From a systems perspective, subsystems leech energy (negentropy) from their parent systems. So if entropy were ever at a "universal maximum" it would be theoretically impossible for any subsystem ever to emerge. Since cosmic evolution is manifestly systemic evolution (concurrent with the emergence of new dominant laws) entropy would have to be at an initial minimum. Either that, or the entropy of the universe would have to change over time.

In what sense could a completely undifferentiated cosmos even be said to be ordered though?

1848: Year of Revolution by Michael Rapport — Maw

A good read. Enjoy.

A fraudulent god; there's a concept.

Since the first commandment is "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" you could say that Christianity is explicitly polytheistic. Of course, the phrase "the one true god" is also found in the texts of many different faiths. Implying that "other gods" are all frauds.

This is a fallacy called reductio ad Hitlerum. — frank

Nazism was itself the product of a complex historical chain of ideological and political developments. Just because it went horribly awry in the hands of the reigning psychopaths one cannot for that reason alone condemn and convict all of its historical antecedents. Likewise, as a contemporary, Heidegger certainly could not help but be a product of the same historical milieu. Perhaps he was a sympathetic exponent of a version of the system that actually came to into being, perhaps he was even cast in the role as an apologist for that system by its ideologues. But that doesn't make him culpable for the worst of its failings, or incriminate him as one of its architects. He was an intellectual existing in an unfortunate milieu.

To this extent I'd agree with your characterization of the fallacy. Hitler was responsible for what Hitler did; history was responsible for creating the conditions that made Hitler possible.

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The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics
by Eduardo Mendieta

Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
by Gilles Deleuze

What’s your solution, best guess, or daydream? — Experience of Clarity

I think you optimize your mind towards the object of application for the general benefit. So how you do that varies with your personal preferences and skills and context I guess. Which why it is great there is such a variety of philosophical domains.

Personally, I'm starting to volunteer at the local library, trying to get more politically involved, trying to figure out where and how we may be going wrong today by understanding the history of class conflicts and revolutions. Those are my strategies.

But i say again, it is the way of how philosophy should achieve this combination that makes all the difference.That's the "juice" and the real question I think. — dimosthenis9

I was thinking about that this morning. I guess this is asking, to what extent is philosophy modular? And it is as modular as you need or want it to be. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind play well together. So do neurology and neurocomputation and linguistics. But you can make a lot of progress just focusing on epistemology, which itself covers a lot of ground.

So maybe, is there some core thing to which all of these various areas of interest contribute mutually, whether individually or in concert? Time and again the answer seems to be the self or (as I see them inextricable) the self-in-society. In which case, those philosophies which examine this theme explicitly, social-ethical which I picked, or maybe cognitive-phenomenological seem to best exemplify what philosophy is about, qua ultimate practical application.

I'm finding everything uniformly good. Three seemed a little dense with the catalog of characters and titles, but I think it reflects that world. As I mentioned elsewhere, the Habermas I'm reading analyzed exactly the nature of the salon as a forum for the meeting and melding of the aristocratic and plebian\creative spheres and ideologies, it was rewarding to read them in parallel.

À la recherche du temps perdu #4: Sodom and Gomorrah
by Marcel Proust

I was referring to "us" as the condition of human uncertainty faced (or ignored) by each person, making philosophy our ticket to seeing our part (and with others), thus bettering our response, ourselves. — Antony Nickles

I think this is the basis for a kind of meliorism, versus pessimism. I would typify myself as a melioristic naturalist.

to the extent philosophy is tempted to remove our responsibility to ourself — Antony Nickles

Yes, as I embrace the spirit of Naturalism, I see myself as an agent of the the universe. So my greatest moral duty is maximize my own potentials and my contributions to society.

So would it be fair to say you see philosophy itself as kind of enlightened humanism?

In the same way that Kant says the "prohibition of publicity impedes the progress of a people toward improvement" I think the evident corruption of the proper functioning of the public sphere (due to contamination by dominant-exclusive interests) is not only a detriment to socio-cultural progress but a contributor to socio-cultural decay.

That is a central and timeless point. Can I contribute to society if I myself don't see the world clearly? If I merely read books about social struggles but never exercise my own mind in a real, live social struggle, I rob my own development, misfiring in my attempts to contribute to society. — Experience of Clarity

What is your answer?

