This is true, but I would put it this way: philosophy curricula more closely resemble literature curricula than they do the sciences or mathematics, and that's slightly odd. — Srap Tasmaner

That seems a better question then. How could one restructure the pedagogy to reflect a different approach? Oddly, I can remember exactly how my introductory philosophy classes started, but not the science ones. But the air of certainty and present tense is definitely what was intended to be conveyed.

And I don't think you would want philosophy to exude that kind of authority where the right views are already there to be learnt?

So does the historical approach not go very well with the mature practice of philosophy?

Kant only matters to us because his ideas are interesting; his ideas aren't interesting because he's the one who had them. — Srap Tasmaner

I certainly agree with that. And you can only make an academic career by having ideas of your own that your peers find interesting. Even if it is just offering a revisionist telling of philosophical history.

But what you learn from close reading of the big names is as much the way they thought as what they thought. You can get into their thinking and attitudes and so discover the habits that work in the philosophical game.

Yet how would you set up Philosophy 101? It would have to be some kind of map of the field that oriented students the right way. It would have to use some surprises to get the kids gripped and thinking.

The most philosophical moments for me came in fact from my first psychophysics class were the professor used the example of the Mach bands that give sharp outlines to all boundaries in our visual field. I walked outside and for the first time noticed the contrast edging around the dark buildings against the bright sky. Or at least understood the neural mechanism responsible for what had seemed a defect of clear vision and the processing logic behind it.

The things I would have in my introductory class would be the epistemology of modelling and dialectical ontology of metaphysics. So Kant and Anaximander would be useful historical starting points. But a quick sketch of the context in their times would be enough.

Then one could add a review of comparative philosophy – pay the necessary lip service to theology and PoMo as cultural traditions, along with science, Eastern traditions and the general theory of socially-constructed belief systems. :grin:

I would attempt to start the deflation of the confused use of "consciousness" by first pointing to the conflation of neurobiological levels of semiosis and sociocultural levels of semiosis.

The human species has the further advantages of language and logic to structure its modelling relation with its world.

The animal kingdom just has its neurobiology ... although ants and termites are arguably an example of ultrasociality as well. They use a system of sign – pheromones – to "think" as a colony organism in a similar structural way to how humans use words to coordinate their group thinking social order.

So get the story about "consciousness" right and all the more interesting scientific questions start to flow. You don't get locked into the plaintive bleat from the back seat that is the Hard Problem being repeated over and over as the end to intelligent discussion.

According to your theory of mind/consciousness, are insects conscious? Do they have minds? — RogueAI

I could address this in detail. I’ve spent time in labs where they investigate the neurobiology of jumping spiders. Cockroaches and wood lice are the stuff of introductory classes.

But I have no patience for you because you can’t stop harping on about “consciousness” when I’ve carefully explained my position on that and why it is such a confused term.

At best, consciousness = attention + reporting. A jumping spider has something that is primitively like what we would call attentional processing. But it doesn’t speak so can’t report or introspect.

And now you go back to bleating about whether insects are conscious in whatever muddled way you understand that term.

My question was not whether it's worthwhile in general, but how does talk about the history of ideas contribute to philosophical discussion? — Srap Tasmaner

But what do you study when you do a philosophy degree but the history of ideas? You hope to learn critical thinking and even eventually join up with some current research project. Yet you get sat down for your first years and walked through the history of philosophy.

Perhaps you can skip ancient Greek metaphysics and start off with Enlightenment epistemology, but it makes sense to understand the context of what has gone before so as to ground what seem the concerns now.

I would say that in fact a problem is that folk skimp their history and don’t realise how much is simply being rehashed with each generation. And also, close study shows how much the telling of the past is a sloppy caricature of what was actually said.

Anaximander is a prime example for me. Philosophy is a social game and its winners write the history. So the complaint might not be that the history is rather irrelevant - which for poor historians, it would be - but that it is a lot of bloody work to be historically accurate.

