I need a nervous system to see a tree, but I also need eyes and a tree in an encompassing world. Or are we to claim that the eyes create themselves? — plaque flag

See my reply in the Schopenhauer thread.

You and Wayfarer both seem to want to emphasize the primacy of the subject and make the world as mere spectacle for or ex nihilo creation of some kind of constituting transcendental subject.

But serious objections to this claim are (it seems to me) simply ignored. For instance:

I need a nervous system to see a tree, but I also need eyes and a tree in an encompassing world. Or are we to claim that the eyes create themselves ? — plaque flag

I know Husserl is tagged with the charge of solipsism and idealism, but Merleau-Ponty knew better. Husserl’s genius was in the recognition that the being of meaning is in the in-between, the interaction between a subjective and objective pole, rather than in the acts of a pre-constituted transcendental subject. Husserl’s transcendental ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity. What is central is the synthetic constituting activity that remakes both the subject and object poles. If Husserl didn’t make clear enough the importance of the in-between, the baton was taken up not only by Merleau-Ponty but also Heidegger and Derrida. I think in relation to this synthetic structure, the biggest problem from your point of view isnt just Husserl’s treatment of the subject, but what he has in common with Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, and has led to the charge of linguistic idealism against post-structuralists leveled by the realist-materialist crowd. What this alleged ‘linguistic idealism’ has in common with Husserl’s synthetic subject-object acts is the dependence of world as well as subjectivity on a reciprocity that leaves no room for the coherence of any ‘material’ aspect of world independent of this reciprocal interaffecting.

I wish I could understand this. If only I had spent my life doing some interesting reading instead of drinking in bars.. :wink:

leveled by the realist-materialist crowd — Joshs

...for whom any suggestion that objectivity can be less than absolute is a surrender to anarchy...

Again, it depends on what kind of thinking you want to do. — Janus

I thought that was “philosophising”. But if you are arguing that philosophy ought to be radically open to all comers, then I would agree. No problem with there being a competition of methods … as pragmatism will in the end win out. :smile:

I would accept that I am talking about “metaphysicalling” or even “natural philosophising” in terms of the kinds of thinking that are effective.

The mouth of the funnel can be as wide as you want to imagine. It is all going to narrow down to the method of pragmatic reason - the semiotic modelling relation - in my view.

Artists may also create novel cultural concerns. — Janus

Sure. But what I am stressing is that art is not a solitary enterprise. It doesn’t exist unless it is shared. The novelty - as in the informationally surprising and revealing - is to be found in the paradigm shift that the wider social system might undertake.

Anyone can splash paint at a canvas to create an accident of pattern. It takes the shock of an audience to give the work its meaning. It becomes art because it is a sign that can be read as expressing some socially-contexted message … like the modern socially approved trope of the artist saying look at me, find me in this canvas by the characteristic violence and randomness of my dripped trails of paint.

“Doesn’t this abstract expressionism truly assert the artist as its central presence by simultaneously removing their presence from the work of art? This has to be the ultimate self-portraying. That will be $50 million thanks. Ker-Ching!”

So it is the conspiracy between the artist and the audience which is the space in which salience can arise. The artist comes up with novel signs that audiences are then encouraged to read in terms of established cultural habits.

Do most works art really challenge society or simply conform it in its habits of throught? The degree of actual novelty is very low. In modern art, isn’t it largely just a story of needing ever more extreme was to assert the Western values of romantic individualism.

Look at me, I’m different and new! And isn’t this novelty what we collectively most value? Ker-Ching. Another artwork sold.

I’m only stressing the social game that constructs our hierarchies of cultural value. And questioning who really produces the socially meaningful novelty in this life of ours.

Art is probably more part of the conformity creation I would argue. Hence poetry’s role in mythologising the human condition, making the historical facts fit the self-affirming narratives. Empires build monuments that speak of their transcendent right to power. Art galleries likewise enshrine the social ideas that matter - history told as dialectical story of progress from the pagan to the religious to the aristocratic to the romantic to the bare existential.

Technology, as logic paired with fossil fuel, is what has actually put human society on its exponential path of becoming the global planetary organism. The domestication of the Earth with a metabolism of concrete, cows and corn.

Philosophy barely talks about this with any insight. Economics and sociology are only waking up to it.

It has been the topic of conversation in ecology since the 1970s. But only recently have even the biologists understood why the industrial revolution was again nauture doing its biosemiotic thing. Colonising entropy gradients with metabolic technology.

