But, in my humble opinion, a complementary view that renders the complexity of systems more comprehensible, is neither a definition nor a fundamental understanding. — Pieter R van Wyk

Opinions are worth shit. Make the argument if you can.

Your whole schtick about “give me a fundamental definition” is crackpot talk. Systems science is a large and varied field of study. It would be like asking you as an engineer to give me one fundamental definition of an engine. One that unifies all the types of engineers that there are.

The objective sciences deal with quantitative measurement, whereas values are qualitative judgements. — Wayfarer

I don’t agree but it’s not an issue. You are talking here about epistemic idealism and that’s near enough pragmatism. We are modellers of reality and so always on the side of subjectivity in that sense. No problem there.

It’s how you slide into ontic idealism which I question. I appreciate that you do make an effort to bat for idealism. But the pattern seems to be that one minute we are talking about cognition as a useful way of constructing “the world” - an embodied model of the world as it is from a point of view that includes an “us” as its centre - and the next you assume that an ontological argument has been made. That this “us” is more than just a figment or avatar of that world modelling activity. Suddenly something that was an agreed part of the epistemic process has broken free and exists in its own unplaced realm outside the pragmatic modelling relation an organism has with it’s environment.

I sought to elaborate on that, in respect of the claim that life and mind can be completely understood in thermodynamic terms. — Wayfarer

But that’s not what I say. What I say is that life and mind are so grounded in the task of navigating entropic flows that it would be hard to escape this most basic reasons for evolving a body and a mind.

Humans - as social organisms - could perhaps have the complexity to rise above the world in some way. Yet look close at human history and one doesn’t see that. There is a lot of talk about high flying ideals, yet all the social activity cashes out in creating a machinery of exponential growth.

it can be supported with reference to sources, hence the mention of Nishijima, who was no ‘idealist absolutist — Wayfarer

So where does value come from in this telling? Is it on the side of the epistemic relation between an organism and its world, or is it something more - an ontological level break between the realm of matter and the realm of ideas?

So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

Exactly. Walk me through it.

We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word spirit is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively. — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

Your source equivocates. That is what I pointed out. Is the qualification that spirit is only used figuratively meant to walk us back from the ontic to the epistemic? We talk as if value and meaning are separate from material being and yet share the same Universe, but that separateness is then just a figure of speech?

Are we walking idealism all the way back to semiosis - which indeed says physical systems share the world with organismic systems? Entropy can be regulated by information. Clearly I would be happy with that and only want to claim that semiosis is the well worked out scientific theory that now makes good this epistemic version of idealism.

But you appear to want to defend some version of ontic idealism. And your sources likewise equivocate at the crucial point.

So, according to this AI summary, a system is: two models, one a compositional hierarchy the other a subsumption hierarchy. Do you agree with my understanding? — Pieter R van Wyk

Two models as two perspectives on the same thing. One offers the synchronic view and the other the diachronic. So one focuses on how a hierarchical systems is, the other on how it developed. One speaks to structure and the other to process.

You get the drift. Complementary views that help make the complexity of a system comprehensible.

What, about the passage you quoted, suggests either? — Wayfarer

Its...

Matter alone has no value. — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

In logic, the corollary of that is that value alone has no matter. And that is absolutist talk, matey!

As a relativist or dichotomist, I would says "matter" might be regarded as a state of minimal value, and "value" as a state of minimal matter. This phrasing makes clear my ontic commitment. I am speaking of matter and value as now the connected limits of a dynamical balance. Reality is to be found in between these limiting ideas. Reality is always some hylomorphic mix of matter and value – if that is the terminology you insist on using.

It sort of works from a systems point of view as value does speak to purpose or telos. But form is also important as purposes have to be embodied as causal structures – structures of constraint. When you call something good, or beautiful, or divine, or whatever, the question becomes, well what is the shape of that? What does that look like in practice?

Even Plato's realm of ideas had this hierarchical structure. The universal notion of the Good anchoring the Universe of mathematical forms that gave structure to the concept of the ultimately optimal. The sub-realm of triangles gets to know what its best – most beautiful and regular – shape is. Then all the triangles that are increasingly ugly and mishappen in some way. Down to the truly crappy triangles being scratched out with a twig in the sand.

Absolutist talk sounds important and impressive. But it equivocates.

If you parse this phrase carefully, what function is "alone" serving? Does matter have no value after it has been emptied of value, and so some value had to have been there all along? Just as little as possible. Matter becomes defined as a state of infinitesimal value, and then that seeming so close to zero, we can forget to ask how matter might enjoy both some kind of value and also no kind of value in the same breath.

Idealism can shrink its inconsistencies very small with coy wording. Yet always the equivocation lurks.

Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose. — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

This runs into a problem when science tells us matter is shaped by a thermodynamic purpose. The Big Bang could happen as it was a grand carving out of the very Heat Sink it was throwing itself headlong into. The Universe expands so it can cool, and cools so it can expand. Some material crud forms in the midst of all that once the temperature has dropped to a few degrees from absolute zero and distance has grown so that planets are only moderately warmed by the dying fusion embers that is their local star.

Then civilisation and culture can rise up out of the biofilm that starts to coat a rocky planet with a convenient temperature. You get little critters and then clever apes. A narrative game starts up that leads to a technological one. You get a lot of talk about values as the way to coordinate a bunch of people using an easily sharable social algorithms. Little aphorisms like the Golden Mean and "do unto others". It helps bind the people to the authority of a value system if they believe it is not just pragmatically optional but absolute and damnable by hell fire. Or perhaps instead penalised by coming back in the next life to try over from the level of a bug or mushroom.

Hey, when faced with the strained metaphysics used to bolster ontic idealism, I do start to see the advantages of nihilism.

If civilisation and culture want values and meaning, do they really have to commit to idealism and its absolutism? Can't a sorry old pragmatist like me not have values and meaning without all the claptrap? Just living a productive life and enjoying it?

I think there are other, better ways of seeing things. I've tried to lay that out in this thread. — T Clark

But all you keep doing is collapsing causality to the notion of efficient cause and then talking about the other thing of "context".

There are always other models of causality. You have something like you are describing in proximal and distal causes in medicine. Or proximal and ultimate causes as defined by Ernst Mayr. In quantum physics, contextuality is invoked as the better way to explain non-locality.

My approach is based on Aristoteleanism as that aims to make a proper logical dichotomy of causation. It divides it into the two complementary halves of some set of top-down constraints and some set of resulting bottom-up degrees of freedom.

Each half accounts for the other half. And so you have a model of causality that sums to 1. Nothing is missing. But also you have the thing you are really wanting – two directions in which causation as a whole is interacting. A holistic relationship between downward or globalised constraint and upward or localised construction.

Perhaps Aristotle's four causes are too complicated. But I already said that. You only really need formal and material cause. But then it is also useful to make the further division that is causes in general and causes in particular.

My claim is that in many cases, focusing on cause makes it harder to account for context. — T Clark

And this is so until you learn to expect causality to be dichotomised in the systematic fashion I just described.

If you start out not just expecting causality to break down into a tale of actions in a context, but for this to be a mathematical-strength reciprocal relation, then focusing clearly on the local degrees of freedom will automatically sharpen whatever you might mean by the global context – the global constraints that form these exact freedoms you complain about as being vision-obscuring.

For example, to have atoms, you must have the reciprocal thing of a void. The two go together in a necessary way. For a mass to have a shape and a motion as the kind of things it does, it has to have the matching thing of a context for this to be so. A large and empty space in which the mass can have a shaped boundary where it suddenly stops, and a sufficient vastness so it can rattle around until it collides with some other atom that has a shape and a motion.

So even for our most cartoon picture of nature, causality is based on a reciprocal pairing of local freedoms and global constraints. If we form a mental image of what the degrees of freedom look like – a wee atom – then this brings with it an equally definite image of the kind of context in which such dof would exist. In this case the kind of absolute Euclidean emptiness that is a context rendered as a-causal and ignorable as possible. And yet as a spatial expanse, it does contain this atomistic content. It does play some residual causal role.

The salt marsh I described is out there in the world doing the kinds of things salt marshes do. What's causing that? It's dozens of different factors interacting with each in a complex pattern. What does the idea of cause provide in that kind of situation. — T Clark

Again, complexity can be modelled. And that is done by hierarchy theory.

Once you get used to understanding causality as the division into constraints and degrees of freedom, you can then start stacking things up into hierarchies. A network of networks ordered by their scale.

You have the salt marsh ecology – itself a hierarchy of organisms – interacting with its environment, the sea and the weather, over minutes, days, months, seasons, centuries and millenia. The tide goes in and out twice a day. The global climate changes rather more dramatically every 100,000 years.

So start with the general principle of how causality works – some functional balance between a stabilising set of constraints and the degrees of freedom keeping the show dynamic – and then start adding all the possible spatiotemporal scales that this balancing act must play out over.

In hierarchy theory, you call it a set of cogent moments or cogent scale. It defines how much context you need to take in to account for the degrees of freedom you are interested in. Its all explained in papers like this.

I wonder how much of our disagreement comes from a difference of understanding of what metaphysics is and how it applies. — T Clark

Yep. I don't see metaphysics as just people making shit up in random ways that take their fancy. It is about extracting the deep principles. The presuppositions that can be deemed absolute as their emergence as the eventual horizon on inquiry is inevitable.

Metaphysics was solved almost immediately in Greek philosophy. The unity of opposites. Hylomorphism.

But then the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution fired up. The Church had taken over metaphysics for its own social purposes. The Industrial Revolution happened and the world fell in love with a causality based on switches and levers. Metaphysics got broken into engineering and spiritualism.

