But he was the scion of the ruling dynasty who also happened to have trained as an ophthalmologist.

So you’re comparing guns with nutrition?

I guess if you live in a society with high rates of gun ownership and the possibility of violent crime then it would seem necessary. That’s the ‘vicious circle’ aspect of gun ownership. The more others have weapons, the more we feel the need for them. That shows up in the spikes in gun sales that often happens after mass shootings

It seems to me I’m asking a straightforward question that is being met by circumlocution.

The thread is about gun control, and my comment was about equating gun ownership with civil freedom. You might explain how what you said has a bearing on that.

Or, the root of the root of the issue is how to deal with the inevitable monstrosity and absolute horror show that is human nature, unrestricted. — Outlander

So does this mean, because human nature is horrible, then you’re under threat, hence the need to arm yourself? Is that what you’re saying?

Mind independence doesn't mean what we might think it means. When talking common-sense realism: of course the moon exists when nobody is looking, and the tree falls in the forest where nobody can hear. And on a common-sense level, that is quite true.

But the question of whether things exist independently of the mind, is not the question of whether they exist whether or not you or I, in particular, are aware of them. The question arises from the realisation of the role of the mind in perceiving what we know to be the external world. The brain and the central nervous system are in contact with the world through the sense-faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. The mind or brain integrates all of that data with our remembered world-model to construct a panoramic vision we know as 'the world' (panorama literally meaning 'seeing all'). Without that conscious and unconscious process of data reception and synthesis, there would be no world to see. It's not something infants see; they have to learn how to see it, an act which takes the first few years of life.

'Sure', might be the response 'but even if you're not conscious or not there, "the world" continues to exist.' And in one sense, it does - but again, we only know that, because we're able to consciously contemplate it. We have an innate sense of its existence, and all of the empirical data indicates that it existed before we, as individuals, were born, and will continue after we die. But that knowledge is still grounded in our 'mind's eye', so to speak - even our knowledge of what it is.

Realism neglects the role of the mind in this process. It takes the world as given, without considering the role the mind plays in its construction. That is the context in which the idea of mind dependence or independence is meaningful.

The root of the whole issue is the equation of weapons with civil liberty.

By the way, Zaroastrianism (the first monotheistic religion) argued 3 postulates: Good thought. Good word. Good deed. Little has changed in religions since then. — Astorre

There’s a Buddhist anecdote that an elderly questioner once asked the Buddha, what is the core of his teaching? He replied, ‘Cease from evil, learn to do good, and purify the mind.’ Taken aback, the questioner said, ‘but a child knows that!’ ‘Yes’, was the reply, ‘but how many grown adults are able to live up it?’

A conversation between John Vervaeke and Evan Thompson about The Blind Spot book.

(I bailed on it after about 20 minutes but I’ll leave it here.)

So what didn't Bell prove 55 years prior? — noAxioms

Bell didn’t prove anything. At the time, the required experimental apparatus and know-how didn’t exist. He worked out what needed to be proven, but the actual proof had to wait for those guys that won the Nobel (well after Bell had died).

Glad you found it helpful. I realised from the comments on this topic, that a lot of what I’ve learned (mainly from The Embodied Mind and Mind in LIfe) is not at all obvious to the casual reader so maybe some background would be helpful. As mentioned, that primer was generated by AI and I haven’t read everything on it but I’m working through it. (I’m dubious about the ‘radical enactivism’ section, which I wasn’t familiar with, but I’ll leave it there for the sake of completeness.)

@Dfpolis - I hear your concerns about conceptual clarity, especially regarding the distinctions between vegetative, sensitive, and rational. I want to clarify that when enactivist or biosemiotic perspectives speak of ‘intentionality’ in relation to basic life forms, they are not proposing that such organisms possess beliefs or conceptual intentions in the sense that rational sentient beings do.

Rather, the claim is that a rudimentary, pre-conceptual kind of directedness — a teleological orientation toward what is beneficial or harmful — is already implicit in the way living systems maintain themselves. This isn’t to collapse the distinctions between kinds of beings, but to suggest that what we know as intentionality in its mature form has developmental roots in the self-regulatory dynamics of life itself.

Enactivism doesn’t deny the classical distinctions drawn from De Anima, but it provides a different way of framing the continuity between life and mind. It focuses on the enactive structure of living beings — how they bring forth a meaningful world through their activity. In this sense, it can be seen as an interpretation of Aristotle’s principle of the soul as the form of a living body — particularly in his account of perception and movement, where the organism is already responsive in a way that presupposes some mode of purposiveness.