There is a metaphysics here where biology > physics.

Now that is what counts as a paradigm shift and a social surprise. But also one that aligns with mind > matter if you squint just right and understand this in terms of Peircean immanence rather than Cartesian transcendence.

the dependence of world as well as subjectivity on a reciprocity that leaves no room for the coherence of any ‘material’ aspect of world independent of this reciprocal interaffecting. — Joshs

:up:

I'm 100% down with that (or can find one interpretation of it that I like). I call it Ye Olde Lifeworld. [It's just the world, but I'm trying to talk around certain biases.] The scientific image is just a piece of it, encompassed by and dependent upon it.

As I preach from the perch of my soap box, one cannot yank out either the subject or the object and still have the real thing. The true is the whole : promises, sassy looks, and earthquakes; checkmates, wankbanks, quarks, and continuous functions. 'No finite [disconnected, bounded] thing has genuine being.' Or (in a metaphysical-speculative fuck-practicality register) the ab-stract (the out-yanked) is ideal (a mere image, fantasy, fiction). [So the objects of that catalogue above and in general are interdependent for their meaningfulness --- have their being in relationship with one another. ]

In other word : holism.

I think in relation to this synthetic structure, the biggest problem from your point of view isnt just Husserl’s treatment of the subject, but what he has in common with Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, and has led to the charge of linguistic idealism against post-structuralists leveled by the realist-materialist crowd. — Joshs

Now I'm surprised you would say so, because I'm basically coming from a Heideggarian place in my criticism of a Cartesian foundation. I love Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Had to buy a copy for the shelf. So I shouldn't be confused with someone trying to eliminate the 'subject.'

I'm trying to find a plausible 'big' story (grasp of how it all hangs together) that doesn't lapse into contradiction or absurdity or blind faith as so many such stories so easily do.

The living flesh is as primordial as language and world and tribe. — plaque flag

I take flesh in even a metaphysical sense. The body (of the one who sees and speaks, for that one ) is not just one object among others. It is the sun.

As I preach from the perch of my soap box, one cannot yank out either the subject or the object and still have the real thing. The true is the whole : promises, sassy looks, and earthquakes; checkmates, wankbanks, quarks, and continuous functions. — plaque flag

Amen brother Flag!

I agree with you in the abstract, but in practice there is just too much detail for the finite individual to master. The world has too much richness, too much depth. — plaque flag

But you seem to understand the "in practice" in terms of Cartesian representationalism rather than Peircean semiosis. You want every pixel lit up, every information point displayed. Only by "all the bits" is the whole properly understood.

But I say the opposite. The effort is not to master every detail. It is to learn to be able to ignore as much detail as possible.

That is the principle of reality modelling, of pragmatism, of Bayesian Brains, of the Batesonian difference that makes a difference ... of consciousness as the focal attentional/intentional view of the world as it has been rendered by a host of habits acting from their ingrained "self-centred" perspective.

Think of the game of 20 questions. Bivalent inquiry is logarithmic in its progress because it can throw out half the total information on each well judged guess.

In 20 steps, you can turn a million possibilities into 1 certainty measured against a backdrop of 999,999 bits of ignorable noise. Information is meaningful as signal to the degree that information has been discarded. Treated as random backdrop "whatever-ness".

So in practice, it is the ability to discount reality in advance that allows you to control it to your advantage in the present. Wisdom is knowing how not be bothered. Your global habits have already assimilated all possible surprises the world might have.

You can't tell genius from crackpot until you have built up skill at discarding the crackpot with automatic ease. Get to that and the genius pops out, catches your attention, with similar practiced skill.

Even though I see a construction of a grand metaphysics as still possible and worthwhile, such a construction has to be a severe lossy compression of the world. It's not obvious whether it's better to be a Hegel, a Coltrane, a Chappelle, a Napoleon, or just a person who puts their parental role before all else, etc. — plaque flag

Exactly. Except lossy is the feature and not the bug when progressing from analytical intelligence to synthetic wisdom. That is how you can climb the ladder of abstraction and see the wealth of deterministic-seeming detail turn into a simpler statistical array of the accidental. A local blur of baseline fluctuation.

And why also frame this as what kind of historical individual would you like to be? Knowledge is collective. Peirce defined truth as the limits of a community of rational inquiry. And the more complex the world is as a state of emergent hierarchical order, the more the top of the tree ought to be inhabited by synthesisers than analysers. Contributing to the putting together is more impactful than contributing to the breaking apart.

