It seems to me that you are trying to set up the following dichotomy: "Either wisdom is just adaptation (cleverness) or else one must explain wisdom in terms of God." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am certainly interested in folk actually setting out their ontological commitments. And talk of "good and bad" could mean adaptively optimal and its privation, or transcendently perfect and its privation.

Even as a starting point for a properly worked up dichotomy or unity of opposites, these are clearly two different bases of argument.

If we don't differ at this fundamental level, then you can say so.

Again, my objection was that any action can be seen as an "adaptation" towards some end, but wisdom generally consists precisely in knowing which ends are actually good to achieve. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Or I could say that any action can be judged as an adaptive optimisation that is so generally effective it can be relied on as a regular unthinking habit, and so "having an end in mind" becomes not even some particular thing that is in mind, but is instead made the flesh and blood of what I am about.

So clever thinking is aimed at the novel. Wisdom has already assimilated what is generally "the good" as just its general orientation to the world.

And wisdom can't "know precisely which ends are actually good". That is an appeal to transcendent truths that float above the real world. It can only, in the usual fallible and pragmatic fashion, keep testing, keep exploring, by being alert to its own failings and getting out the clever thinking to figure a better world model out.

So again, I highlight the quick way you leap to a transcendent framing of what wisdom could even be as a psychological trait. There is a perfection out there waiting for the wise. Whereas I stay rooted in the pragmatic world where we are moved only by our failures of prediction.

We can propose general ends that we ought to try to achieve. Then see if they do lead us some place that seems better. And that in itself is the pursuit of an adaptive life balance rather than some idealised final perfection.

You seem to be collapsing any distinction between apparent and real value however. Yet it seems obvious that people can be very clever in pursuing merely apparent goods, and that this is typically what we mean by "being unwise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am doing the opposite of being real about the human situation. You can't critique the world that is shaping you unless you develop a metaphysics appropriate to that task.

So as soon as someone like yourself tries to frame things as a false dichotomy – the type where there is the bad choice of being good or bad – then I try to reframe it as a true systems dichotomy. One that sets up the win~win of a complementary pair of oppositions.

So at the level of social psychology, that cashes out as the general systems principle of stable social systems being organised as a functional balance between local competition and global cooperation. Another way of saying that any physical system is some fruitful or rational balance of its global constraints and its local degrees of freedom.

So from cosmology to social science, the causal model is the same. The pragmatic model, the dialectical model, where Nature self-organises to have a stable existence based on the very fact it is built on fundamental instability. In dynamic equilibrium fashion, the whole persists no matter how much the parts are exchanged.

And that is exactly how a "good" social system works. It balances the counter forces of general cooperation and individual striving so that the whole is dynamical and continuously adapting while also acting as the stabilising hand which tips the local competitive energy in a generally wise and productive direction.

Thus I am not collapsing anything. I am rescuing Nature from the kind of misunderstandings that you are expressing. I am turning weak dichotomies into useful ones. One can't be a sociologist and not understand how societies aren't about good and bad people. They are about the functional wholes that result from competitive freedoms being kept in reasonable check by cooperative wisdoms.

So again, a justification for the dichotomy of clever~wise. It is another way of saying the same thing about a society as a structure that needs one kind of energy at its local level and the different kind of energy of an enforceable boundary at its global level.

Neither energy is inherently good or bad. It is the matching of the dynamical balance to some context of possibilities. Any immature social endeavour needs to burn a lot of clever ideas. Any mature social endeavour need to preserve the balance of those ideas that made for the best collective habit.

I'm not sure what to make of the appeal to Peirce. I don't think his agapism runs into this problem because it has an end it is oriented to. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You can always use Peirce's religiosity against me. But I already agree. He wasn't of a time or place where he could easily have escaped religious indoctrination. Agapism is widely agreed to be his least useful turn of thought.

In his trichotomy of tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism, we can see that what he calls love, a systems scientist would call constraint. The wholeness that holds everything together in its collective self-embrace.

Peirce is railing against the tone of his times – the mindless competitiveness that the Victorian understanding of Darwinism was meant to condone. But "true" Darwinism is exactly that balance between competition and cooperation that I've described. The ecological balance that is the way to properly understand Nature.

So you could call cooperation or global constraint "love" in the hope your audience finds that an aspirational rallying cry against crude Darwinism. Or you can drop the romantic anthropomorphism and argue from the deeper logical consistency that Peirce had provided in his own work.

It was a maladaptive response to the post-war economic and political pressures the Weimar Republic faced. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well surely only because they lost the war? The allies and the axis powers did understand where things had gone wrong after WW1 and did a decent job of setting up a win-win balance of competition and cooperation after WW2. Social engineering works if you can understand a system as a system.

It wasn't love that created the post-war prosperity the world enjoyed for a while. It was an incredible amount of devious self-interested thinking by a collection of nations that was then cemented by the formation of a set of international institutions.

A greater wisdom prevailed as the US navy took over from the British fleet to turn its old imperial empire into the new free-trade world. Germany and Japan were "lovingly" recapitalised to be manufacturing exporters dependent on happy customers. Great Britain was shuffled off the stage and the US could get paid by the dollar becoming the new world currency – its fee for keeping the new peace.

So there was tremendous wisdom coupled to tremendous self-interest shown after WW2 – in great contrast to WW1. And the pragmatic balance that was struck was already falling apart as soon as it started as the communist world and the third world had their own natural ideas of what the best deal should actually look like.

Thus this winds up as another real life tale that speaks to the very themes that I have outlined.

You can't escape the reality of systems logic when you look into how the world is really organised.

There might be a lot of talk about what is good, what is right, what is loving, what is true. But it is soft soaping the tough business of forging understandings of how competition and cooperation can be rebuilt in the new circumstances that human history keeps presenting.

You made no points that go to the central point. And that is if wisdom and cleverness are cognitive processes, then how does that relate to the evolved structure of brains and nervous systems? If one isn’t minded to treat these things as gifts given by God to humans, but instead naturally evolved traits, then how does one make sense of their evolutionary continuity with mammalian neurobiology?

Brains in general are good in the sense that they put animals in a functional relation with their worlds. And brains work generally by applying the structural logic of dichotomies and hierarchies - the Peircean triad that is the cycle of reasoning. Abduction-deduction-induction. This understanding of the world by dialectical analysis - dissolving it into some structure of generals and particulars - is just what we see in every aspect of neuroanatomy. Frontal lobes for planning and motor control, back of the brain for sensory processing. Left brain for focal processing, right brain for global background or contextual awareness. Mid brain for emitting habitual responses in quick learnt and automatic fashion, higher brain for taking time to pause and analyse and so develop answers when faced by novelty.

So I answer the question from my point of view - the one informed by the semiotic logic that accounts for organismic structure. Nature doing what it does when equipping life with a mind. Gifting it with Peirce’s cycle of pragmatic reasoning. Start with the risk of making a clever guess. Develop it into an inveterate habit of belief.

Pragmatist philosophy arose out of a time when the first proper psychological research was being done. When science was exploring the relation between the processes of attention and habit in the brain. Peirce showed that what was the current new theory of cognition was also a theory of reasoning in general. If this dichotomy was good enough for the rise of life equipped with mind, then it was good enough for an account of rationality in toto.