My starting point was wondering what Wayfarer's point was in telling @apokrisis what he did, as quoted above. What effect did he expect that paragraph to have on apo's views? — Srap Tasmaner

This has its own history. At least five times now I’ve had to respond to the jibe that Peirce was ultimately an idealist because he used the words “objective idealism”. I have to point to the context in which Peirce philosophised - the very churchy world of late-1800s Harvard and Massachusetts academia which placed Peirce under considerable social pressure to conform. And also that Peirce was arguing for semiosis as a general ontology before there was a clear notion of their being genetic and neural codes to match the linguistic and logical codes of human thought.

And if we are talking about the actual zeitgeist that Peirce was responding to, it was his response to Kant that most closely echoed Schelling and Duns Scotus.

But anyway, the history of ideas is important as it is the only way of understanding why folk tend to believe the things that they do. And while science and maths are juggernauts when it comes to the production of new things to know, maybe philosophy only has its history, or it’s creative writing wing.

If you're having problems with multiple people here, perhaps the problem is not the other people? — RogueAI

If you call being qualified to speak to the OP a problem, then you’re probably right. I’m probably the only one to have discussed all this with Chalmers, Koch, Friston, etc.

Condescension. I'm not here to pass tests set by you. — Wayfarer

You seem to want to tell me what Peirce really argued. And I happily call bullshit on that pretension.

As in any well constructed argument, I was offering a particular example in support of my general case.

I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work. — Wayfarer

You have yet to demonstrate that understand you semiotics. You have only seized on two words you think you understand - objective and idealism.

A lot of what you say is not science, per se, but metaphysics. — Wayfarer

You make that sound like a complaint. What would you prefer your science to be grounded in?

Do you agree, then, that psychology, insofar as it is the science of consciousness, is in principle capable of the same degree of precision and objectivity as is physics? — Wayfarer

I don’t believe in a science of consciousness as a thing. I believe in a science of life and mind - of biosemiosis.

Is consciousness a substance or a process? Have you got it clear what kind of "scientific" account you are even committed to?

People betray their substance ontology by talking of consciousness as a fundamental simple. A property or quality. They will talk indeed of "qualia" and "phenomenology" as if they are very sciency bits of jargon. They get enthusiastic about quantum conscious, panpsychism, information theory, and other crackpot proposals because that sounds like science "heading in the right direction".

But I understand life and mind as processes. Consciousness is not a noun but a verb. And if I say I am conscious, it is of something. What I really mean is that I can attend and report. I can introspect in the socially approved fashion of turning my neurobiology of attention onto even things that I wouldn't naturally waste time noticing – like the "redness" of red – and speak about it in a narrative fashion as something that "I" have "experienced".

So to be able to look inwards and report is a skill we learn that boils down to being socially trained to use language to direct our attention to all the "phenomenology" that our brain is instead evolved just to "look past". The brain is busy trying to assimilate the world to its running predictive models. Society sets itself up as a higher level self in our heads and demands a full account of all our thoughts and feelings so that we can become "self-regulating" beings – aware of ourselves as actors within larger sociocultural contexts.

Consciousness is treated as a big deal in modern culture because it really matters to society that it can sit inside our heads and make sure we run all our decisions through its larger filter. We must notice the details and be ready to report them.

I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted. We are supposed to always be giving full attention to everything and holding it in memory long enough to report exactly what happened in the event we had to offer a full narration in a court of justice.

But the brain evolved not to pay attention to the world as much as possible by sensible design. And until humans wrapped themselves up in the new collective habit of narrative self-regulation, that is all brains did. Act as "unconsciously" as circumstances would allow. Stopping to note every passing detail was not what "being conscious" was about.

So any scientific theory of consciousness starts with accepting we are dealing with an evolved process not a fundamental substance. And then the first practical bit of business would be deflating the overly socially-constructed notion of consciousness that everyone employs.

After that, the real science could begin.

As I have said, biosemiosis, the modelling relation, Bayesian mechanics, are what I regard as the right kind of approach. They say life and mind arise out of material being, but they have a difference. There is some mechanism or algorithm by which they can grow out of a physical substrate.

This clicks into place when the material ground is understood in the language of dissipative structure. Matter poised at criticality is a source of instability that can be tapped to do stuff by forms that can impose the constraints of mechanistic stability.

An engine can capture an explosion of petrol vapour and force it to turn a crank. A source of physical instability can be harnessed to give a stablised output. Information (as structural negentropy) can regulate the flow of entropy.