Right, in the same way that my hallucination most certainly exists. — Metaphysician Undercover

The hallucination is that you are hallucinating.

You can call an atom a thing if you want. Things are systems of a very basic or maybe well-understood kind. The point was you said an atom had a purely theoretical and not a real existence, which is absurd. Maybe the theoretical concept of an atom doesn't correspond in toto to the actuality, but that is a limitation of perception and representation that doesn't eliminate the underlying correlation of the intentional object and the reality it intends towards. You can't perceive a "season" but seasons most certainly exist. Our mind simply does not operate in the requisite dimensions to intuitively apprehend seasonality as an object. Some people can intuit the objective reality of complex spatial relationships that are not centered on themselves, while many can't. That's how the heliocentric-model (theory) came to be. And it took a long time. People are stubborn in their limited perceptions sometimes.

You obviously have no education in basic chemistry, so you take the route of dfpolis, deny the facts and ignore the reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, that is the obvious fact here. My education must have gaping holes in it. Much more obvious than the facticty of atoms being evident qua properties in the external world which we experience constantly.

An "atom" is a theoretical representation. Atoms do not have independent existence in nature, — Metaphysician Undercover

Ye are quite mad lad. Bon voyage, enjoy the ride! :)

A "system" is a whole, and as such it requires a boundary, or principle at least, which validates its supposed existence as a united whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Systems are functional entities characterized specifically by their differentiation with respect to an environment and their stability, among other things.

If a system isn't a real thing then certainly, by your logic, there are no real things. An atom is a system. And yes, it is an 'arbitrary' boundary if by that you mean at some point the atom didn't exist and at some point it will cease to exist. Again, if that is your definition of arbitrary, then we live in a Heraclitean world and the only thing that really exists is change.

Do you accept that a "system" is an artificial thing? So any experiments carried with a system are designed and ordered by the engineers of the system, therefore not necessarily giving a proper representation of what is natural. — Metaphysician Undercover

Systems are absolutely a fundamental feature of natural reality. I completely espouse Laszlo's perspective that the systems theoretic framework is a paradigm shift in conceptualizing the nature of reality, one which handily absorbs pseudo-problems like that of mind-matter, since mind-matter systems demonstrably exist and can be evaluated in systems-theoretic terms.

If anything, the relationship between "purely" artificial systems - qua models - and natural systems is of key interest to me.

I am using ChatGPT more as a way of fleshing out my own thoughts, as I'm already well-acquainted with the details of almost every answer it gives. However it does catch some stuff, and it even presents interesting novel points once in a while. The philosophical content is in my questions/statements, to which the responses are usually parenthetical.

The only thing with intelligence in the entire galaxy is humanity. — Leftist

That's a huge assumption that only illustrates the limitations of human knowledge. It originates from an core orientation of philosophical pessimism which in itself has no basis. One can just as easily adopt an original philosophical optimism, one that recognizes even in our tiny little speck of existence a huge spectrum of intelligence. This leads to the conclusion that, not only are there probably other intelligences, there are probably other intelligences far more advanced than our own.

Wikipedia tells me "In information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality." Care to state your case? — Metaphysician Undercover

I actually covered a lot of my views relating thermodynamics and information theory by way of cybernetics in the dialog with ChatGPT I just posted in the Lounge. There is a lot of preamble because I needed to contextualize the discussion to make sure the neural net was weighting things correctly. The history of the conversation appears to change the nature of the response to any given question.

There is an additional portion to the chat I had subsequently that brings in the concept of analog computing, which is interesting because in it information is instantiated as form/structure. I might take that a bit further so I haven't appended it to the main dialog yet.

For my own interests, mostly the "manifest image" of everyday life, I think there's a lot of interesting ground that could be covered by an epistemological oriented metaphysics, as exemplified by C.I. Lewis and more recently by Raymond Tallis. — Manuel

This is very interesting and prima facie not in my acquaintance. Thanks for sharing!!