How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence — Pieter R van Wyk

Ah. You have a self-published theory to push. And you don't seem to have any interest in placing it within the 2500 year old tradition of systems thinking. Explains a lot.

"If and when we consider things, contemplate things and try to understand things, we can consider anything. In doing this we must convert some anything into something. And there are only two ways we can do this: First we could designate some name (perceive some possible purpose) to some collection of anything and then contemplate some valid description of this specific collection. If we can agree on the unique things in this collection we have named, we could have a meaningful conversation about something. This is then the notion of a system, how we understand all physical things, even those physical things that give us a perception and an understanding of abstract things. Let us name this Systems-thinking, for future reference.

If it is not possible to name something and agree on its constituent parts - we could consider some anything in terms of something else. If we could agree on such a relationship, a meaningful conversation could also ensue. This is how we form an understanding of all conceptual things. And this we could name Relation-thinking for future reference. — Pieter R van Wyk

So far, this is rather rudimentary. But it does lean towards the kind of distinction that a contemporary systems thinker like Stanley Salthe makes. The difference between compositional hierarchies based on the relation: "Is-a-part-of" versus subsumption hierarchies where the relation is: "Is-a-kind-of".

I'll let AI generate an instant summary for you....

Stanley Salthe distinguishes compositional (or scalar) hierarchies, which are based on spatiotemporal scale, from subsumption (or specification) hierarchies, which are based on developmental history or logical relationships. The two models help to analyze complex systems from different perspectives.

Compositional (or scalar) hierarchies
This hierarchy is based on nested parts of a whole, defined by differences in magnitude, size, and rate of activity. It provides a snapshot of a system at a given moment in space and time.

Relationship: "Is-a-part-of".

Structure: Portrayed as boxes within boxes, or levels within a system. For example, a population contains organisms, which contain cells, which contain macromolecules.

Dynamic relationships: Lower-level components are constrained by the next higher level. Importantly, downward regulation is not transitive across the entire hierarchy but must be converted at each level.

Way of knowing: Understanding a system involves subdividing it into its constituent parts (a reductionist approach).

Subsumption (or specification) hierarchies
This hierarchy is based on logical or historical sequence, where earlier, more general conditions are subsumed by later, more specific ones. It describes how a system develops over time or how different fields of knowledge build upon one another.

Relationship: "Is-a-kind-of" or "develops-from".

Structure: Portrayed as nested brackets, with more specific classifications contained within more general ones. For example, the biological world is a special type of the material world, which is itself a part of the physical world: {physical world {material world {biological world}}}.

Dynamic relationships: Control or influence from a higher, more specific level (e.g., biological forms) can extend down through all lower levels (e.g., physical forces), as the higher levels impose new informational constraints on the lower ones.

Way of knowing: Understanding a system requires looking at its history or ancestral conditions.

Nihilism. — Wayfarer

A silly retort. My semiotic approach starts with accepting that life and mind exist by being in a modelling relation with the world. So that can be considered a variety of epistemic idealism. Peirce of course used Kant as a launch point.

So life and mind are fully part of Nature and entrained to its thermodynamic constraints. Genes and neurons are the obvious physical basis of a relation based on codes, information, symbols – habits of interpretance. Biology and neurobiology can tell us all about the way ideas can shape the world.

Biophysics provided the last missing piece when it showed that there is a convergence zone at the semi-classical nanoscale of chemistry where biological information can switch the physical flows of entropy at "no cost". Or at least the flicking of the switch has a single standard small cost – the cost of an ATP molecule or two – to cause some organic chemical change picked freely from an almost infinite library of such reactions. Any organic molecule you want, we can make it. All same price. You pay $1 please.

So as a variety of epistemic idealism, semiosis is different as it fully cashes out in a rational account of what is taking place at the point where ideas interact with the world. There is no longer any explanatory gap that ontic idealism can exploit. Not even the tiniest one.

And rather than being a species of Nihilism, this biological and neurobiological level semiosis paves the way for the more interesting and complex case that is the linguistic and mathematical semiosis on which human social and cultural order is based. Semiosis based on publicly sourced and shared code in the form of words and numbers.

So say you are concerned with some philosophical notion like "values". You want to know how values as an idea can exist somewhere in an uncaring and Darwinian world. You want to argue that because Scientism leaves no clear place for them, therefore – any real argument being omitted here – ontic idealism applies. Values are somehow part of the great Platonic absolute. Its own realm of the good, the true, the beautiful, the perfect, the divine, the right. A collection of things of that kind which are the shiny objects in the eternal kingdom of pure ideas.

Well actually you don't want to be so specific about what ontology you mean to commit to at this point. Best to keep it vague otherwise it all starts to fall apart under critical analysis. The important thing is that "values" supports the notion that to the degree science bangs on about the material basis of Being, it is missing "what matters most".

But semiosis happily puts human values back in the actual world. Humans have formed a sociocultural level of organismic being. We exist by modelling the world in terms of our collective narrative and technological habits. We can mine nature to build civilisations. These world narratives or Umwelts could be deemed useful fictions – epistemic idealism – but they work. They set up a feedback loop that results in a compounding growth in human civilisation.

And the more rational and scientific we become, the more we accelerate that production of human richness and variety. The better we get at harnessing the resources of nature and building whatever idea of paradise we might have in mind.

Of course, "values" then become a problem if we start changing the world so fast that we haven't had enough time to update that way of looking at the world in a way that remains pragmatically useful. Like if we still saddle ourselves with Platonic or Cartesian forms of ontic idealism and value absolutism.

But hey. The science on semiosis is in. The grounds for pragmatism are secured. One can move on and join the modern world – engage with it from a vantage point that has the right ideas about it and about us.

Do you still dismiss that as Nihilism?

What stood out to me is that biosemiotics is not a monolithic discipline. — Wayfarer

No discipline involving inquiry could be monolithic. It has to be riven at every scale by its dichotomies - its dialectical factions.

So by the time you can name the first dozen such factions of a discipline, then you are probably starting to explore it properly.

That opens a space where physicalism doesn’t have the last word, and where the epistemic/ontological split really matters. — Wayfarer

Well yes. But you omit the faction that unites information and entropy under dissipative structure theory. Folk like Pattee who directly tackle the symbol grounding issue and show how biology works.

Biosemiosis is a theory of life and mind. If you haven’t solved biology, you are not really ready for the neurobiology or sociocultural levels of biosemiosis.

All of that kind of thinking can be understood as naturalist without necessarily being physicalist. — Wayfarer

Well actually you would want to drill down to the level of biophysics now that science has got the tools to explore that. That is what really made biosemiosis - of the dissipative structure stripe - credible.

That is the province of enactivism or embodied cognition, which I'm sure you're familiar with, — Wayfarer

Wrote books on it. But once again, don’t confuse the epistemic lessons of enactivism with the ontological tradition that is idealism.

Of course we neurobiologically and socioculturally construct our worlds. But the world is still out there and deserves its own best scientific account. The best such account that can then include us in that general physicalist explanation is biosemiosis. The story of how epistemic creatures could arise as Nature’s way of accelerating its entropy flow.

This surprises me. I think of you as intellectually committed to a holistic approach. As I see it, reductionism and causality go hand-in-hand. — T Clark

But isn't my argument here that holism means all four of Aristotle's four causes. And reductionism just means material and efficient cause. Or even in very reduced renderings, just efficient cause. Closed patterns of logical entailment. The stuff of logical atomism.

So that is why I don't understand why you would seem to say you would rather let go completely of causality – and in return for what exactly – while I instead make causality my preoccupation. I can't really see what else there is except the question of why we exist in a Cosmos with a rational order. Causality is the primary metaphysical fact. It is the basis of any explanation or narrative we might have.

Unless we are instead doing ... what?

Over my career I’ve seen how disruptive that kind of approach can be—applying rational methods that ignore environmental and social context. — T Clark

I started out in ecology so was already beginning from there. :up:

This is the kind of thinking that leads to climate change. — T Clark

Well yes. It indeed explains it in causal terms.

Why are we humans cooking the planet? Well fossil fuel hydrocarbons weren't properly entropified back at the time they should have been.

First, bacteria and fungi couldn't decompose the lignin that plants had just invented so as to compete with each other in the new terrestrial race to grow the highest and reach the most sunlight. So someone had to come along eventually to recycle that fossilised polymer. We humans showed up with our steam engines and turbines. We have been scaling up the burning at an exponential rate as there was no obvious reason not to do so. Then by the time a reason showed, we have created a whole culture around exponentialising the breakdown of the stored energy of that buried lignin.

Oil and gas are another such historical accident. The ancient warm and shallow seas went through an explosive era of planktonic growth. But when this died and fell to the depths, the oxygen depleted bottom water couldn't support the aerobic bacteria needed to decompose it. So that got covered over in sediment layers and again became a dense deposit of fossil hydrocarbon in want of a species with the kind of digestive juices that could stomach it. Or at least the machines that would madly burn it at a compounding rate of growth while being protected and maintained by the kind of human society that couldn't imagine any better form of existence.

So – with my ecology hat on – the causal explanation for climate change is as plain as the nose on your face. Nothing would even have gone wrong if the damn planet had the atmospheric physics which would have released the heat all this industrial burning was producing rather than trapping it with the greenhouse gases the burning also created.

It is just a case of bad engineering at the geophysical level. The combustion chamber lacked sufficient heat exchange in its design.

And bad luck that biology didn't keep up with the biomass it was producing from the late Paleozoic era through much of the Mesozoic, so creating an entropy gradient so steep that quite outrageous versions of biological order had to be evolved to get it moving again through a planetary scale dissipative structure.

