going on. From the lower level's point-of-view, if they erode the constraints that enabled them, they're in for a paradigm shift, as the kids say.

So causality broadly is a unity of opposites – the partnership of downward-acting constraints and upwardly-constructing degrees of freedom. The overall goal of this system's causality is to discover a persistent dynamical balance. — apokrisis

But there's only one system that's so well balanced that it's stable, right? Namely the heat death of the universe. Every system of constraints must allow slightly more freedom that it really ought to if it's to become stable, because in the very long run all such systems are temporary and must seed their own destruction. The whole purpose of these temporary solutions is to waste as much energy as possible and then fall apart, right?

But then, as Wallace Stevens observed, "Death is the mother of beauty."

Systems that fall apart too quickly to be much help burning off energy are replaced by more complex and robust systems, but on the other side of that curve there's less to work with as you slide downward toward oblivion and the systems are again less complex.

There's a sweet spot -- like how much a dissident can get past the censors, or how much an artist can challenge convention. In that zone, the whole thing produces wonders that are only possible because they are temporary.

But there's only one system that's so well balanced that it's stable, right? Namely the heat death of the universe. — Srap Tasmaner

The Universe is the stable context which is then colonised by further hierarchical levels of dissipative complexity, like stars, blackholes and biofilms.

But the Big Bang is the featureless start, and the Heat Death is the return of things to a featureless end. So it is only in the middle that the Universe can get more interesting in that it plays host to its local dissipative structures. Gravitational clumps of particles that become negentropic residues wanting to be broken down if a mechanism like fusion, Hawking radiation or redox metabolism can exist to do the job.

There's a sweet spot -- like how much a dissident can get past the censors, or how much an artist can challenge convention. In that zone, the whole thing produces wonders that are only possible because they are temporary. — Srap Tasmaner

That’s it. We are only around as an interested party because any turbulent flow has eddies. The Higgs symmetry breaking turned a smooth flow of expanding-cooling radiation into a lumpy mix of radiation and clumping particles. Stars were turning hydrogen and helium back into simple radiation but at the expense of having to make nickel, carbon and other crud as the other half of the equation.

In the short run, on the local scale, the second law can run backwards. It’s not a big deal.

Step 1 to understanding apokrisis is to swap the idea of "causes" for the idea of "prevents". — Srap Tasmaner

OK, now to understand me, you need to recognize that "causes" cannot be adequately replaced with "prevents". This is because "causes" implies agency, an act whether its intentional or not, and the discussion of how specific acts are prevented, or allowed for, can never produce an understanding of the act itself. Therefore in ontology we ought not think that we can swap "causes" for "prevents", because the two have different meanings, and thinking that we can do this would be to misunderstand.

Certainly for evolution, this ought to be obvious: variation happens wherever and to whatever degree it can, and insofar as one variation gains predominance in the next generation, to that degree there is some new constraint -- and new options -- as we go around again. — Srap Tasmaner

This provides a good example. What you describe, is how a variation gains "predominance". But this descritpiton is inadequate for understanding the cause of variation in the first place. So if one were to claim that the theory of evolution provides us with the means to understand the cause of variation, this would be an unjustifiable claim, because it only provides an explanation for how a variation gains predominance. This leads many to claim that "chance", or "random" mutations are the cause of variation in the first place.

But you should understand that "chance" and "random" are not proper causal terms. These terms represent ideas which are produced when this mode of thinking reaches the end of its applicability. We could call this the boundary conditions to that system of thinking. That mode of thinking already assumes active variation, as a given, so anytime this system of thinking approaches that boundary condition there is the appearance of endless possibility and this gets interpreted as chance, or randomness. And this is because the cause of variation itself is on the other side of the boundary condition, being taken for granted, and therefore cannot be understood in this way. Then to think that this provides an understanding of the cause of variation would be to misunderstand.

The gist of it is that -- particularly considering the time-scales and populations involved -- whatever can happen, will. And "can" here is glossed as "not prevented by some (generally top-down) constraint", and keeping in mind how change gets locked in, at least to some degree and at least temporarily, so we're never talking about everything conceivable happening, but only what is a genuine possibility under current conditions.

In this sense, yes indeed, degrees of freedom construct. It's their job. — Srap Tasmaner

Do you agree now, that I've explained how this claim, your conclusion, "degrees of freedom construct" represents a misunderstanding. "Constructions" are artificial structures requiring intentional agents for design and production. To show how the intentional agent is restricted, or prevented in its constructive capacities, by current physical conditions, and non-physical ideas, and claim that this provides a representation of "the cause" of these constructions, is a gross misunderstanding. That is because it takes the intentional agent, which is the true "cause" of the constructions, for granted, and therefore provides absolutely no understanding of that agent. Then, since the intentional agent is on the other side of the boundary conditions for that system of understanding, it must have infinite degrees of freedom at its disposal, so its actions cannot be understood at all by that system, and therefore are represented as chance or random acts. But this is not consistent with how we understand intentional acts.

The problem here is that since the agent, as the active cause of activity is placed on the other side of the boundary conditions, it is rendered as impossible to understand by that system of thinking. Therefore, the agent in those constructions which the "degrees of freedom construct" might equally be an intentional agent, or a non-intentional agent, depending on how one moves to define the relative terms. So there is much ambiguity simply because the agent is outside the boundary conditions and therefore cannot be understood.