Some might say that humans are special as God gifted them the possibility of being wise and doing good in the world. It is all part of that transcendent metaphysical package. A very deeply embedded social institution that was well adapted to the human way of life in the age of agricultural empires and then feudal states.

But Peirce stood at the transition to modern post-Darwin age of thought where it is Nature and not God that accounts for humanity. We are evolved organisms. And now the metaphysical thrill is to realise the evolution of the mind was a cracking of the problem of how to be an organism in a rational and pragmatic relation with its world.

Peirce developed this understanding of natural reason into an actual mathematical logic. He boiled down what it means into a Platonic strength architecture. The triad of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies.

The world as a whole”blooming, buzzing confusion” that is the fog to be symmetry broken by some clever guess. A shot that divides dialectically into some kind of figure and ground distinction. A difference that makes a difference as the semiotician would say. So the abductive guess splits the world into what we must pay attention to in terms of all that we can also be wise in ignoring.

This dichotomous symmetry-breaking then can be worked on so that it produces its particular deductive consequences. As scientists, we have a theory and derive its predictions. Then follows abductive confirmation. The clever theory either works or proves too shaky to count as a wise habitual basis for action.

What survives this test of time becomes the weight of mental habits that leaves us as well optimised as organisms as we can be. At least within whatever physical and social environment in which we must co-exist.

Anyway, my point here is that I’m not pulling positions out my arse. I have a metaphysics. I speak for a natural world that is organised by its natural rationality.

I could be mistaken but you and @Count Timothy von Icarus have your own metaphysical tradition. The one where we are all God’s special creation. Made imperfectly in His perfect image. Ect. You will view cleverness and wisdom within that mental framework.

And I instead have a different grounding point of view. The grand unifying perspective on Nature as a semiotic enterprise. The Universe as the growth of reason, material being as a structure of inveterate habit.

The problem becomes the God story is well known to me as it is just the general Western institution - impossible to avoid as part of collective culture. But my position seems to be poorly understood by you.

While science does appear to push the other story that is the natural philosophy viewpoint, it does this only in the watered down guise of Darwinian evolution and Newtonian mechanics. It is not the full-blooded response that is the holism of Aristotlean systems science and Peircean semiotics. Reductionist science still respects the boundary drawn up when it was forced to make its accomodation with the Catholic Church and cut the humanities out of its remit - at least in the big picture metaphysical sense.

But that alternative metaphysics does exist. And it sets the terms which would count as a critique of anything I’ve said. So far, you haven’t disputed the natural logic of what I say, backed up by its truth as psychological science.

Instead, this thread has generally lapsed back to transcendental metaphysics where wisdom is just some mystical notion of The Good. Or what God would will in his own perfect image. Cleverness then gets to sit at the elbow of evil. A meretricious tool of the Devil as we have been warned ever since Adam and Eve.

Why on earth are you concerned about following a "plan" that exists only as a part of a fiction? — hypericin

I was confused by what you were directing an argument against. It seems that you were attacking misconceptions shown in some other thread. So sure, it all you want to do is highlight the fact that minds can't jump into different bodies, then go for it.

But I still don't follow how it is then that argument.

If the business model of the clone facility relies on the metaphysical belief that mind is the pattern that informs the structure of the body, that is one thing. One can kind of go along with that from the embodied perspective that I would take. And that would only leave what seems to be the queasy decision that one would have to make to think the procedure was worthwhile.

One has already accepted that there is no "psychological continuity" in the sense your mind would somehow jump across and occupy the clone with its already functionally ready to go neural machinery, prepared with a fully faithful copy of your embodied state.

But if the issue is that some poster needs to be convinced that the mind is then not something over and above its physical instantiation as some pattern of information that all the relevant neurology has, then maybe your tale of confusions might have some impact on that.

And indeed, it should be hard to find the clone procedure plausible and not then see it as support for the embodied physicalist view while still also treating the mind as something – as in some kind of Cartesian spirit stuff – that can flit off to inhabit the cloned self. There is an inconsistency if that is the misconception in play.

So sorry but I thought you were first asking as straight-out "would you still do it?" question. And then that you were wanting a general metaphysical conclusion. But now it seems to be just targeting the problem that the standard Cartesianist would have here.

My argument is that, if my version doesn't work for you as an example of successful personal continuation, than neither does the teleporter. — hypericin

Again, we are debating science fiction at this point. And my view of personal continuation is based on science fact. So I pointed out that we deal with some level of this issue for real just when we go to sleep, when we turnover our molecules, when we think back over our many years of growing up.

The teleporter and the cloner might be on some kind of continuum as to how they might then stretch that everyday acceptance that I am me, based on the fact that I wake up in the same bed with the same aches every morning and a "to do" list of intentions for the day ahead.

The teleporter promises to disassemble my information and my matter and then reassemble them. I would probably be OK with that whether or not my existing atoms were recycled or replaced like for like. If it worked as advertised, then psychologically I wouldn't have any clear reason to be more worried than when I go to sleep – and understand there will be some busy rewiring going on inside my head to do stuff like consolidate memories and do some molecular level house-cleaning.

But the clone procedure creates a lot of messiness about psychological continuity, even if it is just on the larger social side of that equation. An embodied mind exists not just in a body but in a society and a world that already has a "me" shaped hole for myself. There is my wife, kids, bank account, rights and responsibilities, a personal history that a lot of other people are connected to and would be affected by.

Society at large would have to accept the procedure as unproblematic for my clone to be treated as me after it replaced me. My wife would have to not mind that a copy of her husband returned home that night and maybe brought a little urn of ashes to sprinkle under her favourite rose bush.

So viewed from the embodied perspective, I would say that my death would have to be concealed from society for the cloning operation to be counted as a success. Would you treat a clone as actually the same person? Well I guess if the clone is a greatly improved one, perhaps you would. There are all sorts of things you might want gene edited or neurally tweaked.

Getting off the track but you can see why I would say the teleporter raises less confusions. The cloning process might be put on a similar footing if instead everyone knew I had climbed into some dissolving vat after having my information scanned, and then that information was used to regrow me rapidly until a few hours later, I suddenly stood up and started wiping off the slimy goo from my limbs, ready to shower and slot back into the society-shaped hole that is just as much part of any claims to a "psychological continuity".

So the reader is forced to claim that even this example constitutes continuity (ChrisH), is forced to explain why the teleporter suceeeds while this fails (you), or is forced to reject the teleporter as well (me). — hypericin

Yes, I see now that what seemed like a general question was a targeted repost. Good luck with your efforts. :up:

Why should it matter, metaphysically speaking, when the disassembly happens? — hypericin

You built your version of the thought experiment based on a series of confusions. The victim had a mistaken belief about how it worked. The technician let the victim recover consciousness and see the copy. So the argument is based on things going wrong rather than things going to plan. And thus the “when” is indeed an issue already. We should be discussing the plan that was intended where the idiot victim would have got what he paid for and never woke up to realise he had been plainly idiotic.

And then if you consider your the successful version of the plan, there is a both a copying of the info and a “disassembly” which is not actually a disassembly in being a temporary division of a person into his form and his matter. It is a permanent destruction of the originally embodied person rather than a momentary deconstruction.