It understands mind as fundamental to existence, not as a material constituent but as the faculty through which and by which whatever we are to know is disclosed. — Wayfarer

As always, you confuse epistemology with ontology. There is what is and then how we could know.

Putting the two together is pragmatism/semiosis. Pulling them apart into a realm of ideas and a realm of materials is dualism.

And you keep leaning on semiotics and believing it is leading you to idealism. You see it as a sword to smite materialism.

But no. It is the sword to smite Cartesian dualism. So time to learn how to grasp its handle rather than grab it by the blade.

That’s why the supposed fact–value dichotomy is broken: there are no 'brute facts' apart from a horizon of meaning in which they matter. — Wayfarer

As a pragmatist, I can speak to epistemic method. And as a semiotician, I can then speak to the way that cashes out as my ontic commitments. They become related as two sides of the one coin.

You don’t seem to get the neat logic of what Peirce was actually up to here. He fixed the confusion that you keep reverting to.

You’re setting up 'pragmatism vs. idealism' as if they were exclusive alternatives, — Wayfarer

Clearly I’m not. At least I am certainly clear and you are not as yet. You are confusing pragmatism for materialism as idealism demands that as its perfect enemy. Pragmatism did the other thing of subsuming both camps into its broader holism.

Maybe I should have called this thread "Against Efficient Cause." — T Clark

Well there is nothing wrong with efficient cause in itself. It is part of the Aristotelean package. And clearly it is the notion of cause that we humans have in front of mind. We are always looking for the switches to switch and the levers to pull. Where we fit into nature, into the flow of the world, is where we can insert a choice - a difference that makes a difference.

So there is no surprise that folk would see efficient cause as what matters most. That is what the game of life is all about for us. Making things happen that otherwise wouldn't have just happened by themself. If they happen by themself, then we either have to learn to live with it or find ways to prevent. If it rains, we put roofs on our houses. It still rains, but now we don't get so wet. The roof is the switch and lever – the effective cause of water being diverted suddenly sideways.

When you say "context" I think you are saying something similar to what I meant when I wrote "What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. — T Clark

Context would be the facts about what constrains the possibilities as the other kind of facts. So not merely a matter of convention. But we are then free to call on both kinds of fact as it appears to suit us. So in the causal narrative we create, conventions can form in what we tend to stress and what we don't.

If I want to teach you to throw a basketball, I wouldn't bother starting with a physics class. But I might draw attention to the mechanics – how you set up your hands and your joints as the right kind of initial conditions for your body as an evolved system of switches and levers ready to fire.

Sure, when we're talking about asteroids or artillery rounds, but what about when we're talking about complex systems like the salt marsh I discussed. — T Clark

Sure. Things get interesting when we jump from complicated systems to complex systems. One where life and mind are intruding on the physics to help organise nature.

But haven't I bored you to death about that already? Physics only has the broadest notions of finality. It has its global constraints that boil down to thermodynamics and dissipative structure. Its only ruling tendency is to increase entropy. And it will spend a little negentropy to get there. A vortex develops as a structure to drain your bath as that way it starts to drain a lot quicker. Air and water can change places far faster and the job of equilibration gets done much sooner.

Then life and mind come along and note that this is the causality of physics. You are allowed to exist under the scope of becoming an informationally-complex dissipative structure. If you can add efficient cause – some system of levers and switches that unblock pent-up entropy flows – then physics will pay for you for that small service. Become the blades of vegetation intercepting the sun, become the little critters with legs, mouths and arses. Get focused on imposing a causal mechanics on the world and you can have a job for life, even if you accelerate the entropification of nature just a tiny bit.

A human runs with the power consumption of a 100 watt bulb. At least they did until they upskilled from being just foragers scratching around salt marshes for whatever they could jam in their gob.

I have no problem with this, but I think sometimes, often, it doesn't make sense to consider causality at all. — T Clark

That is an idea completely baffling to me. How can you even think if not causally? What would that even look like?

This question points to the problem that arises when dichotomies are taken to be features of your worldview—as if they disclose the very structure of reality and the limits of what can be known.

One of the most prominent is the fact-value split—and it leads to what William Desmond called “default atheism.” — Wayfarer

Well dichotomies do disclose the limits of what can be the case. And fact-value is not a well-formed dichotomy. It is just a broken dualism.

Idealism is fatuous as it imagines the world made perfect under a set of guiding values like good, truth, beauty, the divine. But what kind of plan is that? How can monotonic personal values be turned into real world facts? What social or ecological structure – what natural structure – could implement this hope?

Sure, you can speak of the aspiration. But where is the delivery, the execution? If you listen to idealists, their idea of a plan is to either wait until you die and get transported up to Heaven, or else undergo some form of ego-death down here on Earth. Everyone stop everything you are doing and cease being a striving individual engaged with the daily business of living. Meditate to medicate.

In practice, only pragmatism works at all. Steering some balance between complementary limits. Formulate a system of values that is dichotomistically framed. One judged by the facts that are its outcomes. The facts that you then either want to leave alone or the facts you want to think about how to change.

Idealism points the mind off into the never-never. Placeless notions of perfection. Pragmatism is what lives down here on the surface of the Earth. Focus on the dichotomies we need to negotiate and we can come up with plans based on reason and evidence.

If it is true that the movement of the stars does not explain why the ball fell to the ground from the fifth floor, it follows that there is a kind of causal disconnection. — JuanZu

Exactly. From our human point of view, we want to know about our causal freedoms. We want a notion of causality that puts us in the centre of the Cosmos, large and in charge, the maker of purpose and the decider of form. This just what is natural to being an organism that lives by exploiting the possibilities of its environment. We come at nature with our cunning causal plans.

We throw a ball at exactly the angle where nature takes over the rest of the chore of hitting some desired spot. And it is important to know that far off stars can't affect that in being too distant in spacetime. Otherwise we would have to factor them into our mental calculus too.

And indeed, our causal narratives used to take celestial influences quite seriously. Conjunctions of constellations needed their horoscopic interpretations if we were to make wise decision down here on Earth.

So causality is the narrative we tell, the map of how to get to where we want. But then philosophy came along and started injecting a little more metaphysical rigour into this exercise. What was causality as a narrative at the level of the Cosmos itself?

From what I’ve read, ontic structural realism is the attempt to rescue scientism from the wreckage of materialism. It has no interest in the nature and plights of existence as lived, but only in the abstract representation of physical forces. It’s like the Vienna Circle 2.0. — Wayfarer

I'm well aware of how you read things. Science is always scientism. Nature must include the supernatural. Plug in the algorithm and print out the conclusion without further thought.

If I throw a ball from the fifth floor, I know that the cause of the ball falling is because I threw it. — JuanZu

But did you mean to throw it down by throwing it out? Your own action only imparted a thrust that should have seen it travel on forever along that straight line. It is only because the ball encountered both friction and a gravitational field that it was caused to instead curve.

Though of course you could have factored those effects into your throw and thus know that the cause of it landing where it did was down to an artfully arranged mix of your freedom to launch a ball in a direction and the inevitability of what would happen thereafter due to contextual constraints.

If your intent was to simply state disagreement, consider it duly noted. — Relativist

Don't be so touchy. I simply pointed out that physics does deal in "abstract objects and physical objects" and so physicalists – as those committed to a metaphysics of natural causes – mostly only deny the existence of "supernatural objects".

I then explained myself as to what I meant. Where you are speaking about objects, I would instead talk about causes. Or even better, the modal distinction between chance and necessity.

So physics combines the absolute abstract necessity of the laws of symmetry with a notion of materiality that is as reduced as much as possible to pure contingency. And this is the approach that has worked out spectacularly.

Physicalism is not materialism as such. It is the deflation of materialism that Aristotle first proposed – as a metaphysical-level argument – in his hylomorphic theory of substantial being.

Talk of "abstract objects and physical objects" is misleading as any kind of object is based on the idea of the substantial being that physicalism – as a naturalistic account – is meant to be deflating. If you call yourself a materialist, you are already losing. If you want to make sense of being a physicalist, you do this by showing you accept the reality of mathematical structure in combination with the matching reality of the degrees of freedom that a global state of contraint leaves contingent or undefined.

Hence why quantum physicists joke about operating under the Totalitarian Principle. "Everything not forbidden is compulsory". This gets at the structural realism that has become the basic ontological commitment of the physicist.

For instance, if special relativity constrains all quantum action under Poincare invariance, then a great deal is forbidden in terms of vacuum fluctuations. And yet also, contrariwise, absolute freedom is then granted to the gauge symmetries available within that global state of SR constraint. Under quantum field theory, you can have SO(3) symmetry broken down into SU(2). And if reality can break in that fashion, it must do. Which is lucky for us as we can exist. There can be quantum fields organised by SU(2) that start spitting out fluctuations which become the kind of fundamental matter described by the Standard Model.

I mention Ontic Structural Realism as now the fact of metaphysics catching up with the physics and excitedly explaining the modal distinction of chance and necessity on which this physicalism stands.

Folk may have the impression that physics exists to cash in the metaphysics of Greek atomism. And to be fair, that is what really inspired Newton and his mates.

But this was just a stepping stone. Now physics is firmly based on the hylomorphism of symmetry and fluctuation. Structures of constraint and the degrees of freedom they also have no choice but to form. Or the physics of relativity coupled to the physics of the quantum.

A coupling that seems the new mystery. But then again, only if you make the metaphysical mistake of expecting ancient atomism to apply to the description of gravity and not step back to think about the Planck scale in properly hylomorphic terms.

When I go back to what I wrote about the chain of causality, one thing that jumps out to me is that constraints—events that prevent future events—have a bigger effect on what happens in the world then causes—events that result in future events. — T Clark

This is certainly right. And it is why Aristotle identified four “becauses”. So your constraints are formal and final cause. But you also need your degrees of freedom, or efficient and material causes.