If we adhere to the principles of that system of thinking in a strict manner, the degrees of freedom must be represented as infinite at the boundary condition, and this is completely inconsistent with how we understand "intentional". Then we have the irresolvable problem of how a random act may "construct". The first act within the boundary, the act with the highest degree of freedom, yet not infinite freedom, is a "construct", showing the characteristics of intention. However, intention is not allowed to be outside the boundary, because that would require a type of constraint not provided for by the system of thinking. And so this system of thinking is demonstrably incapable of understanding intentional acts.

In comparison, the theistic way of thinking places intention as outside the boundary, with a transcendent intentional God. But this way of thinking implies that the constraint system of the other model is incomplete as there are necessarily bottom-up constraints (moral constraints) imposed by God.

As usual, you just don't listen to what I've said — apokrisis

Well, a one-liner about people recycling manure provides no indication that you understand the first thing about the difference between open and closed systems.

Life evolved metabolic power by learning to recycle its materials and thus learn to be able to live off just sunlight and water. — apokrisis

Do you agree with me then, that since life required both sunlight and water, biological systems are open in the sense of matter and energy. Therefore that distinction is irrelevant to this discussion, and to proceed in that direction is just a digression, diversion, or distraction.

If I may... Step 1 to understanding apokrisis is to swap the idea of "causes" for the idea of "prevents". — Srap Tasmaner

Although the basic idea of Positive vs Negative (absential)*1 Causation makes some abstract sense, I'm not familiar with the notion of active "Prevention" in supposedly Natural processes such as Self-Organization. In complex systems, random "interference" sometimes occurs, but non-random "prevention" seems to imply an active "intervention". Which could suggest some kind of Agency. For example, most of the search items (causation vs prevention) involve medical or psychiatric interventions or omissions*2 by human doctors.

As I understand the concept of Self-Organization, the only secondary causal agency is the Self : as in "self-causation". Which hints at some non-linear potential in the original causal input : e.g. the Big Bang. By "non-linear" I mean something like the codes of a guided missile that can change course along the way to the target.

Is there another external agency, that counters the Linear momentum of the initial Cause? In billiards, the pool shooter is the First Cause, and subsequent paths of the balls are the result of momentum & direction (vector) inputs. I suppose you could say that the perimeter of the table "prevents" the balls from exploring all paths in the universe. But the table is a man-made object, constructed with intent to prevent or constrain degrees of freedom.

In the context of Big Bang theory, any subsequent exchanges of causal energy are presumably due to exchanges of momentum, which are not intentional or preventional*3. Is postulating some Active Agent*2 changing the direction of causation by intentional prevention. Or am I missing the point? :smile:

*1. Absential Causation : Terrence Deacon term
Absential ~ Causality. a form of causality dependent on specifically absent features and unrealized potentials can be compatible with our best science
https://absence.github.io/3-explanations/absential/absential.html

*2. Causation by Omission :
For example, to take fairly simple cases, 'causation' by omission involves a negative event 'causing' something, and prevention involves something 'causing' a negative event.

*3. The Philosophy of Prevention :
Prevention is an active process, prevention is a kind of practical as well as philosophical intervention.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299747527_The_Philosophy_of_Prevention

Stop making excuses for yourself. It is your lack of credible analysis and understanding of the subject matter itself. — apokrisis

This thread --- on a philosophical question --- is beginning to devolve into a political or religious debate instead of a dispassionate dialog. Some indignant posters seem to be defending canonical positions instead of philosophical postulations. So, since the OP is of interest to me, I'll continue on, while trying to avoid the hostile dug-in posters with polarized worldviews and ad hominem arguments : attacking the messenger instead of responding to the message. Fortunately, there are still a few calm open-minded thinkers on the forum. :cool:

Is there another external agency, that counters the Linear momentum of the initial Cause? In billiards, the pool shooter is the First Cause, and subsequent paths of the balls are the result of momentum & direction (vector) inputs. I suppose you could say that the perimeter of the table "prevents" the balls from exploring all paths in the universe. But the table is a man-made object, constructed with intent to prevent or constrain degrees of freedom. — Gnomon

I don't think we need to talk about intentionality, or not yet, or not this way.

Ask yourself how your approach would change if, instead of just saying the path of the billiard ball is a result, you said that the billiard ball is constrained to follow such a path.

If you can get yourself into a Humean frame of mind, and imagine that almost anything could happen when one billiard ball strikes another, then you are ready to see the resulting path as a narrowing of this possibility space, as a possibility left open by the various operative constraints.

And there's a sense in which such a view is frankly statistical, as Hume's was. (Other antecedents would be the ideal gas laws and statistical mechanics, the statistical framework for evolution by natural selection due to Fisher, etc.)

That's how I understand this approach, in broad strokes.

This is because "causes" implies agency, an act whether its intentional or not, and the discussion of how specific acts are prevented, or allowed for, can never produce an understanding of the act itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

So what is the cause that retards your progress as you try to push through the rush hour traffic constrained by the weight of other cars and all the stop lights? What do you say made you late for work?

How is it that science can measure entropic and viscous forces?

Why is agency just half the story of the world when the other is the frustration of agency that follows from the interaction of agents?

Even if we accept your idiosyncratic framing of causality as agency - an ontology of animism - the logic of systems still applies.