But the systems view is both are needed. They are mutually complementary roles rather than mutually exclusive. This is what allows a system to be a scalefree dynamical balancing act – a system with an inbuilt ratchet of growth and repair.

So do you want to be famous to history or a great dad? I would reply a good life is going to understand that these ought to be complementary goals, and that we should start by being satisfied by striking the right dynamical balance. And if one is the limit on its other, that's fine. It is how it should be if they are actually dialectical oppositions that need to be resolved for the win-win outcome.

Were Hegel, Coltrane, Chappelle, Napoleon good dads?

Of course in practice that doesn't really matter either way as their few offspring were immediately swallowed up in the anonymity of a much vaster pool of population growth. But likewise, even their achievements were something else someone would have done - or at least done similarly enough not for it to count as a material difference in the unfolding of larger human history.

So there isn't such a strong excuse for being a bad parent because you had more important stuff to do – unless that stuff fed back to improve parenting as a general social skill. That thought ought to focus your question more sharply on the actual point of what is good for "the rationalising system" which is all about its accumulating habits and feedback loops.

What I'm looking at is how the metaphysics might model its own creator and how it accounts for its own role. For instance, does the correct metaphysics accelerate the heat death ? I like to see how theories account for their own engendering. — plaque flag

I've talked endlessly about this. Anaximander and his Apeiron. Peirce and his cosmic growth of reasonableness. The Big Bang as a symmetry-breaking of an "everythingness".

In the beginning is a vagueness. The nothingness of an everythingness. But everythingness includes all its contradictions. And much of it must cancel because it is "too symmetric".

If you can move a foot to the left, you can move a foot to your right, and you are back right where you started. Everything has changed and nothing has happened.

But that then sets you up for an emergent residue of what can't be cancelled away as it dichotomous or asymmetric. It is a difference that makes a difference. You can grow or you can shrink. Once you start heading in those kinds of opposite directions, it tends to become more a permanent symmetry breaking. It takes much more time and energy to cancel out the move you might have made.

So a simple translation or rotation can just as immediately self cancel. That is what we say virtual particles do in the quantum vacuum.

But then growth and shrinking are complex symmetry breakings which are moves towards complementary global and local limits on being. You can go a long way from your "other" and so make it a long way to get back.

Again this is quantum field theory and its path integral or sum over histories story, understood in terms of the thermal decoherence created by a universe that cools and expands. With global growth and local energy dissipation baked into its fabric, the universe creates conditions where particles that start off as left-right coin flips – the symmetry of particles and anti-particles – get pulled far enough apart from each other in terms of distance and energy that they simply fall out of the entropic flow.

The virtual vacuum fluctuations crystallise as fundamental real particles. Quark, electrons and neutrinos. They become the dust of localised matter that can no longer stream at lightspeed and so are frozen into one or other of their original symmetric states. Asymmetry of scale has stranded them.

Only at the end of time will the Universe complete the cycle by in fact giving all this matter dust the time to find its way back to a state of virtual existence as the information content of cosmological horizons. Symmetry from the particle fluctuation sense will be restored. But that is now baked into the asymmetry of a de Sitter heat death void where the Universe as a thing is now the heat sink without its heat source rather than the Big Bang's story of the heat source without yet its heat sink.

So "time" is the energy difference that is used to set up this thermo-spatial asymmetry. The Planck scale measures its "smallness" at the start and "largeness" at the end. Reality exists because everythingness contained its further possibilities in terms of symmetries that could very quickly be discarded and thus – in Darwinian fashion – discover the symmetries that couldn't so easily be self-cancelled to universalised nothingness quite so fast.

There were the global dimensional asymmetries that explain the existence of spacetime extent and energy density content as the general gig of the Universe as an "existing by persisting as an expanding~cooling system" story. And there were the local or gauge asymmetries that could cause isolated particles to condense out of the radiation flow and become negentropic dust that made an atomistic mess of the otherwise pretty clean void until eventually enough time past for this dust to catch up and self-erase.

So metaphysics since its recorded dawn has offered this kind of self-organising tale based on a logic of vagueness, the dichotomies that then can break the symmetry of a vagueness by their asymmetric structure, and the complex hierarchies of negentropic eddies that can form on top of the general downward turbulent entropic flow.

Metaphysics got there early. Physics is catching up fast.