Causality as efficient cause is not wrong. It just is always shaped by some prevailing context.

Constraint removes possible futures, but normally still leaves many possibilities open. Accidents can happen. Asteroids could be on paths that just miss the Earth as there was no constraint on that fact.

So constraints determine events, but mostly in only the most general fashion. Rocks normally fall down rather than up. But they could just as well land there as land here.

Accidents are then the opposite of this determination in being the freedom for particular things to have happened within the space of free possibilities. We can tell tales of efficient cause where something might have happened, and then there was a difference because it either did or didn’t.

The asteroid could have been a lucky narrow escape or a historical extinction event. Either way it was determined by the laws of physics. And which thing happened was left as an accident of history.

Of course mechanics would say the asteroid was fated in it trajectory by setting off in some state of initial conditions. But then that would require the arrangement of that very particular set of circumstances for some good reason. An extremely careful choice of starting point in a world that now - looking at things from this complementary point of view - appears not offer any constraint on that being what got chosen. By someone with an interest in the whole affair. Wanting to show how what happened was inevitable from the start.

So causal accounts are flexible like this. We learn to make good choices about how much events are to be explained by contextual circumstances and how much by accidents or free choices.

Which then gets us into what we mean by finality. Rocks have tendencies to fall. Humans can want not to.

The actual science is independent of all the metaphysical claims you made. — Relativist

Utter bollocks. But go ahead and back your assertion up with the argument that might sustain it. :up:

One more thing: you imply that there's some consensus on some particular metaphysical model (among physicists? Among philosophers?) I sincerely doubt that. I know it's not true of philosophers — Relativist

You are not sounding sufficiently familiar with either the metaphysics or the physics. But prove me wrong if you like.

You just get angrier as the years go past.

Again, just check out what I already told you seven years ago. Long before AI was around to deal with one's more mundane intellectual chores.

Inspired by the twists and turns of modern physics with its foundations in permutation symmetries, structural realism has become a big thing in metaphysics. The slogan is “relations without relata”. Reality exists by conjuring itself up out of a pure holism of relations.

It's controversial because of course there must be something concrete, individual and material to be related, right?....

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4383/of-relata-and-relations-grounding-structural-realism/p1

Since you asked so nicely I’ll let AI bring you up to date with how current metaphysics views current physics.

Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) asserts the world's fundamental reality is its objective modal structure, which includes relationships and the natural necessity and possibility governing them. The "chance" in OSR relates to the concept of probability and potentiality as aspects of this fundamental structure, alongside necessity. OSR suggests that objects are derivative of this structure, not vice versa, and that the world's fundamental features are not the intrinsic properties of objects but the relational networks they form, which possess modal features like necessity and probability

And I already told you all this seven years ago now.

Are you suggesting that the metaphysician ought to be instead a physicist, and that being a physicist instead of a metaphysician would make the metaphysician a better metaphysician? — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. I’m suggesting that if you want to talk sense about something, you need to start by understanding something about what it is.

Would you take much notice of a virgin telling you what sex is all about?

It's more than a 'dualist complaint', it was an inevitable consequence of the Cartesian/Galilean division. — Wayfarer

So two guys who ran the risks of heresy charges and book bans unless they made a show of still being good Catholics. Their moves towards materialist explanations had to be publicly renounced. And then a little later, it was the Church on the back foot. Science was rolling and so all the things that materialism could never explain had to become the dualist defence. Science then kept on rolling and dualism has been pushed right out of the show.

Who mentioned God? — Wayfarer

Who didn’t when Descartes and Galileo were outraging the public by beginning to inject some mathematical and observational rigour into matters ontological?

By contrast, pansemiotic or process views (including Whitehead’s) retain the sense in which form, meaning, or constraint is not reducible to the physical but is constitutive of reality itself. — Wayfarer

Wasn’t Whitehead panpsychic? You are free to define pansemiotic how you like, but I place it firmly on the side of physicalism. Even if it is a physicalism designed to be a suitable ground for the biosemiotic view that accounts for life and mind.

Hence the 'six numbers' of Martin Rees. The mother of all a priori's. Why? They were undeniably prior in the sense that they pre-condition everything that subsequently developed. — Wayfarer

The triadic relation between the three Planck constants is more fundamental. And as a pure “Unit 1” relation, it doesn’t even need to come with some arbitrary number. Its number is simply the symmetry of the identity number - which is 1.

it needn’t import God into the picture, only the recognition that constraint precedes contingency. — Wayfarer

But why does one thing always have to come before the next thing? That is the causal logic that is the root of so much ontological confusion. I am arguing - after Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce - that constraints and contingency co-arise. Each is the other’s “other”. Or Paticcasamuppada as your Buddhist mates would say.

So how anyone portrays the ontology of modern physics is just a matter of personal preference. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it does help to at least know the physics, wouldn’t you agree?

the result is less a rigorous ontology than a posture of allegiance: a declaration that, whatever reality ultimately turns out to be, it will count as “physical” by definition. — Wayfarer

Personally, I make sense of it by considering proper subsets of the sorts of things commonly treated as existing: spiritual/supernatural objects (e.g. angels), abstract objects, and physical objects. Physicalists deny the existence of the first two. — Relativist

In fact physics has got more rigorous in the sense of shifting the ontological burden from merely a materialist account to one that is instead fully structuralist. So abstract objects are now included. Physics speaks to both material and formal cause.

The old fashion dualistic notion of material being opposed to spiritual being has been upgraded. Matter has been dematerialised in physics. It is now raw potential. Pure possibility. A gradient of change.

The dualist complaint about physics was that it only spoke to inanimate matter – lumps of stuff – and that made it a story of pure contingency. Billiard balls clattering about mindlessly. The materialist view of nature was patently soul-less.

But physics was already riding mathematics to Platonia. Galileo, Descartes and Newton were significant precisely because they were identifying the fundamental symmetries that are the structures organising nature. The structures that turned the raw material potency into some globally necessary state of lawful order. The abstract objects shaping the material objects.

So the birth of materialism was really the birth of mathematical structuralism and the start of the dematerialising of the materialism which is in fact the lay-view of the "real world". The substantial and object-oriented view that is the way we see tables and chairs, billiard balls and falling feathers. The view that understands the world as lumps of stuff all the way down ... until one encounters atoms as the littlest lumps that can't be chopped any finer.

It is this lay-view of matter that got dissolved in conjunction with the maths of symmetry getting beefed up to provide a proper language for talking about the constraints of structure. Science progressed rapidly once it got this trick – reducing matter to pure contingency and reducing form to the absolute logical necessity expressed by mathematical structure.

So the ontology of modern physics is pretty straightforward. It speaks of pure chance in interaction with absolute necessity. And this is the rigorous framework. And one that clearly encompasses everything causal that needs to be said as it spans the metaphysical gamut from chance to necessity.

Who needs a creating god when mathematical logic already enforces its absolute constraints on material possibility. And who needs a creating god when what could possibly deny the existence of chance and contingency?

How can possibility be made impossible except by some constraining hand. It doesn't need creation to exist. It needs limitation to clarify in what precise manner it exists. And mathematical constraint – the natural logic of symmetry – can do that job. Science has spent the last 500 years showing this.

So physicalism is the world as physics would see it. Materialism is an old hat term. Physicalism now clearly sees the world in hylomorphic fashion as an interaction between naked contingency and rigid constraint.

It all starts with a fluctuation. An action with a direction. The most naked material contingency already organised by the most fundamental dimensional constraint. A possibility actualised and revealing the wider structure necessary to its being. Causality tied up in a neat little package. Nothing further needed to account for what is going on.

Why would that be the best i can argue? — punos

What would you be arguing over? The mathematical notion of subsets? That the set of two things is a subset of the set of four things?

And yes, i understand that systems science, and others, may or may not distinguish between a system and a machine, but i do not (for a reason, not out of ignorance), — punos

So what is this reason?

but i prefer to use my own energy-information framework to work these things out. — punos

Did you mean entropy-information? Kind of like holography, dissipative structure theory, and other examples of physics turning to explicit use of systems metaphysics?

Each of the four Aristotelian causes is fundamentally an energy-information system, or the product of a one. Each one is some mixture of formative information and causal energy. — punos

Uh huh. So Aristotlean hylomorphism as the way his four causes cash out as a hierarchical systems view of substantial being?

Except probably not as hylomorphism arranges things into form/finality as top-down constraint and material/efficient causality as the bottom-up constructing degrees of freedom.

So what you describe is the division into the global structure that constrains and the local potential that gets thus shaped up. The whole produces the parts that are of the right type to (re)construct the whole. But then in contradiction, both the whole and parts are mixes of constraints and potentials themselves?

Perhaps you can explain what you would mean by formal and final cause, and material and efficient causes, being mixtures as you describe. Like what are the proportions in each case and how does that explain the differences between the four causes?

I mean one does want to be able to see how the four causes become the dichotomy of material and formal cause in the hylomorphic formulation. But that doesn’t appear too hard to explain in terms of the local-global distinction being paired with a particular-general distinction.

Finality as the long-run general goal and formal causal as the immediate and particular structure achieving that goal. Then materiality as the long-run general potential and efficient cause as the immediate particular action that results from that general material possibility.

So four gets “reduced” to two x two. You get a global vs local division. But now also a particular vs general division that cuts across that.

This could be what you are angling at. Each of the four causes is itself a mix of the two directions in which the pie can be sliced. Local-global in scale and particular-general in terms of, well, scale.

Material cause would become the raw global potency that is also the sharply individuated possibility.