So we are comparing apples and oranges. The teleporter is being critiqued on the basis that things happen as they should. And it also speaks to an embodied story on consciousness and identity that goes back to Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of substance.

Again, you leave me unclear what it is you really want to argue here. But to the degree the teleporter operation is conceivable as something real, an embodied approach to the issue of conscious identity would make it seem OK to disassemble and reassemble a person as the combination of some quantity of completely general matter and its equally unique and specific organising pattern.

But your victim seemed to be thinking that the mind was something more. It was not about a structure of material organisation but some kind of spirit that could hop across and wake up somewhere else.

The nature of this confusion in terms of its metaphysical commitments was unclear. But it sounded Cartesian. So as I say, the story is entertaining. But in what way is it enlightening?

Can we salvage our concepts by fixing a few flaws so they work in every situation? Or do we concede that they are fundamentally bespoke, and do not and can not match with "reality"? — hypericin

This seems a different issue to the mind-body problem that the thought experiment was originally addressing.

So of course I would agree our understanding of reality is a psychological and sociological construction. But then I believe that because this is the view that makes the most pragmatic sense. It works for all situations that we might have when it comes to explaining our epistemic relation with reality.

And one of the problems this pragmatic or semiotic metaphysics fixes would be the mind-body issue. It leads to an embodied and enactive view of what it is to be alive and mindful of the world, experiencing it as a point of view.

Certainly a model. But a model of the world as a world with “us” in it. The self-centred view that can insert our organism purposes into the greater order of things.

So that would be the lens I would use to answer about organic 3D printers and teleporters. That would be why an authentic story on identity would focus on the embodied self and see the error of treating mind and body as seperable in any useful way.

I take your point about the organic 3D copier machine. But I would say the teleporter poses less of an issue because exactly reassembling your atoms - either your original ones or locally sourced one - would seem to bring the original you back to life as the original structural blueprint was being used.

There would be a transition issue. A gap to jump. But the set-up says the atoms were for a time an unorganised collection, and the organisation was also itself in a state of suspension for the same time. So it only all comes back together when the rephysicalised body plops out of the machine as a fully working system again. You have a single world-line or identity at any moment in that a single embodied state gets broken down, then rebuilt, with no leakage of selfhood, just the kind of halt and reboot of going to bed everynight.

A teleporter scenario seems benign for that reason.

But the printer instead doubles the number of bodies running around claiming the right to be “you”, live in your house, spend your cash, sleep with your wife. We can all see the problem in that.

If the transition was seamless - merely a switching off followed by a rebooting of the embodied state - then the printer would parallel the teleporter. So the copying process ought to be simultaneously a 3D shredder that avoids the glitch you present.

Even an embodied notion of conscious identity is troubled by the dilemma of two people running about claiming to be the only identity that has all the worldly rights and relationships that go with being that person so far as the world is concerned.

So I agree this is a fun thought experiment. But still unclear what it might be arguing for or against. :up:

He might equally have believed in psychological continuity. — hypericin

If so, how would he have come to his misunderstanding? Or does "psychological continuity" mean something other than the embodied and enactive view of cognition and sense of self?

The inspiration of this thought experiment was to reframe the basic teleporter concept in such a way that it seems viscerally clear that the clone or teleported are not the original. — hypericin

The teleporter is sciencey bullshit. But at least dematerialising a body to atoms in one location and instantly having them reassembled as the same form elsewhere preserves the continuity of an embodied state. Or fudges the continuity issue by sending both the fundamental matter particles and the scanned information pattern through a "sub domain in the spacetime continuum" at the "same time". There is a continuity being preserved, even if all aspects of this are physical impossibilities.

The problem with cloning is that this is now a thought experiment based on actual real-world science. You have to grow your body. And for it to have a mind, it would have to grow with it in the usual fashion.

So as I said, things fall down where your victim is said to believe that there is only an empty body on the other side of the procedure. And somehow his own mind it going to hop over to inhabit it.

There is not even any bullshit reason to expect continuity at this level. Even if we grant some cloning procedure that creates fully formed bodies with identical mental experiences that can be grown in a vat in a couple of weeks, there is still no reason for your victim to make his invalid inferences.

If you said you were going to dissolve him in the vat and then regenerate him from the vat just as quickly – and somehow both the mental patterns and flesh and blood patterns would re-emerge together exactly as they were, just a bit gene edited for arthritis – then now you would be closer to the teleporter story.

Even if one believed in a Cartesian model – his soul hovers over the dissolving goo until nano-bots knit it back into renewed form – there would be sufficient continuity both of his own matter and his own form to minimise the identity crisis.

After, much of our body's molecular structure turns over in hours if not minutes and seconds. We are literally remaking ourselves every day we live. And it is our genetic information that keeps rebuilding what was there, just a little newer and fresher – a bit different, but not so that you would notice anything radical to challenge your psychic continuity over a lifetime of wear, tear and repair.

The Ship of Theseus is the better guide to the question being posed. At what point does the usual biological and psychology fact of continual remodelling of both body and mind change from being a familiar fact to being an alarming discovery? When faced with the usual technologies of identity crisis, what choices would people really make if fully informed of the reality of psychological identity?

And then the real question here. How can plainly unrealistic technologies illustrate anything other than some of the weird beliefs we have about the separability of body and mind? Organisms are cognitive structures down to the level of enzymes and their other molecular machinery. We don't come apart like hardware and software, despite what might be commonly believed.

I don't think the bolded is true though. Dominant theories of goodness from Aristotle on (and one might even include Plato here) primarily think of bad/evil (and falsity) in terms of privation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a problem with dichotomies. They don't become fully developed until they are turned into hierarchies. That is, it is easy enough to claim the opposite as simply a lack of the thing in question. A simple anti-symmetric state that can be reversed.

So if I turn left, I can fix that by turning right. Or if I turn away from the good towards the bad, then I can turn back towards the good again. The dichotomy only gets as far as privation, as you say. Badness is a lack of goodness. Goodness is complete in its goodness. Metaphysically, this level of discussion hasn't got us very far.

The tricky things is to form dichotomies that are asymmetric and not easily reversible because they have been moved far apart from each other in terms of hierarchical scale. These would be proper unities of opposites. Things that are the complementary bounds of what is possible in the way that the triadic structure of a hierarchy is formed by the scale difference which is to be divided as completely as possible by a local and global bound.

This is a deep aspect of metaphysical argument that most never get. But you only have to consider the metaphysical dichotomies that have always seemed the most fundamental. Like chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, part~whole, integrated~differentiated, atom~void, matter~form, and so on. Each of these pairs seem to join two things that are as completely unalike as can be imagined in some basic way, and yet they then complement each other as they thus frame all the intermediate states that could arise in between.

Think of black and white as the complete lack of brightness and its equally total presence. Each is the other's negation. Black is zero white, and white is zero black. But then between these two bounding extremes arises any possible number of shades of grey. You can have a grey that is a 1% drip of black in a 99% pot of white. Or a 50/50 mix. Or whatever balance of the two extremes you care to put a number on.

So a useful metaphysical dichotomy comes with a hierarchy of scale in transparent fashion. Complementary limits on being are set. Then everything that actually exists is some gradation – a particular balance – in between.