Exactly. Except lossy is the feature and not the bug when progressing from analytical intelligence to synthetic wisdom. — apokrisis

:up:

I see this and completely agree, but what I'm getting at is instead the necessary tradeoff involved in having any finite personality. Lossy compression is one thing, but a lack of data is another. I can't explore every path and get all the 'data' in the first place. To be what I am is to also to not be what someone else is.

instead the necessary tradeoff involved in having any finite personality. — plaque flag

But that is how you could even construct a grounding sense of selfhood. The existential crisis in life is not finitude but vagueness. Our job semiotically is to conjure up meaning in a fruitful dialectic between the self and its world - the world it is pragmatically producing. What you say is finitude is what I call the complementary limits on possibility that make being - as dynamical balance - something crisply measurable.

What we want to escape is vagueness. Where we want to arrive is in a realm of crisply expressed possibility.

Finitude doesn’t even exist. Although we may be bounded by asymptotic approach to a horizon.

To be what I am is to also to not be what someone else is. — plaque flag

I don’t get this. You can’t be something definitely different unless that is a contrast to how you are generally the same.

You are saying the existential crisis is realising you can only live the one life, follow the one path. Or perhaps nearer the bone, you can only be exceptional by sacrificing all else to one thing.

I’m just not seeing the logic of that. But I think maybe there is here a buried dichotomy of whether your one life is largely a matter of accident or choice, Does it lack meaning even to be exceptional when it was just a matter of chance, a win in the generic or cultural lottery? Does It only count if we are self-made creations?

If we understand ourselves as natural beings - the product of evo-devo balancing acts - then the hope is to become pragmatically adapted to our environments. You seem to have more Nietzschean aims in mind. You would have to clarify why “finitude” is a bug rather than a feature from a pragmatist point of view.

Were Hegel, Coltrane, Chappelle, Napoleon good dads?

Of course in practice that doesn't really matter either way as their few offspring were immediately swallowed up in the anonymity of a much vaster pool of population growth. But likewise, even their achievements were something else someone would have done - or at least done similarly enough not for it to count as a material difference in the unfolding of larger human history. — apokrisis

Why the "similarly enough"? Why did the universe or human history need someone Coltrane-ish? Why did it need jazz at all?

What on earth can anyone do that would count as a "material difference in the unfolding of larger human history"? If Fulton hadn't invented the steam engine, someone else would have, or they wouldn't, and humanity would hurtle toward the end a little slower or a little faster or about the same, depending on what happened instead.

To say something this weird about any individual, let alone an individual whose life work is meaningful to a great many people, you have to take a perspective from which nothing matters but the cold, hard truth that we're all doomed in the long run. Not going to argue with that.

I just don't understand what "material difference" means in this context. There's no difference that makes a difference to the Big Sky.

Why the "similarly enough"? Why did the universe or human history need someone Coltrane-ish? Why did it need jazz at all? — Srap Tasmaner

I didn’t say it did. I was taking @plaque flag at face value for the sake of his argument.

From the point of view of the Cosmos, what matters is that we humans work to accelerate the entropification of its realm. And even that doesn’t matter in any strong sense. It just has the tellic force of “inveterate habit”. Being effete matter and all.

Got it. I guess in the long run, it also won't matter that I said "Robert Fulton" instead of "James Watt".

Everything here is lost to history within about three posts. This is a safe space for misplaced confidence. :grin:

Everything here is lost to history within about three posts. This is a safe space for misplaced confidence. :grin: — apokrisis

I'm glad I'm not the only one. Sometimes I find myself in a discussion with someone and I can't for the life of me remember the point we were exploring.

And why also frame this as what kind of historical individual would you like to be? Knowledge is collective. — apokrisis

I agree that knowledge is collective. An 'existentialist' tries to articulate the way the world exists through or for individual personalities who have to figure out their role, which includes deciding what knowledge 'really' is. This is just to tell the whole truth. [Kierkegaard raised similar issues about Hegel.]

The Conversation is adversarially cooperative.* I think we agree. What master does it sereve ? To what goal does it hasten ?

Answers to such questions are expressions of personality, adoptions of criteria, the getting on of escalators for a continuation (after the initial choice) that may be algorithmic. Beginnings are therefore mightiest.

Can one personality contain and reduce all the others ?