Efficient cause becomes the sharply particular action which is itself a general long-run feature of the causal order.

Likewise finality is the generality of a purpose that is then also being narrowed to a specific aim, while form is the specific structure that could in fact be a generic class on answers. You can any kind of drainage pattern to empty your bath or organise your thunderstorm, but actually it has to be vortical.

So yes, even duality looks to require duality to complete its duality. What gets broken one way must in return break that which could have broken it, thus returning everything to a unifying whole.

Kind of just like the BIg Bang universe as the double inversion of that which starts out ultimately hot and small in scale to become the ultimately cold and large. The story of a constant doubling in spacetime extent that produces the constant halving of its energy density content.

So hot=>cold because small=>large. And in the end, nothing has changed even though everything has indeed changed. You have inversions of scale in two different directions - extent and content - but each also cancels out the other. Least extent and maximum content become maximum extent and least content.

I’m just pointing out that this kind of doubled inversion is both really complicated to imagine when it is an unfamiliar idea but also that systems logic is how we are now finding our universe to actually be.

It might be where your own metaphysics was headed. That might be why the four causes seem also to have their own further internal structure. As indeed I agree that they do. Each is defined by its positioning within a pair of reciprocal contrasts. The local-global and the particular-general. The kind of complex matrix multiplication that modern physics does need to employ to keep track of the symmetry breaking that is fundamental to the story of the Big Bang cosmos.

For me, a system is a kind of machine, and a machine is a kind of system, so i don’t really make a distinction between the two terms. — punos

Well exactly. But system science does.

So at best you can argue that there are mechanical systems that exist as a subset of the more general metaphysical notion of a system, which is the Aristotelean four causes one.

You personally might not make this distinction. And indeed it is quite common for folk to fail to make this distinction. Yet it is a distinction that exists in philosophy and was about Aristotle's most important contribution to the history of ideas.

The cog is to the watch as the watch is to the system of time keeping. — punos

As I also have said, systems can form nested hierarchies of systems. Aristotle's four causes describes the basic structure of a hierarchy – a system that marries top-down formal and final constraint to its bottom-up material and efficient freedom. Then within this cosmic-level structure, you can have any number of systems within systems. Galaxies, stars and solar systems. Plate tectonics, landscapes, the paddocks of a farm.

So a cog is to the watch as the watch is to time-keeping. Except the watch as a system is caught between the clockwork that is its material and efficient causes, and the world of watch-wearers with their keen interest in keeping an accurate count of the passing of the hours, minutes, and even sometimes the seconds.

So yes, the watch has to be made of something – its cogs as toothed disks of brass that can be locked into patterns of efficient cause. And it also has to do something in a functional sense. It exists in the final analysis as there is this top-down constraint in the form of a society of creatures who have the burning need to make a count of the passing of time.

Why does a watch exist? We can't answer that question fully without following Aristotle's four cause approach. The hierarchical logic that defines the holism of a system – even if it is a sub-system within the system that is Cosmos as a whole.

It seems to me that there exists a minimal construct that represents the simplest form of a particular kind of system. Subtracting any part from this minimal system will destroy it, while adding parts may or may not destroy it, depending of course on the compatibility of the new part with the existing system structure. This essentially allows a system to either evolve or go extinct. — punos

But this is just dumbing down the idea of a system to make it fit our idea of a machine as the canonical system.

The metaphysical definition of a system dates back to Aristotle's view of causality which said the natural world is formed of its four causes – efficient and material cause coupled to formal and final cause. So a system has all four causes, and thus functionality is part of its essence. But a machine is merely, in itself, just a "system" of material and efficient cause. It is a severely reduced system in that half its reason for being has gone missing in the larger story that metaphysics would want to tell.

So consider this. Is a watch part of a system for telling the time?

And then is a cog also part of a system for telling the time? Or perhaps only a part of a system for the more general task of constructing clockworks and other systems where control over gearing ratios is off prime functional concern?

So a watch can be part of a time telling system. Humans can have this need to measure out the day as if time were itself a mechanical process. And then quite naturally, mechanisms that can do that job will start to emerge in the world. The desire is realised as a form that becomes imposed on material being as some precisely engineered arrangement of efficient cause.

The word "system" properly applies to the four cause level of analysis. The whole of what is going on. The systems view is what closes some set of interactions so that they exhibit emergence and self-organisation.

Humans want to tell the time. They might start by dividing the passing of the day using a sun-dial. Then clockwork might do the job better. Eventually a digital circuit can use the vibrations of a crystal to count out time beats with incredible precision.

But these devices just tell the time. That is, there is someone for whom the information matters. The someone that closes the system of causes by having a goal and determining its form.

If the watch on your wrist breaks – say a cog snaps off – then do you wait forever to see if the watch starts to heal itself, evolve its way back to functionality? Or do you take advantage of there being shops that fix watches, and shops that can sell you better watches – in short, a general human system for time-telling that is self-organising in ways that come together to serve that general purpose.

So then a General Systems Theory would extend that very human-centric view of causality to Nature at its most generic level. The minimal system in that "whole of nature" regard.

We would get back to Aristotle's four causes, but now equipped with what modern science and maths has to say about self-organising complexity and dissipative structure.

How do you determine what is part of the system and what is not? — Pieter R van Wyk

If you subtract a part from the system, does it cease to act as a system?

So one could remove any cog in a watch and it would stop telling the time. But if you got a bucket and tried to scoop out every whorl in a turbulent stream, whorls would just keep reappearing until you changed the whole system. Like cutting off the water flow or cooling it until it changed state and became a frozen block of ice.

You will note this is an easy way to tell mechanical systems and natural systems apart. And so why a mechanical view of nature is felt not to be enough by many philosophers.

Is it possible for a system to contain a system? — Pieter R van Wyk

Topological order tells you that systems form within systems to create a nested hierarchy of order. One kind of thing can become the ground for the next kind of thing. But now your maths and physics has to start getting sophisticated to handle that.

However a simple example might be that if a stream freezes, you can now walk across it. Constraints imposed at the level of H2O molecules become freedoms created at the level of some new system that can construct itself upon them.

If yes, what exactly is a system of all systems? — Pieter R van Wyk

The Greeks called it a Cosmos. We call it the Universe. Metaphysics would try to understand it as the metalogic of existence. A General Systems Theory such as you have already dismissed. :up:

It's a dialectical synthesis, not a reduction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There’s a difference between two becoming one and and a dichotomy becoming stabilised as a pair of complementary actions - the asymmetry that can become fixed as it is moved apart in scale to become a structure of relations sandwiched by its local and global horizons.

It would be a strange answer to say that Socrates deserves to be killed because justice is just the will of the many, as expressed as a system of outputs, for instance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You might find is strange. An anthologist like Richard Wrangham instead accounts for the evolutionary value of such behaviour in terms of the self-domestication of humans - the step that actually allowed humans to become tribal creatures. Both generally empathetic and coldly predatory. Strong in forming in-groups as also strong in identifying out-groups.

You are simply applying this ingrained human principle. Social science explains why it was useful for there even being someone like a Socrates in the first place to prize or murder.

First, how is this not a monadic view of freedom? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is getting desperate. Freedom and constraint are being accounted for in terms of each other. They are a unity of opposites. You might then call that one thing, but it is the one thing of an irreducibly triadic hierarchical relation. So not monadic and not dyadic but triadic.

If such "freedom" isn't aimed at any prior end then it is sheer arbitrariness, but sheer arbitrariness is the opposite of freedom. The muscle spasms is not the paradigm of free action. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And away you go. Not listening to a thing I say.

The arbitrariness or contingency is precisely why the system can also consist of its other that is its constraint or necessity. There is the counterfactuality of a contrast taken to its limiting extremes. Which is how meaningful states of balance can arise as a spectrum of concrete possibility inbetween.

A muscle spasm is the kind of paradigmatically locally free and unconstrained action which can now make sense of the other thing which is a muscle contracting under the global constraint of a volitional intent. It is a local power that can be collectively harnessed.

Yet the idea that choice is a limit on freedom is contradictory, hence freedom collapses into its opposite. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Only in your confused telling. The idea of freedom can only exist to the degree that it’s “other” - a context of constraint - also exists.

Hence, freedom as the self-determining capacity to actualize the good must already have an end or nature in view (although we haven't attained it at this stage). — Count Timothy von Icarus

But here you are talking about freedom as it would be understood by the suitably socialised individual. One that has internalised the constraints of their community and culture, so is equipped to trade off their personal agenda against that larger collective agenda.

All you are doing is describing the way that western people were being taught to socially construct their habits of conduct under a particular axial religion and feudal economic structure. The monkish formula of a personal relationship to God which meant an individual had to act with the goal of achieving a Platonic level notion of what was good, true, beautiful and divine.

You have been socially constructed to think a certain way and you can’t escape that training, no matter how often that causes your rationalisations to collapse into self-contradicting confusions.

But survival isn't the measure of virtue. A mountain may last aeons, but it isn't virtuous or self-determining, nor even much of a true whole. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Another argument that is just stupid. Could even a chimp be virtuous? But isn’t a chimp somewhat self-determining?

If you want to argue, at least find interesting edge cases that might be designed to get at the issues in hand. Make some kind of effort to not waste both our time.

To whom does the socially constructed notion of virtue apply except to those who have been socially constructed under that cultural paradigm.

When the missionary lands on the Polynesian beach, Bible and rosary clutched in hand, what is his proper judgement of the savages he confronts - unsaved souls in perhaps some natural state of disgrace. What is his most virtuous course of action when confronted by some other set of people with its own adapted lifestyle - its own socially constructed way of life that seems to have functioned pretty well even in the absence of the Catholic Church and its medieval rehash of Ancient Greek philosophy.