So instead of a monotonic argument – good is good in some absolute fashion, and badness can only be positioned in some handwaving fashion as "a lack of complete good" – you get a metaphysical story where there is no absolute good or bad, just the relatively good or bad. You can have each to the degree that it makes sense to claim some measured distance that separates the two.

The key is keep the relativity of all things in sight and not falling into the trap of trying to defend absolutes. So wisdom is not something that could be measured as simply a lack of wisdom. That says nothing of any interest about the wider world. But you are getting somewhere it feels if you start to argue that wisdom feels like a lack of maturity.

And then you really get some place if you can see that immaturity – another anti-symmetric statement based on a quality and its privation – is also its own good in that youth has its own complementary value when opposed to age. Youth demands risk and learning. It rewards attempts to be clever. You can see that wisdom and cleverness become joined as a natural continuum of intellectual capacity. Two ends of the one thing. As asymmetric as possible while also being as necessarily connected as possible. And each is good when each is balanced to match the stage of life.

We don't have to turn it into a drama – a conflict of opposites. A dichotomy is the symmetry-breaking that then needs to keep developing until it becomes fully expressed as a hierarchy of "symmetry-stopping". A spectrum of balances where it is the appropriateness of the balance that is the measurable good of the situation. The optimal state for that particular life context and not some attempt to hold up "good" and "bad" as globally-transcendent absolutes. Instead the good and the bad get brought into the world as a practical issue of allowing fruitful variety. The balance that always adapts to the individual occasion. The confluence of opposites.

But prima facie, this no more makes goodness (or beauty, truth, and unity) impossible understand than it is impossible to understand light because darkness is merely its absence, or heat because cold is its absence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, if you are only talking about the something and the lack of that something, the work hasn't been done. Dialectics is about complementarity and synergy. Identifying the win/win story that is having two extreme bounds on Nature that then leave Nature as the everything that exists in-between.

It is very easy to talk monistically about stuff like truth, beauty, good – and even unity – when you don't have to really say anything about falsity, ugliness or evil except that they are privations of the ineffable absolutes. But once you accept the discipline of a dialectical logic, then you have to stop hand-waving and start defining the relation that properly connects the two ends of some spectrum of possibilities.

The categories that make sense are the ones that make sense of all the intermediate cases as being placed at some relative position inbetween the extremes.

That is how we can have a justice system. We can calibrate the spectrum between good and evil in terms of extenuating circumstances. We can both work within a global understanding and rigorously apply individually optimised judicial solutions. Everything can be made relative in a pragmatically flexible fashion. We can live in the real world with something like wisdom.

Success is often interpreted simply as reproduction. In which case, chickens, pigs, sheep, and cattle have been the beneficiaries of a tremendous adaptational boon. And yet, one could hardly look at your standard poultry "factory farm" and not come away questioning if this is "success." — Count Timothy von Icarus

There you go. You grab your monistic and transcendent banner word – success – and so now only see a world where everything becomes questionable in the light of its failure to live up to this mighty standard.

But sensible metaphysics has always kept focused on the relativity of the unity of opposites. The dialectic. The dichotomy developed until it forms the hierarchy with its balance that covers all scales of being.

The Platonist will always be disappointed with the actual real world. It is but a pale shadow of what it should be. The pragmatist instead can see that is not the game of existence at all. The world is a system that is optimising itself in hierarchical fashion over all its available scales. That is the image we should have of it when we speak about it.

They ask if they will survive the procedure. — hypericin

But you have set this up so that the victim acted on a misunderstanding. And that over-complicates things. It seems the victim expected to have his mind moved to a vacant body, not that another body would appear imprinted with what would be his last living state of mind.

So if the victim understood the embodied nature of mind, then they would have at least been acting under a correct view of the procedure. But if the victim had some hazy notion about a soul stuff being lifted and moved across to some new matter vessel, then they are indeed the victim of a bad metaphysics.

The issue of identity is one of continuity. And the teleporter tale plays on the belief that mind and body are separable, so a dilemma such as this could exist. The mind could be lifted as some kind of pattern of information and plonked down to run on some other bit of physical hardware. There is just the single pattern and two bits of hardware involved. So continuity tracks the porting of the pattern.

But embodiment says not so fast. The clone is already an inhabited body running the exact same pattern. And it immediately started to diverge in its thoughts and experiences as soon as it was fired up. The continuity of the pattern was broken as soon as it began to run on the other bit of physical kit.

So even if teleporting were a possibility, the embodied basis of being and identity gets broken both as a continuity of the mental patterns and the physical bodies.

Having created a pair of identities – made as identical as they could possibly be – there is no reason they can't both be allowed to live on. It is not necessary to add on the moral drama. You can tell the same tale as being Elon Musk deciding he wants to both continue on his life down here on Earth and send a branching clone of himself to every nearest star system to start up a new Musk-ruled colony of Musk clones.

If he knows that these are all copies that start with everything that is particular to him at the moment they are fired off into space – or perhaps fabricated from a downloaded pattern at the time of future arrival – them he might think this is all gravy. His identity will continue forever, but now with a multiplying army of Musk world lines.

So how you set the story up can add all sorts of dramas. But the argument against Cartesianism and for embodied cognition can be made more directly.

Organisms aren't like hardware and software – machines running programs. They are living structures of interaction with their worlds.

And if the problems that creates for teleportation scenarios and questions about the continuity of identity ain't immediately clear, then a little more time studying the biological sciences seems required.

I'm confused, how is "good and bad" (or "beautiful and ugly," "true or false," or "one and many" for that matter) not "dichotomous?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m confused. Isn’t this supporting my point? Each of these are a pair of terms that are being dialectically opposed. Each is understood as what it is to the degree that it is not the other.

The moral of the story seems clear. From your perspective, your clone is absolutely not you. The clone is somebody else entirely, who has stolen your life and will now enjoy it free from illness. To add insult to injury, you are killed. The "treatment" is a personal catastrophe. — hypericin

Seems to me that your argument is that the "you" involved here bifurcated at the moment of the intervention. So there are two legitimate points of view to consider, each having becoming its own identity or world line in the time that follows.

And from both points of view, one of the you's made the decision that life was better with the illness edited out. And that one of you had pre-consented the termination of that you's history line. You had wanted to be the other you.

So claiming that a life has been stolen is a bit strong. It was freely given at the time. And morally one could argue that the new you has the right to the pain-free life you granted it. You can't make a gift and then snatch it back in the normal moral sense of things.

Although it isn't all so black and white. The clinic could hand you the syringe and say you choose who survives. Or hand the clone the syringe and say the same thing. The interesting question is then how many out of 100 such situations would the original and the clone chose the fair thing is terminating their own world-line. That then would at least be a pragmatic rule of thumb as to how folk would ordinarily weigh the justice of such a situation. The clinic would know what it ought to do for the good of all.

I guess the problem I see is that anything can be said to be "adaptive" if we are given free aim to choose the ends that we are supposedly adapting towards, but not all adaptations/actions appear to be wise. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem lies in making a circular argument. If wisdom is defined as some single essence - such as the good, the worthy, or even the adaptive - then that ends up saying nothing. You find yourself getting confused by having to deal with an endless array of exceptions to the rule which is precisely what pushes the rule off into some unplaced and abstracted realm where no more can be said than “well we all know true wisdom when we see it”.

The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly “other” to in a measurable fashion.