But you could quite rightly say it is a kind of ‘neo-Aristotelianism’ as it is very different to Aristotelian Thomism, but then, it also draws on a considerable amount of scientific discovery since those times. But hopefully an elaboration rather than a contradiction.

For anyone interested: a primer on ‘enactivism’ and ‘embodied cognition’, generated by Google Gemini, reviewed and edited by me. Contains a brief overview of key terms, concept, and readings in enactivism.

What do you think of this quote? — hypericin

It came to mind as I wrote, but in the context, it is not a counsel of despair, rather a spiritual admonition regarding the emptiness of worldly achievements

People today are well aware of biological purpose, including their own. I once saw a tee-shirt that read "Born. Work. Fuck. Die." As if to say, — hypericin

What are the basic drives that animate animals according to darwinian biology - that would be the 'four fs' - fighting, feeding, fleeing and reproduction. And as evolution is now the secular creation story this attitude is a consequence. But human purposes being reduced to biological drives is a recipe for despair, it fails to honor what makes us different. And what your post reflects is actually the very crisis of meaning which has been precipitated by the collapse of values.

The meaning crisis refers to a widespread feeling of emptiness, disorientation, and lack of purpose in modern life, often characterized by feelings of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. It's a societal condition where individuals struggle to find meaning and connection in their lives, potentially leading to ineffective coping mechanisms and a sense of disconnection from communal and sacred aspects of life. This crisis is fueled by factors like secularization, loneliness, and a loss of traditional narratives and structures.

And central to that, is the sense of purposelessness driven by the narrative of a meaningless cosmos onto which individuals are purported to project meaning. 'Consume, be silent, die.'

It may very well be that you have important insights to communicate, but to do so, you need to reformulate your insights using terms with shared meaning. — Dfpolis

They are not insights of my own, rather I’m trying to express those developed in the primer I generated. (I'm not wishing to come across as pedantic, but there are many new concepts and terms in this field which need to understood to make sense of the idea.)

Rather, it is that matter has taken a form not anticipated by those who developed the principles. — Dfpolis

That's pretty well what I'm saying. It is not vitalism. Vitalism posits a special non-physical "life force" or élan vital that distinguishes living beings from inanimate matter. It's metaphysical and implicitly dualist.
Enactivism, by contrast, sees life and mind as implicit in the dynamic interactions between organism and environment. It avoids invoking any extra force, instead considering organisms as embodied, autonomous systems engaged in meaningful activity. This is why the term 'being' is specific to the organisms. Beings act, whereas things are only acted upon.

The claim isn’t that rudimentary organisms possess rational or even sensory intentionality — but that what we call intentionality at higher levels of cognition is rooted in the more basic organismic fact of self-directed activity. Even Aristotle’s notion of the soul as the form of a living body entails that living things are not simply moved but move for the sake of something — even if that’s just continued existence. This 'for-the-sake-of' structure is already a teleological — and in that sense, proto-intentional — orientation.

John Millbank's point, which is more radical, is that this is really just the Reformed theological tradition's view of man and nature, only with grace and God removed — Count Timothy von Icarus

Makes sense to me. Counterpart to Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic.

Have a look at the primer I had created on enaction.

Bell's theorem (and not just 'theory') demonstrated the impossibility of local reality almost 60 years ago. — noAxioms

It was the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics which was awarded to the experimentalists who proved it. (I wrote an article on it for anyone interested).

I'm trying to work out whether a big lie actually matters, or if it's just reflecting what the public already believes. — Tom Storm

I think it’s cause more than consequence. Sure there was a ready audience but they had to be fed, and lead.

Yes, my son's two chooks are continually complaining, in a chook kind of way, that they're tired of the feed they're given, and make a great show of excitement whenever there's a suggestion that some special treat might be forthcoming.

In any case - the main point is the context - that the specific expression became associated with Trump's election denial, as distinct from it being a general term for political mendacity.

Maybe, but this lie is a torpedo aimed at the Ship of State.

The 2020 election was stolen.
— RogueAI

I was going to ask that myself, but how many people actually believed it? — Tom Storm

According to this story, two years ago 70% of Republican Voters thought that Biden’s election was illegitimate https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-republicans-think-2020-election-illegitimate

Incidentally while it has been mentioned, it hasn’t been made explicit in this thread that the expression ‘The Big Lie’, capitalized, refers almost exclusively to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, in which he persists to this day.