Let’s put your arguments out in the reality of the wider world as see how they fare.

The problem for Hegel though is that his providential teleology seems like wishful thinking. It's Hegel's naturalism and his desire to domesticate the divine by wrapping it in the immanence of history that leads to the good deflating into a monadic attractor. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. Even an Aristotle or Peirce becomes problematic once they try to connect the inherent force of their logic to the socially-constructed paradigms they are meant to also be upholding.

Rationality is telling them one thing - it points towards the structural order of a self-organising nature. And custom is telling them they still need to bend their account back towards being near enough socially-acceptable.

They need to be doing this as if they really mean it too. Otherwise … Socrates! Or the fate suffered by the many Enlightenment rationalists that the Inquisition existed to suppress.

He acknowledges they have strong points and then just defaults to "if you don't like liberalism you can leave," a funny comment from a defender of a globally hegemonic ideology that insists on inserting itself into every culture, by coercion or force if need be. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So Fukuyama likewise follows the logic of his own argument until he hits that point where he encounters the dominant socially-constructed paradigm of his day. He goes a little weak in the knees. He makes the sacrifice he rather regrets which is to acclaim the Pax Americana as the End of History.

Who needs to read the books once you have already read the headline?

But then also, when you speak of “a globally hegemonic ideology that insists on inserting itself into every culture, by coercion or force if need be”, isn’t that more true of the Catholics, Mormons and Scientologists of this world?

As a faith, liberalism seems far more wishy-washy and porous in nature. We did have the UN and various international bills of rights and courts of war crimes. A legalistic structure for embedding a liberal philosophy. But that hasn’t really stuck. History didn’t in fact end at that high water mark.

So again, you can see there is a dichotomy being discussed, yet then treat that as a paradox to be reduced to its correct monistic answer rather the actual dynamic being negotiated in triadic fashion within a hierarchical structure.

Freedom is the power to act. Constraint is the collective rational good. And thus as I have argued page after page, society arises out of the algorithm that is to strike the fruitful balance that is to be found between local competition and global cooperation. Foster the power of independent choice. But then place that in a context where it is being shaped by a communal telos. One knows whether one is fitting in or striking out as the distinction becomes very clear in one’s mind. To compete or to cooperate becomes a choice one has to own and so a power to spend wisely.

Fukuyama is good at giving a structuralist account of how every society in history has had a similar set of ingredients, but balanced somewhat differently due to historical and geographic circumstance. And through examining that evolutionary variety, a general systematic trend can be observed.

If he doesn’t seem a strict Hegelian, it is only probably because Hegel serves as a useful peg to hang his structuralism on. Being a Hegelian in the world of Anglo history departments is instantly controversial. Or it was back when that is how he became overnight famous just for a book title.

:up:

Christianity makes individual salvation the central element of its message. Further, Christian philosophy only develops and strengthens this idea, which could not but influence the social structure and the way of thinking of pre-modern contemporaries: — Astorre

Yes. Christianity was a new social technology. It could break the old world with its tribal kinship structure by shifting hierarchical allegiance from an ancestral genealogy to a transcendent ream. With the church then clipping the ticket as the middleman handling this transaction.

So in some ways it might have seemed like a thoroughly selfless project. But also historians like Fukuyama provide the evidence of how the church became a paying concern as it could shift tribal people from ancestor worship to god worship, and ancestral tribute to church tribute.

Liberation from tribal structure was a significant step in social development. But now the freed individual became part of the new super-clan of the church.

Here we are in particular tracking how this panned out in the Western European context as the Roman Church became divided into its Byzantine and Germanic tribal wings. And how this evolved into a feudalist system some 1000 years after Christianity got going.

From my paraphrasing of Fukuyama:

Christianity turned into its own land ownership and statehood game. Kings of tribes became kings of the common folk, as defined by a church system. Church became an administrative arm dealing with the soul of this corporate body.

The Christian church was different from Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism in that its popes sought to impose new property and marriage laws on old tribal structures. Pope Urban II in 1000s said don’t expect church to ratify old custom as its way was the truth of god.

Christianity cemented English moves towards impersonal law. The kings became the dispensers of court justice. And then the kings themselves were subject to the rule of law under the normative influence of there being a Church and God to say all mortals are law bound. The Church closed the systems in terms of norms of justice and egalitariaism. The same rules constrained, no matter what their personal contingencies.

The Western way emerged from a strong church that claimed the mind and gave the state the body. Then this individualisation evolved its own freedom from church constraint, especially with the scientific revolution and Protestant reformation.

The Catholic Church’s attention to legal codes was important in transforming into modern states. Church came up with Justinian code to reconnect to Greek and Rome rationality, and also Canon law to tidy up its own historic mish mash. So a new institution of legal practice and scholarship emerged.

It also created modern bureaucracy, reinventing Qin China's separation of office from office-holder. Justice dispensed by functionaries of the state. Technical competence and education could start to matter. Chancery staff set a model of civilian rule that kings then adopted

One could go into much more detail. But Fukuyama's point is that the Church itself was plugged into the Greek and Roman philosophy that underwrote a move from traditional clan social structure to a plan for society based on a rational understanding of how to create a social complexity that was able to scale. Western Europe was the ideal Petrie dish for this experiment as it was naturally chopped up into a collection of equal sized kingdoms that were both in sovereign competition and yet united under a general Papal rule. It was a dynamic situation and growing in complexity as it had embraced this more pure form of systems architecture.

A key difference in Europe was that it was politically fragmented into many states, but had a strong church. Europe had its Justinian code as a result of a scholarly attempt to create unity of textual views. Law became a specialised subject at universities, as well as a practice. And it had its concordat of Worms to establish separation of church and state as institutions.

So it took everything to the next level with a sharper and more explicit abstraction. It was about rules not just for some society, but a rational society in general.

Graeber notes likewise how the Church fostered the rationality that paved the way for the full-blown social engineering of the Enlightenment. And the curious way that the tribal habit of mind had to be first broken by identifying the rational with the divine before it came back down to Earth and was allowed to organise human affairs just in being the practice of reason.

An important Medieval Europe innovation was the 1200s idea of the corporation as effectively a legal person. Graeber p304 says Pope Innocent IV in 1250 established in canon law that monasteries, universities, churches, municipalities and guilds could be corporate bodies. This agreed with Platonic approach of Aquinas where angels were ideas made concrete. Every angel represents a species.

So a turn of mind that in scholastic fashion could treat abstractions as solid organising realities. Intellectual bodies in Ernst Kantorowicz words. Europe was able to accept institutions into the human framework of legal and economic protections.

It started with church bodies, then intellectual bodies, and finally cities and trades. Eventually economic entities could own property and rule their own homes. This recognition of individuality as scalefree interest groups was central in creating a liberal and democratic Europe. If it wasn't hurting others, why not let an interest group pursue its own goals?

Graeber notes that corporations thus started as permissive and cooperative ideals. Allowing localised self-regulating community. But then turned into competitive commercial and mercantile enterprises like the East India Company.

Of course, all this is too reductionist: you can't just look at Christianity as the source of everything. All the changes in public consciousness did not happen in a vacuum, but under the influence of many other things, as you noted in your comments. — Astorre

Yep. The history is intricate. What the Church believed about souls or values wasn't really what mattered. Much more important was that it created a strata of society that could foster a rationality that could begin to organise the existing tribal clan structures into a more modern story of free and equal individuals acting in the context of an abstracted framework of law.

A better idea could take root and flourish. Although that better idea was always a balancing act in that it wasn't just about the free and equal individual. It was just as much about a framework of constitutional constraints to place clearly marked boundaries on that freedom and equality.

The question arises: What is the next stage of liberation? Maybe now is the time to free ourselves from the need to be? After all, we are already free from everything else, including any identity, social connections, aren't we? This is exactly where I see one of those very pillars of liberalism that I spoke about earlier. — Astorre

And there we certainly differ. Absolute freedom makes no sense. To have meaning, freedom has to exist within a context of constraint.

You can't have a good game of tennis if no one is following any agreed set of rules. Sure, you can always call for more freedom. But then what are you going to do with it? And when do you remember ceasing to care what others might do with their freedoms if this unlimited freedom to do just whatever is being handed around equally?

So what is the next stage of liberation? A lot of people seem to think it would be nice to get back to smaller and tighter communities. Another form of liberation might be to aim to become more worldly – to be able to move through all sorts of communities and find it easy to fit in with those other ways.

Life makes more sense to me if you see individualism and collectivism as a spectrum of possibilities. Fitting in or striking out are just two kinds of opposing behaviour that we can meaningfully employ. Neither binds us. We can make choices and learn from where they take us.

In terms of the genealogy of these ideas, I think theology is very relevant here, as guys like John Milbank and Brad Gregory have shown. That's one of the ironies of liberalism, the source of its anthropology comes, at least in its origins, from one of the "forbidden sources" of justification. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But Fukuyama does a good job of illustrating how theology was just another important strand of the eventual pragmatic synthesis. Anthropology hardly denies the role religion plays in organising human societies. Although early liberal philosophy certainly argued that humans ought to be in charge of their own affairs and that the lead could be taken from natural science rather than supernatural tradition.

Then in terms of how history has gone, the Anglican Church has turned itself into another social services NGO. Part of the new establishment under “the third way” turn meant to soften the ravages of Thatcher and Reagan’s strident neoliberalism.

We should worry less about what our social institutions say they are and look at more what they actually do.

I've read all of Fukuyama's books so I can say pretty safely that his only option is to justify his ideal case with an appeal to what "makes society work best," which will of course, in his terms, be an appeal to greater consumption, more safety, and the "reasonableness" of prioritizing epithumia. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I came away with quite a different reading. For example....