So rather than getting bogged down in all the exceptions to the rule which - folk who weren’t really acting wisely as they were merely being clever - I have attempted to reframe things in the more properly dichotomous terms of how cleverness and wisdom could each stand as the other to its “others”. How they could be both essentially the same and also then defined by what could make them different.

A temporal trajectory, a story of growth, does that. And I root it in the reality of the brain’s processing architecture. The brain as a cognitive organ is all about making sense of the world by dichotomising it. The principle dichotomy here is the one between attentional processing and habit-level processing. Between having to work something out and being able to rely on engrained experience.

So the choice is either to have an endless debate over the meaning of an unplaced abstraction or to ground the debate in a reality that metaphysics has always understood best in terms of a “unity of opposites”. A dialectic logic.

Whether or not something is "adaptive" as opposed to "maladaptive" depends on ends (i.e., what it means to "live better"), and that's exactly what practical wisdom is supposed to help with. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an example of failing to discover the relevant dichotomy and simply thinking in terms of a monistic imperative and its absence. You only give yourself the options of adaptive vs maladaptive and so your argument goes in a loop. The Platonic ideal always eludes the sorry grasp of the real world. We can always aim higher and therefore always must be in need of aiming higher.

It is the standard bad metaphysical argument that folk torture themselves with. Or torture others with by shifting the goal posts deeper into Platonia.

So what is the proper “other” that grounds adaptive? Well the Darwinian story is that variety is what evolution requires. It is exceptions to the rule that feed the existence of that rule. Every individual must take the risk of being a mistake so that statistically the collective success emerges.

Bring this back to the wisdom issue and we can see that it would be unwise never to risk being unwise. We need to try to be clever as mistakes are how we would begin to learn to eliminate mistakes from our behavioural repertoire.

So the way to understand wisdom is how I describe. It is about learning to play the game of life as the game is presented to us. We have to risk mistakes to make progress. We then have to fix what works so that the successes accumulate.

And a biologist would even tack on a state of senescence or niche over-fit to this analysis. An organism can be so closely adapted to its given environment that it becomes fragile if that environment suddenly changes. One could become “too wise” if one has habitual answers for everything in their immediate sphere and then discovers the world is somehow much larger than they expected.

Pragmatically, the goal posts on what is “good and worthy” could get shifted by unpredicted changes in the world. Just another thought to throw into the mix here.

Hoffman uses mathematical models to explore how spacetime and physical laws can emerge from these dynamics of conscious agents. — Gnomon

Thanks for reminding me just how much of a crackpot he is.

If you don't think that is "substantial", — Gnomon

This is metaphysics we are talking about. Substance is a claim about what “stands under”. And ontologically that is usually regarded as a stuff. A passive and stable material that can be worked up into an unlimited variety of forms.

Of course, Aristotle came up with a better story. Which is where systems science got going.

You said nothing that adds anything. There is a world of difference between belief and “belief” in this debate.

Plato's notion seems pretty appropriate here: — Count Timothy von Icarus

So it always has the same aim. Wisdom always aims to be wise?

Not sure this is a huge step forward. That’s the trouble with talk about value as something transcendent rather than an everyday story of evolving an adaptive fit between an organism and its environment.

I see nothing in Friston’s monograph supporting the claim that rocks have beliefs in any normal sense. A note on p84 explicitly says that by Bayesian belief he does not mean a propositional belief but merely a “belief” in the mathematical and technical sense of “belief” updating and “belief” propagation.

So the use of the Bayesian maths is properly qualified in terms of what its jargon means and doesn’t mean. We can move on from such silliness to the more interesting question of whether his Bayesian formalism is a better way of doing hierarchy theory. And I am perfectly open to that being the case.

It is a problem accounting for the topological phase transitions in complex systems as there is the question of whether emergent properties reflect simply the rearrangement of lower level complications or are indeed the top-down imposition of higher level novelty.

Hierarchy theory says top-down constraints do shape the emergent degrees of freedom that form any new level of topological order. A material particle like an electron is shaped by its Platonic-strength encounter with the constraints of U(1) symmetry, for example. As the simplest final organising structure, quantum field excitations had to eventually arrive at that fundamental state of being.

Friston shows that this is his own central question in his conclusion. But he comes down on the other side of this issue. He claims his Bayesian mechanics does away with the need for downward causation when talking about emergence.

So to me, the issues involved in Friston’s monograph are clear enough. And I still side with the “more is different” camp. For reasons I have already mentioned.

You are just blustering rather than addressing my criticisms.

I'd say the two only seem similar because the ends pursued in chess are obvious and fixed. Indeed, I'd say being good at chess is a skill/techne, not wisdom. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure. But the brain doing all this is the same brain with the same cognitive structure. So the only difference is that playing chess is a highly constrained and artificial task – thus good for extracting the story of what is going on in a controlled setting. And then cleverness~wisdom is this standard brain trajectory applied to our lives in their most general and uncontrolled settings – the lives we live as social creatures interacting with the perils and opportunities of a complex physical environment.

So wisdom and intelligence are of course socially-constructed as well as something innate to our evolved brains. What is wise or what is clever is framed by a collective social judgement.

But consider people who are quite "clever" at navigating their life such that they can satisfy their appetites, amass wealth, win over romantic partners, etc., and find themselves at mid-life completely miserable. Surely, they have been "clever" and intelligent in some sense, but have they been wise? — Count Timothy von Icarus

How does that contradict anything I said? Society would judge them as having being immature, or just unlucky perhaps, and now wise after the event. These miserable folk clearly developed their habits, but unwise ones. And society might even deserve the blame as its own "wisdom" might have set out the game of life in a fashion where being miserable was rather an inevitable outcome.

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life. They only have to be pragmatically effective – optimised enough to keep the whole social game going. There is nothing transcendent about either cleverness or wisdom.

Would he have been wise if he had simply been more inconspicuous about his crimes or kept strictly to the local age of consent? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are conflating personal wisdom and collective wisdom. It is important to see how these are two different things – and thus how they can also come together as the one thing. You can't really have the collective social view unless people can freely dissent from it – and learn from the error of their ways.

So how do you build a wise society? Allow the creation of social institutions to flourish. Allow wise habits to take up a permanent presence. The standard pragmatic answer.

How do you build a wise person? Let them grow up in a wise social context where the wisdom is being institutionalised in this fashion over all scales – from the wisdom appropriate in playing chess or planting out seedlings, to the wisdom in life choices that result in the win/wins for yourself and those around you.

Of course our societies are never perfect. But then who ever said that Nature even has a notion of the Good?

Well, theists of course. But I only speak for the pragmatist here. :wink:

This is just a strawman if you refuse to engage with the way "belief" is intended by the authors of the theory. — Apustimelogist

Which authors? I was discussing these things with Friston back in the 1990s when it was all about dynamical systems theory and generative neural networks. I'd be surprised if he now disagrees with what would be my position on this.

My point is that it is just dumb to confuse equilibrium systems with far from equilibrium systems. A hot rock has its internal state. Drop it in a bucket of cold water and it then shares the collective internal state of the thermal system that is the much colder rock and the now slightly warmer bucket of water.

Bringing Bayesian belief into this discussion is a publicity stunt and not serious science or philosophy.