Whitehead was my personal preference, because I happen to think process philosophy is a powerful concept. I hoped that people would feel free to recast using their personal exemplars... :)

Right now I'm having fun with ChatGPT for free. I realized that, as a neural net, its primary operation consists of processing data through a layer of "hidden neurons" that basically function to tease out abstract similarities between inputs, which can be equated with concepts since the architecture is software implemented. It seems pretty responsive to novel input - I got it to revise its use of certain concepts - uncommon versus unusual - and the revisions stuck between chat sessions, even though it doesn't retain data from session to session by its own account. It was also willing to define new functional terms. It offered me the operation of "dual response" when I asked it to provide me the option to compare its first runner-up response the to one it actually selected, and to give me an easy way to ask it to do that.

So I'm going to start chatting around some philosophical concepts, hylomorphism, dualism, the mind-body problem, and see what this "abstraction engine" can dredge up. A platonic dialog of anamnesis with an AI I guess you could say....

the number of ways macroscopic properties can be microscopically instantiated -- for that is what entropy describes. — Dfpolis

Interesting. I have heard entropy characterized as the tendency to disorder or randomness, negentropy as the opposite. I'm also familiar with the information-theoretic usage, which some people believe overlaps. Order arises out of disorder, it's a natural(istic) fact.

I just reviewed the entire thread, didn't find any reference to the microscopic instantiation of macroscopic properties (other than when you brought it up just now).

Of course this is repugnant to the rational mind, to think that order could emerge from disorder, — Metaphysician Undercover

Maybe I'm just naive, but how is the well-documented physical phenomenon/fact of negentropy not in and of itself sufficient evidence of this?

I like to say, perspective is everything. Asking what is the point of anything sounds like more of an emotional than an intellectual response. The alternate perspective is to see yourself as an apex product of billions of years of evolution. In a not-insignificant sense you absolutely are this universe from which you at the moment feel so alienated. Explore that possibility....


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Thanks, noted. I read Descartes' Error, I preferred Damasio's Error though.... :naughty:
I am still keen to read Jaworski on hylomorphism. I'll just have to bite the bullet.
edit: Jaworski's 2011 book Philosophy of Mind is available on Archive.org . Noice.

Thanks for the feedback @Nickolasgaspar. Like you, I'm motivated to try to find application of philosophical concepts where they can be of most benefit. If "publicity" has contributed to the rapid advancement to and of modernity then we should certainly be leery of the manipulation of the public sphere by special interests, if that impairs its "proper" function.

Interestingly, the next chapter talks about the evolution of the public sphere through the medium of salons and coffee-houses. I'm also concurrently reading Prousts' Rememberance of Things Past, and one of the major recurring themes throughout the first 3 books (as far as I have gotten) is the role of the salon, the interplay between intellect and aristocracy. It's like a case-study of Habermas! A happy accident.

I agree with this last part. I think of philosophy as a diversity of approaches for not taking anything for granted. — Tom Storm

So as a kind of mental training or discipline? I would one-hundred percent endorse that.

Gilles Deleuze et al ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spinozist_philosophers
It may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.
— G.W.F. Hegel
:fire: — 180 Proof

Would you say that Spinozaism constitutes a "philosophical system", such that "philosophical systematicity" could be considered a category? Is the exemplariness of Spinoza's work a function of its systematicity?

So, which branch of philosophy serves as an example of philosophy that clarifies … what exactly? What philosophy is, maybe? — Jamal

Well hermeneutics perhaps. But then, is that a philosophy, or a tool? Depends who you read. Ricouer covers a lot of ground, and he uses hermeneutics liberally.

No doubt, there is a rabbit-hole there. If you don't feel that it is possible to create a category along the lines I did - primary tradition and recent exponent - I get it.

I wonder, though, if there is a philosophical reason I like them, rather than just a personal reason -- which I'd be more apt to believe the personal reason, it'd be interesting if there was some underlying philosophical aesthetic that makes these choices the choices we're thinking about, too. — Moliere

If your personal aesthetic is philosophical, then your personal reasons might also be?

More charitably, I suppose it can be interpreted to mean “which of these is the most philosophical?” Or “the most typical of philosophy”. — Jamal

Yes. Although, not to quibble, but isn't the entire point of providing an example to clarify? For example, I could provide the truth tables for inclusive versus exclusive disjunctions, which may not be very informative to some people. Or I can offer you can't have your cake and eat it too as an example of an exclusive disjunction, which is much clearer.

Gilles Deleuze et al ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spinozist_philosophers
It may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.
— G.W.F. Hegel
:fire: — 180 Proof

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