I’ve been reading US media for years, it is common knowledge that Trump had committed numerous acts which lead many observers to predict the end of his political career - only to see him brush it off and carry on regardless. ( Jan 6 2021 being an outstanding example.) So the response of his base becomes that it doesn’t matter what he does, the problem lies with his perceived accusers. He has broken so many standards that to all intents they are no longer recognized in the public square.

That list describes it well. There is also the factor of ‘outrage fatigue’ - norms of truthfulness and decency are broken so often and with so little apparent consequence, that people merely shrug, and it becomes normalized.

To avoid replacing one form of tyranny with another, he advocates for a renewed commitment to liberalism and a revival of Enlightenment principles such as free speech, open debate, and individual liberty. — Number2018

Sounds eminently sensible to me. One of the founders of the Australian Greens, Drew Hutton, was interviewed recently about woke ideology (hate the misuse of grammar by the way) in respect of trans rights. He says since he left the party (around 2009), it has developed a stance where even discussion of the issue warrants sanction (implication being that there is nothing to discuss). He says that many dedicated conservationists who should be involved in the Green Party have left or even had their membership terminated for questioning the emphasis on the issue. I suppose it is one of the issues that green left politics tends to constellate around.

It is certainly true that living beings have organic integrity and self-directed (aka immanent) activity. So, as a result of their form, organisms act in a way that non-living matter does not. Still, this activity is potential in non-living matter. So, mechanists are correct in saying that the same laws guiding non-living matter guide the behavior of living matter. Still, those laws do not provide a full explanation. They allow, but do not imply life. To have life, we need to specify forms of matter that can live. It is those forms, as Aristotle saw, that make the difference between living and non-living matter. — Dfpolis

Thank you for your comments, and pleased to have found some common ground. Many of the contemporary theorists I'm reading refer to this aspect of Aristotle's philosophy (his Biology is, I think, considered relevant in ways that his Physics is not. Some say he anticipated the idea of DNA, though obviously not the molecular detail.)

So, we can only say that non-conscious forms of life "interpret" or "value" only by anthropomorphizing, and doing so abuses language by stripping interpretation and valuing of their essential, conscious and intentional character. — Dfpolis

Here, however, is where I would draw attention to the emerging school of thought known as 'enactivism' or 'embodied cognition'. This school of thought enlarges the meaning of intent (or value or purpose) beyond that which only conscious subjects are able to entertain. There's quite a large literature on the subject, and it is difficult to summarise, so I've asked Google Gemini to create a primer for it, which explains some of the key concepts and texts. Strictly speaking, the main subject of its enquiries are cognition, rather than consciousness per se, however, as you can surmise, there is considerable overlap in these terms. So it is not a matter of 'abusing language' - the terms are being used in a broader way, and in a new context.

As a corrollary to this, I think the theorists in these schools would question whether organisms at any level of development act solely in accordance with the principles of physics and chemistry. As has been pointed out by the mainstream biologist Ernst Mayer 'The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information.' Even simple organisms strive, persist, and preserve themselves which has been illustrated in the activities of the slime mould, which is a single-celled organism with no identifiable brain whatever (for which see How the Universe Thinks without a Brain).

Yes, but that does not make them subjects in the sense humans are. — Dfpolis

No contest! But, again I am working with a rather broader concept of subject-hood than conscious subjectiivity. (The term for the sense of 'being a subject' is 'ipseity' which is being extended somewhat through these new disciplines to encompass the awareness of organisms less developed than the higher animals.)

I fully acknowledge that this way of thinking is new to me, I still have much more to study and absorb, and I may therefore be mistaken in my presentation of these ideas. But I think to make that judgement some familiarity with the key texts and concepts is required.

Deterministic genetic variation and mutation produce variant offspring that are selected by processes guided by the same laws of nature. — Dfpolis

As I understand it, a better understanding of epigenetics undermines the idea that genetic variation is purely deterministic. Variation can be systemic, responsive, and developmentally mediated, not just molecular noise filtered by selection. Organisms are not just passive recipients of selective pressures — they are active participants in shaping their own evolutionary and developmental environments.

Questions of the meaning of life long predate the scientific revolution, so it is suspect to make it somehow responsible for a fundamental human question such as this. — hypericin

On the contrary, the idea that the Universe can be understood in terms of undirected physical interactions and processes is very specific to post-scientific revolution. And I question that pre-moderns would typically wonder about ‘the meaning of it all’, as existence in those times was very much circumscribed by custom and your place in the social hierarchy (not that this was necessarily a good thing.)