But using the maths of Bayesian probability to model the hierarchical structure of dissipative systems that have the "purpose" of degrading entropy gradients could be a different matter. The question becomes whether anything new is being said that isn't already being said by regular approaches to dissipative structure theory.

So your strawman is a strawman. This is an area I have been busy in for a long time.

Bayesianism is just probability theory. — Apustimelogist

But with a point of view inserted. That is why it is so good for modelling life and mind, but becomes tenditiously hand-waving if you find yourself using the words rocks and beliefs in the same sentence.

Perhaps it might be done in an academic setting for the shock value. And as I say, it is really shocking if the difference between equilibrium systems and far from equilibrium systems doesn't make it immediately a bad analogy, even if it is only meant as an analogy.

experienced chess players are better at reconstructing chess boards from memory. They are, however, not particularly better at reconstructing wholly random chess boards, only ones that would develop from normal, goal oriented play. And, when they narrate their construction, the experienced players tend to reconstructing games based on strategy, rather than blocks of pieces/color, as novices do. The experienced players vastly outperform novices despite not performing better on more general memory tasks. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Proves my point. Cleverness turns into wisdom over time as what was novel becomes the routine.

The novice player tries to be clever with elaborate ploys. The experienced player is seeking to mimimise errors and build pressure by position.

So cleverness and wisdom are both the same and different in being different stages of a nautural progression in skill acquisition. And the chess example applies to the game of life in this way. We have to start by making mistakes in a furious way to begin to learn. We need to invest in analysing the particular to discover what critically matters. But then we begin to master the situation and can instead operate with a weight of skilled and unthinking habit. We can shift our attention up the scale to the big picture where it is about minimising errors and building pressure by position.

It is a further question if some people are especially good at one and not the other. On the whole, the psychologist would say it is just catching people at different stages of this simple intellectual trajectory.

But, Hoffman describes a Veiled Reality, in which we do have some contact with Fundamental Essences, by means of the embodied Information that he calls "icons" (signs, symbols, semiology). — Gnomon

As I say, this part is epistemology 101 so far as it goes. What cognitive scientist doesn’t say this sort of thing? Of course our notions of matter are useful fictions. Even physics says that.

But “consciousness” is likewise a useful epistemic fiction. It is easier to think in terms of powers and substances than to move on to a properly laid out and mathematical systems view of what reality “really is”.

So Hoffman states the obvious about cognition and then gets silly by saying this means the material world is our collective fiction and therefore consciousness is what is fundamental.

The mind and the world are both owed proper scientific accounts. Hoffman’s idealism doesn’t have anything help here.

So no, the equation of Causal Energy and Mental Information is not a figment of my imagination. Is that the "issue" you feel needs to be sorted? :cool: — Gnomon

I plainly said that information and entropy are just mathematical systems of measurement. They don’t tell us about informing or entropifying as real world processes. So the issue is about the how. You coined a term that suggest some general systems theory arises to cover this. But then the hand-waving begins. You speak as if information and energy are substantial things - like forces of nature - and so they just “do it”. Nuff said.

Again, you are misinterpreting the theory somewhat. If you look at the paper, they say a rock can be described under the theory and its more or less mathematically proven that the principle can apply to something like a rock. What you are talking about is a special case of system that is highly complicated. — Apustimelogist

I come back to the point that to claim belief for a rock is to collapse your epistemology into ontological confusion.

Sure, one might have the intellectual purpose of modelling the continuity of all systems and Bayesian probability might be your candidate theory of everything. But my view is that this plainly is a wrong move as Bayesian reasoning is great as a general theory of the organism in its semiotic relation with the world, and so then loses its way when it goes beyond what it was meant to be and is bandied about as a theory of literally anything.

If we can no longer distinguish a rock from a mind under the Bayesian approach, then now the theory is a failure. It becomes the new panpyschism.

The best theory of absolutely everything in my book is dissipate structure theory. And that as a general systems theory does apply as happily to the Big Bang as neoliberal economics.

Obviously, a rock may not be very interesting though as a kind of dynamical system. — Apustimelogist

I was reacting to the first paper. The second by Friston is far more challenging and I’m glad you flagged it.

A quick point is that the kind of dynamics that could even be coupled would have to be in a state of criticality. So a whole landscape of moving and eroding rock could be viewed as a hierarchical system in the way being suggested. It is a tectonic flow. A balance of geological and chemical forces over many scales of being. In some sense its own model as at some particular distance or horizon, the landscape’s smallest fluctuations become a lower bound blur, and its largest fluctuations become so large the system now appears to live inside a fixed background, captured by its laws.

So Friston is walking familiar ground. But then you can see how the humble rock lacks that kind of dynamics which brings this systems perspective into things. The rock has congealed and merely erodes. If the tectonics could be considered lively, the rock is as unlively as it gets.

I’ll have to read Friston’s monograph more closely. But on a skim, I would say he is trying too hard to explain everything by the self-organising dynamics and being too glib about the self-information or measurement aspect of a hierarchical system. But a fun read so far.

It does. — Apustimelogist

No, it really doesn’t. The information that the rock contains bears no resemblance to a system of belief.

You can present your evidence to the contrary if you wish of course.

This can be applied to virtually anything complicated enough, from a rock to a brain to a planetary system to... virtually anything. — Apustimelogist

You may misunderstand. A rock doesn’t actually have beliefs about its environment.

So Bayesian mechanics is based on thermo maths - the minimisation of free energy. And that formalism is a way to model the beliefs of organisms. An organism models its world with the intent to minimise its surprisal - an index of its prediction error that can be written down in thermo maths.

But a rock has no world model. Put a hot rock in a cold place and it will indeed minimise its free energy as the equations describe. It will go cold in a way that says its internal state could be regarded as a model of its external environment. But the rock never had any say in the matter.

Whereas put an organism in a place it doesn’t like and it will keep moving until it finds some place it does.

But I have mentioned the Bayesian Brain as exactly this kind of exercise of marrying the science of organisms to the science of thermodynamical systems. So same mathematical framework. But with the essential twist that an organism is in a modelling relation with its world.

The organism is at root just another thermodynamic system. However it is also this special kind of thermodynamic system.

My problem with what’s called philosophy and philosophers, is that much of the technical jargon often reeks of posturing, of self importance. — Mikie

That being said, why is it important to have a technical notion of “system,” — Mikie

Beyond language, there is the maths. Is that what perturbs you?

Would intelligence be desirable in itself, i.e., worthy of love? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doesn't society always attach that judgement on the individual while being equally convinced of its own inherent worth? Being worthy of love is something in the eye of the beholder. And the individual starts off already grossly out-numbered.

n common parlance it seems to me that "intelligence" has drifted a good deal away from "wisdom." — Count Timothy von Icarus

But why would we use two words if we could do with just the one? My argument is that they are both basically the same thing, but then also completely different in terms of scale.

So the brain exists to do cognition (broadly speaking). And the primary functional division that then arises for the neuroscientist is between attention and habit. The intelligence of the ability to consciously focus and figure out something complicated, coupled to the wisdom of accumulated habit which allows you to react to everything else as if it were already completely familiar and reflexively understood.

This then maps to how we socially view the intelligence~wisdom distinction. We can see how an immature mind could be very smart but not very world-wise. And also how a mature mind cannot help to have become pretty experienced in dealing with the world, even if never having being the sharpest tool in the box.