Fukuyama's Identity argues that Rousseau was followed by Kant and Hegel in creating the modern concept of identity as universal human dignity, and as thus a fundamental social and political goal. So UN bill of rights encodes that telos.
Notion of dignity starts out with Socrates and Greeks treating it as the distinction due a selfless warrior - those who risk life for the group. It was the respect due to citizens who defended the larger democratic organism in a freely chosen way. Or at least fully committed way - the individual accepting the group telos and submerging his own telos.
Those who were ready to make sacrifice then became the nobles and aristocratic leaders of their own community in peace times. So merchants had low dignity. But romantic ideal became about everyone being citizens prepared to submit to the abstracted collective that stood apart from any individual - but then granted dignity to any individual who met its ideal.
Kant’s contribution was to turn the Christian social theory about the moral choice between good and evil into a secular abstract theory that reason itself guides good choices. Fukuyama suggests this arose as a contrast to Hobbe’s materialistic and biological view of man as a socialised animal. Kant said the better part of man was the capacity for detached and impersonal reason - not constrained by physics. Kant sharpened the idea that humans have a fundamental freedom to choose when it comes to morality, and this divides an individual from the world he inhabits in a way that demands dignity as a basic social fact.
Then Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit argues the warrior is in fact a slave in his selfless risk. Real dignity comes through the human labour that transforms the world into a place worth living. So master and slave come to recognise dignity in each other in sublated fashion.
Where Romanticism turned existential in searching inwards for the source of dignity, Hegel was saying the turn was outwards to the construction of the best political structure to express self-actualising humanity. Hegel was inspired by the young Napoleon pushing through his rational framework following the French Revolution and the 1806 battle of Jena.
So the ideal system was citizens recognised as moral agents, equal under law and capable of democratically sharing in society’s decisions. The set-up was that all individuals have absolute moral freedom, but guided by reason they would choose to do the right collective thing. Or rather, they would be able maximise their own goals within the framework of a global social goal. They would creatively and not slavishly lift up their worlds, in local-global systems fashion.

So better and worse cash out here as creative vs slavish. One kind of system seeks the win-win of pragmatic realism, the other the lose-lose of slavish autocracy. And in the real world of public record, we can discern a difference in the degree of resilience and self-organisation that marks societies set up in these contrasting ways.

Is it the kind of society that is collectively adapting itself on the fly?

At the same time, the question arises - what next? What is the path? What will be next? What can be offered in return? — Astorre

No wonder the US is now run by a multiply bankrupt property developer and casino owner who then spent 14 years posing as a titan of industry on a reality show where yuppie talent is pitted against itself in a largely arbitrary death match with the worst possible prize of supposedly working for the idiot boss figure. — apokrisis

You see where strong disagreement gets us? Clarity on your question now emerges.

What came after liberal democracy as a pragmatic social enterprise? Oligarchy and idiocracy. Two forces in some kind of systemic balance. But one that is itself completely confused about how that is now meant to work its way through to some new state of world order. Pax Trumpiana. The Nobel for which Donald yearns.

The history lesson goes that two world wars and a great depression created a need for whatever came after the imperial empire world system. Europe and its colonies. The centres of capital and power coupled to its far-flung resource-capturing net and its network of military bases to keep a lid on the native politics. The UK in particular mastered this delicate art of imperial balance. But by the 1940s, its world system was in tatters.

The US had emerged as the world manufacturing giant and so had the capacity to step in and takeover. War had resulted in a new deal at home. Walter Scheidel did a nice book explaining how big wars are always the "Great Leveler" that result in the breaking down of wealth and redistributing it back to the people. So the US had instituted a new notion of social democracy where there was high taxes, big infrastructure investment and the creation of social safety nets.

Corporations were allowed to do their predatory thing and even approach monopoly ownerships – oligarchy – but also they had to be good citizens. Play nice with the trade unions. Clean up after themselves with environmental protections. Become benevolent organisation caring for workers in factory towns, and generally acting with the wider interests of the US community in mind as much as that of their shareholders and desire to extract profit.

This new corporate benevolence could then be the model for the new imperial empire. The UK had already had to make that kind of balancing act during its own reign. That is how it could rule the world by straddling the chokepoints of the world's shipping lanes with a handful of military bases and a small colonial service. The US could update this model by taking over the world's reserve currency from the UK, and its network of bases, then telling the world to go and free trade. Form their own democracies in the corporate mould. The US would run its central political institutions like the UN, World Bank and IMF, sit back and cream off the profits from running the world money system, take care of the job of being the world's policeman and so also controlling that side of the show, and let the world focus on its trade and social development.

Of course existential challenges to this post war accord emerged swiftly. The Cold War and then the oil wars. And also the US couldn't resist squeezing more juice from this imperial lemon. Nixon and Kissinger dropped the gold standard and made the dollar a debt-backed instrument. It tamed the oil producers by turning them into petrodollar investors in the US system. And it reacted like a scalded cat to the Soviet military threat, and that was only partly political theatre given that nuclear power trumps even hydrocarbon power when it comes to its energy density and explosive potential.

Anyway, this was the liberal democratic world order much as we knew it. American getting so rich on dollar hegemony and humming factories that even the working class felt that heady entropic power surging through their veins. Everyone could drive a gas guzzler, feast at the take away, holiday at Disneyland. The rest of the world, bobbing along in the US's wake.

But then things started to come apart in bigger ways. Neo-cons turned up the heat on the communists and their regimes to varying degrees collapsed. The oil trade wars became oil real wars as running a resource economy is the kind of monopolistic enterprise that sets an oligarchy against its people. Autocrats have to found so the wealth can get properly plundered.

Neo-liberalism also followed as the oligarchs demanded that the global political restrictions on capital – ie: debt creation – should be lifted in the the same way that the local political restrictions on resource exploitation were being systematically dealt with.

So the capitalist beast was constantly evolving. The US working class had been the winners of a phase of greater social democracy. But the US oligarchy eventually shed any pretence of a social conscience and financialised its own people too. The US debt was allowed to explode. House ownership became leveraged speculation. Life became whatever minimum wage would get you, or how much the new financial recklessness felt you could afford to borrow.

All this sets us up for the modern day. The true coming apart of the oligarchs vs the idiocracy.

The fall of Communism saw Russia turned into an autocrat-run oil exporter with a new oligarch class who had stolen the state infrastructure for its monopolistic profits. Putin was KGB and had just done his 1997 doctorate on oil politics. Literally. "A degree in economics at the Saint Petersburg Mining University [where his thesis was] on energy dependencies and their instrumentalisation in foreign policy." Putin had a political vision and his gang of thieves.

This oligarchy had its own idiocracy in the form of information autocracy. Putin just had to make his voters believe that they lived in a well-run country, with an ancient identity, and where the vote wasn't rigged, the media not managed.

China went a more traditional route based off its own long history. Trade it understood. Manufacturing it could learn. Financialisation was right up its street and it was quite happy to run up a national debt at a rate way exceeding even the US. Oligarchy was sort of managed by kinship relations and purges. Then the same kind of informational autocracy was practiced, backed by relatively competent rather than wildly corrupt secret policing.

The US meanwhile was not a mere natural resource play, nor a Johnny come lately manufacturing play. It was now a full on capital play. And on top of that, an information technology play. The US citizen, and indeed the world citizen, was there to be tapped for their debt creation and now their personal data. There was a virtual world being born where anything was free to be the case. An apparently costless and frictionless world where money and resources no longer really mattered.

The price of entry was only the tiniest fraction of a few cents, or teaspoons off a barrel of oil. But the catch was that it was now a price extracted across the entirety of absolutely everything that was making you feel like a private and free individual – a paid-up member of the liberal democratic compact. Social media in particular gets to grab your body and soul. And the new super-oligarchs were the ones who had those information tech monopolies.

So the US has the dollar and that – as debt creation – drains the wealth out of every area of life it touches. We live in housing developments and eat at fast food joints that are as drained of social capital as they are of physical substance. Then tech comes in over the top of that with its promise of the new infinite frontier of a cyber reality. It becomes predatory even on the financial level of oligarchy as any kind of sensible stock market pricing and CEO salary setting gets tossed out the window. Wall Street gets taken for a ride and crypto currency mops up the rest.

And so the new politics of the idiocractic state come into view.

Russian and China have informational autocracies where the citizens must to some genuine degree believe in the world as it is being painted for them. Incredible competence is required to maintain the collective fiction that as a society, it is winning bigly. And something has to be delivered for real as evidence. In China's case, actual economic power in return for a shittier life – although one still much freer and more prosperous than that of its recent memory under Mao. And in Russia's case, a few decades of US investment in jacking up its oil fields coupled to a steady rebuilding of its suddenly abandoned Soviet empire, until Ukraine became the step looking like the one that went too far.

But the US is in a quite different position. Sure, it also has always been a propaganda state. It had to cement its own identity having been started rather abruptly without a solid history. It had its founding myth of being the home of the free and the dispossessed. Raise the flag and swear your allegiance.

It rode the liberal democratic good times and grabbed the reins from Imperial Britain when it really didn't even have another sensible choice. It struck a deal stacked in its own favour, and off things went for another 50 years.

The post-war paradigm of responsible corporations and unionised labour gradually evaporated. The ownership of the world financial and military apparatus started to fall into the hands of a new oligarch class – a mindset with its own political and social theories. The information revolution was now in full swing and out-pacing the manufacturing revolution. What the US debt was financing now was not merely a world based on consumers, but on a world based on an influencer and drop-shipping economy.