So where nature exhibits physical criticality - as it does at the quasi-classical nanoscale – there is an instability which can be fruitfully ratcheted to support a living and mindful organism. There is something a mechanism or algorithm can latch on to and start to proliferate.

The job of science thus becomes creating a generalised theory of such a mechanism or algorithm. Identify the exact design of this essential scrap of form from which wild and complex growth can result. Discover the very thing that makes an organism an organism.

And that is what biosemiosis/the modelling relation/Bayesian mechanics are about. Writing the specifications of the self-organising growth algorithm that allowed this thing we call life and mind to take hold on a material substrate and begin to grow – to develop and evolve.

Friston does want to make it as precise and objectified as physics. He offers differential equations that sum up the central trick of the modelling relation. He calls it Bayesian mechanics so that it can sit alongside classical mechanics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.

And regardless of how you judge his actual formula, at least we know this is what a science of life and mind would look like if it were to achieve the same kind of general format as the physical sciences.

You seem to think science must give some kind of account of all your attended and reported experiences and feels as if they were atomised "states of being" – qualitative stuff. But life and mind are processes that exist parasitically on the Universe as itself a process. There is dissipative structure and then organisms that ratchet dissipative structure.

And the discovery that there is just the one kind of negentropic growth algorithm that explains how evolution could take hold – the algorithm that is the semiotic and Bayesian modelling relation – is the kind of huge simplification we were hoping for from science.

From nothing came everything, and from everything will come nothing, given sufficient time. Matter is mortal. I'm concerned with the logical impossibility past either end of the sentence. — magritte

First off, we can only talk about these things the best we can. But indeed, logic can be extended in the way CS Peirce extended with his sketch for a logic of vagueness.

So the "before" of both something and nothing is the third category that is simply a "vagueness" as logically defined. Peirce flipped the principle of noncontradiction to show this.

The PNC says it cannot be true both that "p is the case" and "p is not the case". Peirce says vagueness is the indeterminate state out of which such counterfactual definiteness can arise. Vagueness is that to which the PNC fails to apply in any definite fashion.

This concept of vagueness gives us a new ground for the emergence of a system of "time, space and matter". For the Universe to swim into concrete being out of nothing is already positing a too concrete kind of ground. Nothing is a very definite and determined kind of state when contrasted to the alternative of their being instead a something.

But vagueness sits easier with a notion of everythingness. If everything is happening, then that amounts to nothing happening effectively. If you imagine the Big Bang as infinite hot fluctuation, that is a pretty featureless or formless initial conditions. Nothing can really happen because everything happening is the most violent kind of disruption.

So if we want to do metaphysics and make a logical argument, Peirce's logic of vagueness takes us a step past the usual "something out of nothing" ontology. We have the deeper thing of the indeterminacy that must be the ground of any consequent acts of determination.

Vagueness doesn't clear everything up of course. But it does give logical rigour to a way of thinking that has been around ever since Anaximander's cosmology of the Apeiron. And it fits the needs of cosmology today by allowing the Universe to have the kind of quantum origin where the beginning is just a "state of indeterminacy" – the vagueness of the "quantum realm" before spacetime and material content emerged as the two determinately opposed aspects of a system of cosmic being.

As for the rest, we all know that he who presents the most ostentatious posturing wins. Much like those chimp ancestors of ours. So, go for it. — javra

The posturing guru speaketh. Bravo! — javra

You started with the ad homs after quickly running out of arguments. And sadly they are not even witty, let alone cutting.

When so loosely understood, what then isn't? — javra

It is your interpretation that is sloppy. The Peircean and Bayesian argument is that this is the most generalised view of rational inquiry. The same basic epistemic arc of predict and measure is what evolution elaborates from biology on up.

So now metaphysics is a branch of science? Um, no, it is not. ... — javra

Despite your boundary policing, natural philosophers and systems scientists are quite comfortable with this thought.

If it makes you uncomfortable, well um …

Good luck with that, apo. I'll for now just choose to believe yours is merely a stinginess of charity mixed with some degree of deception (be it self-deception or otherwise). But hell, I could be talking to a Chat GPT program after all. So who knows? — javra

Comfort yourself however you like. You had no argument you could make.