So it becomes a scale issue. The young mind often seems a bit precociously sharp. The aging mind surprisingly full of a stock of sensible habits. The brain is the same brain. It has just gone from living in a world where all was surprising novelty to a world that can hardly surprise at all.

We say there is no fool like an old fool as almost nothing can dent the security of sedimented habit. While we equally find the kids to be as much smart-arse as witty.

So yes, we apply our social judgements. And we might have different criticisms of folk at the opposite ends of the lifetime that they have spent adapting themselves to the opportunities and viscitudes of the world.

And I know that there I just related "intelligence" to the sensible, but this is only because "intelligence" sometimes seems to become wholly estimative and computational. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Commonsense ought to matter more in everyday life. But society has changed. Work itself has become more computational than practical. Or perhaps more polarised into computational and emotional intelligence as the focus of what people do.

So talk of IQ assumes a generalised intelligence or G factor score that you can attach to an individual. But we know it isn't quite so simple. And what the labour market prizes is itself evolving in time.

But two seconds on AI would sort that out for you. And it is the most basic of philosophical distinctions.

Ontology is the philosophical study of what exists, reality, and being, essentially asking "What is real?". In contrast, epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge, concerning how we know what is real and the methods and principles of gaining knowledge, answering "How do we know it?". These two branches are distinct but related, as our understanding of what exists (ontology) shapes how we seek and acquire knowledge (epistemology) about it.

Philosophy being philosophy then takes a thousand views of what this really all means. So as a technical distinction, it will rapidly become less clear. :smile:

Surely no one these days reads a book and expects a glossary, or even references? Always quicker to google. To get with the times, we should just have AI automatically hyperlink every long word perhaps. Hover over it and get the definition. Who would have time to scroll a messy thread?

Wisdom seems to provoke a lot of wistfulness around here. But prosaically, it is only the habituation of intelligence. The construction of a generalised system of thought which comes itself to be so widely applicable that it takes hardly any effort in the thinking.

If there is a reason to champion wisdom, it is because we are social creatures and wisdom is taken to be what should be the view of the largest human context. And intelligence is prized as the opposite – the genius of the individual.

But again, they are just the dichotomous limits of the same thing – the reasoning process. And that was neatly defined by Peirce as truth being what would be believed in the limit by a community of rational inquiry.

If you agree with Donald Hoffman's Interface Theory*...That's an Idealistic philosophical approach, but for practical purposes, common-sense (science) may be a better guide to dealing with Reality. — Gnomon

As epistemology, his point is mundane. As an ontological commitment, it makes the usual idealist mistake.

Idealism is the reaction against reductionism – an attempt to reject a world of only atoms blindly banging around in a void. But idealism fails to replace reductionism with anything better. It falls back on a mind stuff to replace the matter stuff. Making the same mistake in the other direction. Or tries to sustain a Cartesian dualism which tolerable to both the church and the scientist. Each side absolves itself in the other side's "great mystery".

But the holism of the systems science approach is perhaps much crueller than the Idealists ever had in mind. Systems thinking simply incorporates reductionism under its greater causal generality. It takes it in and then sits it firmly in its corner. :grin:

So reductionism models reality as a great complication built up from its fundamental degrees of freedom. Information/entropy are all about counting those. Instead of atoms or even fundamental particles, we can count the quantum numbers that are the discrete states being shuffled about the cosmic board by their wavefunctions. Reductionism goes as small as it could possibly go.

But then the systems view comes in and points out that all differences are differences in terms of larger context. And indeed, the context shapes those degrees of freedom to be the "simple as possible" things that they are. Quantum physics makes this plain too. A maths of symmetry and symmetry-breaking tells us why – in Platonic strength fashion – these basic quantum numbers emerge. The greater context defines its own smallest thing.

So idealism just doubles down on the mystery that reductionism creates. And systems science is the proper philosophical antidote. It shows that reductionism is one pole of the greater whole. The world can be simplified to a large degree. But in the end, it is revealed to be an irreducibly complex whole. And even physics says that directly these days. Idealism is still stuck in the 18th Century so far as metaphysical debate goes.

I don't understand that assessment. Energy & Entropy are Processes, not substances. Information --- or EnFormAction, as I like to spell it --- is also a process. — Gnomon

But you had to invent your own term to turn information back into informing. So you clearly can see there is an issue to be sorted.

Entropy/information arose as a way to count bits. Put a number on distinctions - whether they were a difference that made a difference, or even when they were differences that were just noise.

So that was a valuable step. Science could count the differences that any kind of system - physical or organismic - could contain. Then came the difficult bit of adding back a distinction between information that indeed informed, and entropy that instead was work or free energy.

Eventually this has led to the current rich variety of models that put meaning and action back into any counting of bits. We now do have process accounts like dissipative structure theory in physics and the Bayesian Brain theory in neuroscience.

So first we reduce everything to the bare notion of countable differences. We reduce it so far that it completely loses its larger systematic structure - the coherent context that even allows the difference to count as a difference. And then we need to repair the damage by building back some story of a process that is organising this whole show.

Ideally, the whole of reality will then be described under this one common process. But as has been said, organisms are different as they encode their environments in terms of their selfish wants. So under the most general class of systems causality - which I say is dissipative structure theory - you have at least this one major sub-class that contains the novelty; which we can call semiosis, or very loosely, information processing.

system must be less complex than its environment and it reduces complexity through a kind of code that "sees" only certain things in that environment. That becomes its reality. — Baden

So you wish to limit your definition of a system to an organism then? Which is fine, as code-based or semiotic systems are their own class of thing. Life and mind as opposed to mere physics.

But if talk about systems is talk about some general causal model, then it has to include the physical realm. And we do talk about weather systems, solar systems, atomic systems, ocean current systems and all the other systems that are globally coherent in being hierarchically self-organising.

And the big advance in biology and neurocognition has been to recognise the continuity that underlies the “mind-world” difference. The organism is a system with a code and the environment is also a system - lacking a code but still a system of constraints.

So reductionism is left with no where to hide. It is systems all the way down. And this is why both physics and organisms can make sense within the one larger causal model offered by dissipative structure theory.

The world was already doing something organised. The organism only had to latch onto that grand entropic enterprise as a bit of viral code.

But at some point the zooming out needed exceeds the human perspective — Srap Tasmaner

Boom and bust is a natural thing. Speak to an environmentalist and they would say all legislation would have to be framed through the lens of how your latest proposal would be viewed through your grand children’s eyes. Or even out five generations hence.

But we have engineered our markets so that they can panic and crash in seconds with programmed trading. Then re-jigged them so they can’t be allowed to crash as the national debt instead gets exponentialised to the point that even five generations of thrift couldn’t repay it.

So our problems certainly don’t exceed our grasp at an intellectual level. It is more that systems rigidity of this kind - laws that might bind us five generations out of- have become politically unthinkable.

It is all about balance. Traditional societies might have had the mindset of no social order change ever. Modern society might have fetishised not just change but infinite acceleration. No limits. Let’s just blast through the singularity.

In between those two extremes, the environmentalist pushing a five generations rule would seem to have a better intellectual grasp of the world’s ecological and thermodynamical realities.