Life lived as a reality show. Life as you would live it in a costless and frictionless Universe. Life lived where violent polarisation was the daily entertainment rather than a rationally-framed dialectic. The life lived as an idiocracy of opinions and alternative facts. A life drained of the pragmatic realism which had been connecting the two sides of the existential equation – the physical energy consumed for the social meaning extracted – in some degree of flourishing balance.

So the current recipe is oligarchy and idiocracy. Life as unbounded resource extraction and a soul-devouring reality show. A disconnection that looks fatal, but which could run on for as long as a big enough narcissistic incompetent fool can be found to front it. The illusion of a strong man in charge.

Putin was a strong man with a vision of how to glue things together. Pump the oil and don't alarm the voters. As long as they believe that it is only oligarchs now falling out of windows, and the state barely touches on their lives as the oil and gas gets piped abroad, then the system ticks along in some sort of stable equilibrium.

Xi is another strong man – although rumours of his demise grow daily – who tightened up on China's mercantilist exploitation of the US's 1940s free market play. And competent implementation keeps that show on the road. Manufactured goods flow freely and China's population has full bellies. Things work on a level that is tolerable, and the scope of dissent severely limited.

Trump is then exactly what a idiocracy might wish for. Although his oligarch backers didn't quite bargain for his actual level of incompetence, and all those that he would appoint to jobs in his second term.

But then also, the US oligarch class is itself marked by its own grave incompetence. Whether tech bro left or Christo-fascist right, it lives in the same idiocracy. The same detachment from the pragmatic reality of what actually makes for a well-functioning society. We see this in Musk and Vance. We see this in the Supreme Court. We see it in the guy who sells pillows and all the other idiots who suddenly get promoted to multi-billionaire hood by the simple fact of living in an economy structure to be a wealth and debt ratchet. The idiots who never had a clue feel they get to have the super-sized vote on how the world ought to be run.

And why not if you believe that reality is a costless and frictionless realm? Your hopes and fears are what become must populate that limitless landscape. Idiocratic society where narcissistic incompetence become something that works. Something that is fast becoming implemented over all scales of US society as hierarchy theory says it must.

Trump is just giving away the Imperial US Empire you would think. And why not? Idiocracy seems the bigger prize now. The costless and frictionless landscape where polarisation drives the clicks. The new owners of the means of production are getting rich beyond imagination as the cost and the friction has been matchingly shrunk below the level of popular comprehension.

The reality show is eating the voters alive. The real world still exists somewhere in the middle of all the information and entropification. But capital flows and the entropic flows are now a dance taking place over the socially-shared horizon. The cost and the friction can't be seen. And that creates the stability – at least for a while – of a collective state of delusion.

Everything "works" at producing some outcome. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly! That is the central feature of my metaphysics. The one first sketched by Anaximander.

Everythingness is impossible. Therefore somethingness exists.

All paths might seem possible. But most cancel each other out. And that is how you arrive at that which works. The somethingness that becomes our world. The structure of being which can hang together as some unity of opposites.

The sort of metaphysics you find in physics for example when there is talk of the collapse of the wavefunction of the Universe. The ultimate expression of the principle of least action.

So the reductionist worries about the impossibility of getting something like the Universe out of nothing. The holist can flip that on its head by arguing instead that something exists because everything is just too much. It contains its own dialectical negation to the point that only the ur-dichotomies can survive the Darwinian contest.

The Universe could have had any number of dimensions, as why not? Well everything would have had to boil down to just 3D if the ur-dichotomy was the symmetry-breaking of rotation-translation. The two inertial symmetries that grounded Newtonian mechanics. The only dimensionality that is equal and balanced in terms of its rotational and translational degrees of freedom is 3D. Thus it becomes the something that exists.

So this holistic metaphysics is the way to go. Anaximander named his everythingness the Apeiron. And its dichotomisation was the process of apokrisis. Peirce improved on this by turning the story into a proper logical notion. He called the everythingness a logical vagueness. Something even deeper than merely the confusion of fluctuations that would be an “every thing”. A vagueness would be more like the physical notion of a quantum foam - the state that a self-organised dimensionality would have to arise from as a Darwinian sum over all its possibilities.

The societies of both 1984 and A Brave New World are both presented as being extremely stable, and in a way that is at least plausible. Would they be good societies in virtue of this stability? — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you listen to what I say, then you should already be guessing that I would be asking about where is that which is other to this stability and so just as necessary and good to the whole.

So if stability is one side of the equation being balanced, plasticity is the other. In Nature, a good structure is resilient. It is adaptive as well as self-sustaining. It is rigid but it also bends. It has an identity but it also evolves.

This gives a clear basis on which to critique these dystopias. Do they seem balanced in the natural fashion I describe?

Even constitutional democracies have autocrats to rule them. A king or president or prime minister. For a political system to be balanced, it must be both rather fixed in its long-term decisions and flexible in making quick choices when faced with immediate issues. There must be someone whose word is law at the very centre of things, but someone who is also just as ruled by constitutional laws when declaring a war or an emergency of any kind.

And this form of rational organisation is just naturally how the intelligence of brains is organised. A constitutional set of habits and a commanding spotlight of attention. A long term wisdom and an in the moment cleverness. Both an evolved stability and an evolved plasticity in some kind of good, because functional, balance.

So dialectical structure - the unity of opposites - explains all structure in nature. It is how the real world self-organises. Human societies exist in the real world and so follow the same mathematical logic. Peirce’s triadic story of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies. Or firstness, secondness and thirdness.

If stability is one of the goods that a society supplies, then this can only be because it also supplies the other thing which is its plasticity - its resilience and adaptability. It can both change and stay the same because these two social goods are being delivered over appropriately separated timescales. Stability as the long run goal and plasticity as the immediate quick adjustment.

This ties back to OP question. Liberal democracy works better in that it does balance the elected autocrat and rigid constitution functions in some scalable way. Very large and complex societies can exist if this general model of self-organisation is instituted over all scales of a society.

Even tennis clubs and local community boards have constitutions and chairs. Wherever you go in a properly liberal and democratic society, this kind of structure should be completely familiar. Everything is a version of the basic dichotomisation of power. Stability and plasticity are basic goods being balanced appropriately every where you could look. A fact that can be taken for granted.

Now stack that up against your “stable” dystopias. You can see what is instead fundamentally missing across all scales of a police state run by a dictator. It is so obvious it smacks you in the face. With a truncheon if you voice it out loud.

Actually though, social critics have made just this sort of point re secular educated urban liberals' inability to maintain birth rates that would even allow their population to only fall by half each generation. It would seem to be an ideology that must rely heavily on conversion versus organic growth. I would think this says nothing about the choiceworthyness of such a view, but on a "natural selection of ideas/ideologies" account, it seems to be a major flaw, akin to some sort of mutation that tanks fertility in organisms. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t know. One minute you are quoting stuff about the autoexplotive turn of modern neoliberalism, the next you are pointing out its consequences as if your mind can’t make the connection.

Do I really have to explain to you the force of your own arguments? If you are right about the first point, then here is your own evidence for why it is a correct diagnosis.

Neoliberalism is self dooming for quite a few reasons, not least that it is boiling the planet at an accelerating rate. It you strip away all the constitutional restrictions on growth - such as debt limits and environmental protections - then an unbalanced society run by unhinged capitalism is what results.

No wonder the US is now run by a multiply bankrupt property developer and casino owner who then spent 14 years posing as a titan of industry on a reality show where yuppie talent is pitted against itself in a largely arbitrary death match with the worst possible prize of supposedly working for the idiot boss figure.

Neoliberalism had some good theory behind it. But was fundamentally dishonest in its claims about rising tides floating all boats and wealth being able to trickle down faster than it would be hoovered up.

If birth rates are falling, well who in their right mind is going to bring kids into such a world, even if they are in the 1 percent and have some semblance of a natural work life balance?

So you are correct that the current social order is auto exploitative. In itself, that isn’t a bad thing. It’s quite fun to be young, free and entrepreneurial. But when that autoexploitation is unbalanced - a story not scaled over all levels of society - then it does become a bad and unnatural thing. The 1% are the auto part of the equation, leaving the 99% to be the exploited.

Anyone can understand the force of that maths.

In this case, you dream of criticism, like a philosopher. "Break me, because I honestly want to be affirmed or to doubt." — Astorre

I’ve had years of academic stress-testing so I’m not too concerned. :up:

At the same time, the question arises - what next? — Astorre

Given the hegemonic world power is being run as a clown show, that question has become even more intriguing. Not sure Trump makes sense from either a reductionist or holistic perspective.

Let me ask you a question. Why do you consider all opinions that differ from yours to be reductionist and one-sided? — Astorre

When you say my approach, you are talking about a systems metaphysics that goes back to the start of Greek philosophy. Anaximander had already set out the holism of the unity of opposites to get modern rational thought started.

And reductionism is fine as far as it goes. The systems approach in fact incorporates reductionism into its holism. It recognises upwardly acting material construction as the “other” of downward acting global constraint.

But reductionism is the mindset that is particular strong in Anglo thought. It dominates the imagination. Germans and Russians have more of a systems thinking tradition. Buddhist and Taoists likewise.

So it is a fact that a lot of metaphysical debates are confused as they try to answer the big questions armed only with half the story.

Try to read what others answer not as criticism of your thoughts, but as a constructive complementary discussion. — Astorre

I would love it if a critique could be advanced. But you will notice that there are only assertions being provided and not arguments. No serious analysis or evidence offered. Just strawman efforts of knocking down things I haven’t said.

Yeah, I think this is right, despite the fact that we seem to be beating a dead horse. — Leontiskos

Nope. You keep turning away from a live discussion in order to flog the same old strawman.