*Coherence norms individually may mirror the reality constraints on a tribe. A leader's incoherence leads to a nonadaptive cacophonous practice in an unforgiving world, so nature 'insists' on unified egos (on the memetic evolution of the universal adoption of identity as the norm of logical consistently and coherence in a being held responsible for explaining its actions). Brandom is great on this stuff.

But that is how you could even construct a grounding sense of selfhood. — apokrisis

Well, yes. But there's a personality type that tries to ingest everything essential and worthwhile about all other types. Hegel is famously associated with the swelling blob that harmonizes errors (all other partial-finite personalities) into a grand and complete self-consciousness.

So we get a finite personality that wants to be its own other -- no longer finite. One's opponent always has about the same number of 'bits' of complexity, right ? Ye shall know them by their windmill / shadow / projection. To cast no shadow, to miss out on nothing essential. But we can discuss this attempt from the outside. Can the creeping fire of irony be put out ?

So do you want to be famous to history or a great dad? I would reply a good life is going to understand that these ought to be complementary goals, and that we should start by being satisfied by striking the right dynamical balance. — apokrisis

It's hard for me to believe in a free lunch. As Kojeve or someone noted, if we were immortal we could eventually get around to everything. But mortals are haunted by opportunity cost, to name just one ghost. Is it better to be Beethoven or Kant ? Who's to say with authority, having somehow been both ? And who's to say that what is 'said' in defense of Beethoven isn't the music itself ? Who's to say, with authority, that Kant told us more than Beethoven ? I live in concepts largely myself, but I can use concepts to contemplate the possible limits of their range and authority.

Kojeve's book on Hegel makes explicit this 'getting on' the escalator by assuming that a certain kind of conceptuality is the king's highway. Given that first step, the rest follows. But that first step is 'irrational.'

Amen brother Flag! — wonderer1

Thanks ! I love preaching the word of Zod (who is great fun in Superman 2).

I've talked endlessly about this. Anaximander and his Apeiron. Peirce and his cosmic growth of reasonableness. The Big Bang as a symmetry-breaking of an "everythingness". — apokrisis

You definitely address the issue in general. But I have trouble (might be my problem) making sense of the subject or place of enunciation. Presumably we are stuck in/behind the human nervous, with human goals. Does that constrain your theory ? Can your theory serve the heat death directly (to put it playfully), or must it serve the replication of your genes ? Or ?

I swear I'm not trying to be difficult. I really want to clarify the issue.

But mortals are haunted by opportunity cost, to name just one ghost. Is it better to be Beethoven or Kant ? — plaque flag

Interesting point. In the finite amount of time and brief attention span of my life, I've never considered pursuing an intellectual or cultural project of consequence. It's more likely: do I sleep in or do I do the shopping? And I suspect that no matter how many years most of us are given to live, we are never going to be Beethoven or Kant. I doubt talent like this is just waiting for time to unleash it. And I suspect that's a blessing. Maybe being Peter the electrician, or Mary the accountant is a finer and more rewarding experience in the living of it (certainly compared to Beethoven). Even as a half-baked romantic, I think I would much prefer an 'enjoyable' life to an influential, or prodigious one. The question of a realist theory of language and all that this might imply may well be a decadent and nugatory pursuit. :wink:

Kojeve's book on Hegel makes explicit this 'getting on' the escalator by assuming that a certain kind of conceptuality is the king's highway. Given that first step, the rest follows. But that first step is 'irrational.' — plaque flag

First steps are abductive. Rationally constrained to be that which could scale in general fashion as a causal account.

So I disagree. It is the deduction of the consequences that follow that needs to have its conclusions baked in by logic. And then from there, we are back into the real world of inductive confirmation. The evidence either inclines us towards our hypothesis or it doesn’t. We learn and move on.

If that magisterial view of rational inquiry seems a bit sweeping, well it works. So believe it until a better method comes along.

In the finite amount of time and brief attention span of my life, I've never considered pursuing an intellectual or cultural project of consequence. — Tom Storm

Interesting to hear because it's been so different for me, though as I got older I realized it didn't really matter.

And I suspect that no matter how many years most of us are given to live, we are never going to be Beethoven or Kant. — Tom Storm

Very true. But when I was in a band we sometimes felt greatness in the moment, pouring out something from the center of us, whether or not it was relevant to others. Creative friendship is like a love affair.