The real ‘crisis of meaning’ is very much associated with the advent of modern technological and (post) industrial culture. And again the absence of meaningful social structures is not necessarily negative, as individuals are much more at liberty to pursue their own ends. But it can’t be denied that feelings of alienation, disconnectedness, loneliness and anomie are characteristic of modern culture and that this is often underwritten by a sense of meaninglessness.

What your essay seems to miss is the notion of hierarchy in purpose. Of course, biological life is full of purpose, at every scale. But at every point where purpose is found, one can ask what purpose does that serve? — hypericin

I didn’t say nor imply that there isn’t a hierarchy of meanings. At the most basic level the organism’s purpose, and the overall aim at which all of its constituent parts are engaged with, is persisting, staying alive. This drive animates (literally) all living creatures.

What do you think—does this mechanism still hold today? — Astorre

I don't think that it's so much a conscious strategy, as the fact that America twice elected a Big Liar as President. If that hadn't happened, then we wouldn't be discussing it - there would still be plenty of disinformation and false news about, but it wouldn't be emanating from the Oval Office.

You keep accusing me of exactly what I don’t claim — apokrisis

You said "That which is initially some unfiltered instant becomes sharply framed in terms of its particularity within a setting of generality. Firstness as an initial vagueness is transmuted into Firstness as some crisply fixed quality held within a system of interpretance. It becomes seen as a particular instance of the general thing we have learnt to label as "redness". The transformation of "unfiltered instant" into "some crisply fixed quality held within a system of interpretance" - reflects the nominalist tendency to treat qualities as products of classification, not as independently real (as Peirce does). That is conceptual nominalism: the idea that qualities only become real in or through being subsumed under general concepts or categories.

The question I am engaged with is “if not monism, then what?” — apokrisis

It's the same thing. Physicalism is monist, because it presumes only one fundamental substance, matter~energy. The epistemic cut then has to be represented as being an aspect of the physical world, because, if it's not physical.....

Peirce speaking in the spirit of his time and place.... — apokrisis

You always use that excuse to deprecate Peirce as idealist. 'Oh, he was a man of his times, he didn't know about systems science'. He was a thoroughgoing idealist, he said it himself many times. (He was before Moore and Russell's rebellion against idealism.) The 'holism of the triadic relation' is only an aspect of Peirce's ouevre, but it's the part biologists have appropriated for their purposes. I'm sure that Peirce would see the Cosmos as alive.

Peirce understood the divine not as a traditional, anthropomorphic God, but as a creative and unifying force inherent in the universe, manifesting as thirdness and the tendency towards order and habit-taking.

Sure. No problem with that at all. Besides, I never advocate for belief in God. There's no creator God in Buddhism. And that passage sounds like something you would find in many philosophies.

My antagonism is about your constant efforts to frame any comment I might make as reductionist and scientistic — apokrisis

I didn't introduce those terms. I said 'physicalist', which is how you described yourself. About the fact, as I said, and to which you didn't respond, that your system has no real place in it for human beings, as several others have commented. And the fact that the only place for organic life in your model is as kinds of heat sinks. What is there to like about that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a draft I'm working on:

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

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

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

Nominalism. Just what Peirce wasn’t.

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

Chalk and cheese.

It’s a criminal referral for what DNI Gabbard called a “treasonous conspiracy” — NOS4A2

A made-up report which directly contradicts an earlier, bi-partisan report, chaired by Marco Rubio, now Glove Puppet of State, which established that Russia really did try to meddle in the 2016 election, had a hand in publishing leaked DNC documents, and had favoured Trump over Clinton, but had not been able to change any actual votes.



And Trump accuses Obama of treason :rofl:

Impeach Now! :rage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of whom were eminent scientists.

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

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

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

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

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

What is nous when it is at home? — apokrisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But notice that 'insert themselves' implies agency.

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

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

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

There's your materialism showing again.

There. Is that enough phenomenology for you? — apokrisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Markoš concludes that all living creatures are interpreting subjects, and that all novelties of the history of life were brought into existence by acts of interpretation."

There is no reason to think that most non-human creatures are conscious of anything. Positing that they are is a pure, unsupported extrapolation. It is much better to confine our conclusions to those supported by evidence. — Dfpolis

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

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