It is for these reasons that I gave my own definition. — Astorre

Sure. That’s the game here. To the degree you state something clear, then there is something to expand upon or challenge. :up:

In this case, if we take a chaotic world order as a starting point, then "system" = A, if we take an ordered world order as a starting point, then "system" = B — Astorre

The interesting thing here is can you even have pure chaos or only a relative lack of order? If you look into chaos theory, it turns out to be the theory of fractal self-organisation in nature. The grand pattern that everything can’t help but fall into when everything is as unconstrained as it can be, but then also still constrained to be in globally closed interaction.

So if it is a “world” but also “chaotic”, then you have a system as I have described it. A global state of constraint with its local degrees of freedom. Chaos theory describes such world’s where fluctuations are so unruly that - unlike a Gaussian bell curve degree of randomness - there is now a randomness that is fractal or powerlaw and so doesn’t even have a mean. And yet that still leaves the world in a very definitely constrained state in that it is completely specified by its powerlaw fractal order. The degree of internal disorder is precisely measurable and predictable as a statistically emergent pattern.

But what if the system is just our idea? Chaos or order - our idea? Maybe everything is somehow different? Science is built on the basic assumptions that the universe has some kind of order. But this is precisely an assumption, which is confirmed by the existence of paradoxes.

So in this case, all our judgments are nothing more than opinions. — Astorre

Well no. Science is distinguished by the way it freely proposes its ideas and then backs them up. So it is more than just opinion. And if we are here talking metaphysics, then even that relies on being able to demonstrate some conformity between our beliefs and our experiences. You want a logical approach to reality - a rational model of causality - that seems to apply in a universal fashion.

That would be the goal of traditional metaphysics anyway. A post modernist might of course like to claim the licence that everyone should have the right to their opinion and than judgement isn’t about a process of collective wisdom that stands the test of time.

It was metaphysics that claimed reality was a Cosmos. And the first metaphysicians did not see “paradoxes” as the problem but rather as the essence of existence. A world could arise as the dynamical balance of its fundamental divisions. A principle Heraclitus popularised as the Unit of Opposites.

So philosophy itself was founded on the systems view. But the Greeks also invented atomism as the alternative reductionist paradigm. And that proved very appealing once 16th C Europe wanted to re-imagine the world as a giant mathematical clockwork - a machine that could be constructed. Reductionism became the religion of the Industrial Revolution as engineering is a very effective mindset if you want to impose human control on the natural world.

To run nature, you have to be doing something that nature itself isn’t actually doing.

There's an issue I don't think has been raised yet: "system" often carries a connotation of rigidity, though we can certainly point to systems that are flexible and adaptive. My point is, it's always a question with systems. — Srap Tasmaner

This is a misunderstanding that arises if you view Nature as a piece of reductionist machinery. But not if you view it as an organic whole. Systems science starts with the very idea of a universalised dynamical balance. Rigidity and plasticity are always relative as the balance that a system must seek to optimise if it is to persist, and thus even exist.

To be able to adapt is to be able to live in a changing world by also changing. And this is then achieved by becoming a hierarchy of rates of change. You need the global laws that change only slowly and the local degrees of freedom that can be spent very fast.

You need the banking system as your global context and the small change in your pocket to make quick and simple choices. Rigidity and plasticity are just the same thing - a dynamical balance - viewed over vastly different organisational scales.

The money flows through the economic system over all scales. All that changes in a well-plumbed system is scale of that flow.

It then becomes a separate debate whether a society has an optimised hierarchy of capital flow. Is it too rigid or too fluid on any particularly level, or even as a general whole.

I justify this by the fact that a system in the world itself can be both an ordered set of everything and a chaotic one. We have no evidence for either the first or the second approach. — Astorre

A reductionist might say - on epistemic principle - that there is this either/or choice. But the holist would expect order and chaos to compose a … system. :smile:

They would be the co-arising limits on Nature. The complementary qualities that form the dynamical balance.

And physics has the evidence. Nature is ruled by criticality. It is neither completely ordered nor completely chaotic but the balance of the two - as is recognised when we talk about a Universe closed under thermodynamics.

A third characteristic I would name is a certain stability over time. If a collection of something instantly falls apart into separate parts, it's hard to call it a system — Astorre

This is key. And it goes deeper as a system in fact exists on the edge of chaos, as they say. It feeds off instability. It is the stability that arises in organising instability into a predictable flow.

So water is an eroding source of instability. And a landscape shapes it into an efficient collection of drainage channels. A system is the global pattern of constraints that emerge to create an efficient collection of local actions. Nature is visibly hierarchical when you can see it organised into a fractal pattern of dissipation.

So a system is all about stabilising instability. And it indeed has to optimise this as a dynamical balance. It needs to exist in a persistent state of criticality, or at the hinge point between building itself up and falling apart.

Any organism is exactly this. A balance of its growth and decay. Every molecule of the body is being turned over. This is how the body as a system can stay optimised within its own ever changing environment.

For Physics, Interaction is an exchange of Energy (causation). And for Philosophy, Interaction is an exchange of Information (meaning). Yet, the relationship of Information & Energy*4 is not well known. { https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page30.html } Perhaps the best way to define a holistic System is to describe it in terms of Synergy*5 : energy + together. — Gnomon

My problem with this is it lapses into substance ontology which is reductionist. An ontology of stuffs rather than of processes or the holism of systems of self-stabilising interaction.

So I would point out that energy and information do indeed speak to the connection between the entropic world and the informational creatures who construct models of the world so as to entropify it more cleverly. There is something both essentially the same but also absolutely different when we apply a systems metaphysics lens to Nature. Our theories have to handle that.

But to approach this from the process philosophy point of view, it is important to capture the architectural holism of the causality. A system has a distinct causal structure which is the hierarchy. And a hierarchy is the self-balancing and emergent mix which is top-down constraints shaping bottom-up degrees of freedom.

If we are using physical jargon, then entropy-information is a good dichotomy but also locks us into an ontology of substance rather than process. Whereas constraints-degrees of freedom is how physics speaks about an ontology of hierarchically-organised causality. It speaks directly to the architectural principles that apply to thermalising systems of any kind - physical or biological.

This leads to the conclusion that a system, in our everyday understanding, is a conscious construct. — Astorre

That could be an implication. But the evidence is against it.

A system’s metaphysics is usually understood as being about closure under causality. A system in some fundamental way makes itself. It bootstraps into being.

Systems science is thus usually founded on thermodynamics. And more particularly, on dissipative structure theory or self-organising systems. So it is a physicalist story. But very different from reductionism in believing that a natural system is also telic in some basic sense. It is driven to structured order by the “need” to run down a gradient. It emerges as there is a Darwinian selection just to be optimised for entropy production.

Then within this strictly physical story we must account for life and mind. And that is easy enough to do if we see organisms as the further evolution of entropic structure. Life and mind are what come next in the hierarchy of nature when systems that can model their worlds - using codes: genes, neurons, words, numbers - arise and become “selfish” feeders on this world.

So life and mind are no longer blindly entropic. As systems, they represent a real shift. A causal novelty. And yet they are still completely part of this world with its over-riding and causally closed thermalising imperative. Life and mind are more of the same in the most general physical sense of being evolved dissipative structure. They just happen to spend energy on modelling their environments so as better exploit them.