Maybe being Peter the electrician, or Mary the accountant is a finer and more rewarding experience in the living of it (certainly compared to Beethoven). Even as a half-baked romantic, I think I would much prefer an 'enjoyable' life to an influential, or prodigious one. — Tom Storm

I hear you. Ties into the above for me. Relationships are central. Art can be a great part of that. At this point in history, given the surfeit of great stuff already out there, it's hard to want to play some belatedly recognized lonely genius or even some famous person too afflicted to enjoy the success.

The question of a realist theory of language and all that this might imply may well be a decadent and nugatory pursuit. — Tom Storm

I'm willing to consider that me doing philosophy is like my cat grooming herself or sharpening her claws on this cardboard triangle we bought her.

If that magisterial view of rational inquiry seems a bit sweeping, well it works. So believe it until a better method comes along. — apokrisis

Just to be clear, I don't mind sweeping. Is Shakespeare a better philosopher than Peirce ? Why or why not ? Different forms of sweepingness. I like grand theories.

The mouth of the funnel can be as wide as you want to imagine. It is all going to narrow down to the method of pragmatic reason - the semiotic modelling relation - in my view. — apokrisis

If you have a particular goal in mind that will constrain your thinking, narrow it down. The semiotic modeling relation would be one conceptual constraint, which I have to say I'm wary of universalizing.

Sure. But what I am stressing is that art is not a solitary enterprise. It doesn’t exist unless it is shared. — apokrisis

That seems too narrow a view of art to me. Art may be a solitary enterprise or it may not be. No one escapes from being influenced by some aspects of culture, even if only by being inducted into a linguistic community. But the social dimension is by no means the whole of the story as i see it. I paint and draw and I also write poetry; when asked why I do these things I say in regard to the first "to discover how I see, and how I feel and understand beauty and aliveness in terms of tone, colour, intensity and calm in terms of visual composition".

I have painted for more than fifty years and only recently bothered to pursue showing any of my work. Similarly, I write to see how I think. I'm not much concerned about publishing my work; because that's not why I do it. If I published it ans someone could relate to itl got something out of it, then great. If no one related to it it wouldn't matter to me because I know what it means to me.

Technology, as logic paired with fossil fuel, is what has actually put human society on its exponential path of becoming the global planetary organism. The domestication of the Earth with a metabolism of concrete, cows and corn.

Philosophy barely talks about this with any insight. Economics and sociology are only waking up to it. — apokrisis

This I totally agree with. :up:

There is a metaphysics here where biology > physics.

Now that is what counts as a paradigm shift and a social surprise. But also one that aligns with mind > matter if you squint just right and understand this in terms of Peircean immanence rather than Cartesian transcendence. — apokrisis

And this! I have no truck with transcendence because I think it is incoherent and irrelevant; but that's just me. I have no objection to others entertaining such ideas (or believing that they are in fact entertaining ideas :wink:)

I have no desire to disabuse anyone of anything unless they ask for it by arguing for, or simply asserting, whatever, as being the one truth or true path to the truth.

Rationality is a collective enterprise, but it is a method not a set of conclusions; conclusions are matters for individuals. A valid argument is only as good as its premises (which are themselves not justified by the argument, but in some other way, with its own set of presuppositions). In other words, at least in relation to metaphysics, soundness is in the eye of the beholder.

I swear I'm not trying to be difficult. I really want to clarify the issue. — plaque flag

Think of it this way. Imagine a lake damned up behind dirt mounds. The second law describes how it wants to run down to a more general equilibrium but can’t right now. You with a digger can hasten this project. And the second law doesn’t mind if you stick a turbine generator in the flow. More energy is going to be lost than you can extract, even if turbines can be approaching 90z efficient. Besides anything you extract will be used or lost in transmission pretty soon.

So organisms can strike a bargain and dip their ratcheting machinery in the entropy flows they can unlock.

The Universe is more of problem to explain in entropy accounting as in fact the total entropy does not change if you count the negentropy of the ever growing spatial expansion that cancels out the entropy of the ever cooling material contents.

Hence the idea of the free lunch, the quantum fluctuation out of nothing. And hence justification for the deeper vagueness-based story I’m telling when it comes to the Cosmos itself rather than the parasitic colonisation of convenience entropy flows by the machinations of living and mindful organisms.

Is Shakespeare a better philosopher than Peirce ? Why or why not ? — plaque flag

What would Shakespeare have said? What would Peirce have said? From their points of view, what do you suspect would be the answer and why?

We can use a word like “philosopher” widely or narrowly. But with that freedom comes the responsibility to not employ it confusingly and thus render our utterances vague.