But none of those qualities are objectively real in the way that bullets or marbles are. — Wayfarer

But these are all subjective qualities. Your notion of the material world is being described in how “it” feels to “you”. It is harder or softer, drier or wetter, hotter or colder, heavier or lighter than the flesh and blood self that wants to prod away at it. The world as you are imagining it is the one that is subjectively related to yourself as the centre of that world.

Science comes along and ends up saying quite different things from its mathematically an empirically abstracted viewpoint. The familiar world of material objects becomes something quite alien once seen from a more properly objectified perspective, with its quantum fields and relativity.

The idea of objects with qualities gets radically deconstructed, showing the degree to which your neurobiology lives within in its own broad brush and self-centred view of physics as it is at the scale of humans living on planets at a time when the Universe is generally almost at its cold and empty heat death.

OK, to state what should be obvious to those science savvy, such as yourself, one does not - and cannot - empirically test a theory inferred from data via use of strict theory and still declare such test one of empirical science. — javra

I can't follow your argument there. Science is the combination of theory and test, deductive prediction and inductive confirmation. So you seem to be introducing some strong division between "strict theory" and "empirical science". Although I'll degree that in social terms, science does divide between its whiteboard theorists and its lab-coated experimenters. There is a lot of good natured banter between the camps that can also turn to frank hostility when prestige and grants are involved.

But anyhow, it is another social fact that the failure to find supersymmetry – where the expectation was quite high it ought to be showing up at current accelerator energies – is a big part of the reason for string theory, and thus M-theory, suffering a drop in stock price in the current ToE ideas market.

So the interaction between mathematically-robust theory and empirical constraint on belief in that theory is a delicate business. A social game where a community takes a Bayesian view on what smells right and what line of inquiry to invest further in.

To the outside world, science will paint its adventures much more by the book. The funders and managers or science like that. But from the inside, something much more recognisably human is going on.

The ASSC is a very good example of what passes for "science". It is the kind of open mic gathering that can really launch your career. Chalmers and Koch are good examples. Even down to the publicity stunt of betting cases of wine so as to put the drama of big questions in terms every tax-paying science funder can relate to. And puts their names firmly at the centre of the story for years to come.

One does not test a theoretical inference against another theoretical inference - regardless of what the latter might be, that of supersymmetry included (which has alternatives to boot) - and then declare this a scientific test. For there's nothing empirical about such a test. — javra

Bollocks. Bayesian reasoning accepts the dog that doesn't bark as part of its baseline of probabilities.

You are trying to defend a methodological purity that would make working scientists laugh – privately, not publicly of course.

I spent some time with the psi research crowd because they were an example of science in fact trying to nail its methods down with absolute textbook rigour. It was a fascinating tale of the social limits of practicing what you preach. The rigour was eventually exceptional. The scope for any "psi effect" was publicly quantified to decimal places.

Yet still the community divided into the skeptics who knew the believers were cheating, they just couldn't show how, while the believers accused the skeptics of using their unconscious bias to suppress the ability of the squeaky clean labs to replicate the effect that the believers could produce on the same gear.

It always is going to come back to the way humans actually reason and how brains actually operate. Which is why I highlight Friston and his Bayesian brain model of epistemology.

A direct question: does the total self of mind and body which can be to whatever extent empirically observed by others which you (I would assume) deem yourself to be hold a first-person point of view which is now reading this text? — javra

Does that sentence even make sense? And from what point of view?

I can see how it makes sense as a utterance from the familiar point of view of the Western philosophical tradition grew out of the theologisation of Ancient Greek metaphysics. The hylomorphism of matter~form transformed into the Cartesian divide of res extensa~res cogitans. Neuroscience came along with its challenge to finally understand the mind as embodied modelling – the Bayesian prediction machine – but people clung fast to the Hard Problem that arises from believing consciousness equals a representation of the world, not a relation in which the semiotic Umwelt of the self in its world is the neurobiological construction ... that is in turn socially extended when the further encoding machinery of speech and maths happens along.

So you ask a question directly from your point of view. You ask it in righteous fashion. It would be a grave discourtesy for me not to stand in your shoes and thus be forced to agree with anything you might say.

But sorry. I've spent too much time with scientists and natural philosophers. I can see where you are coming from and I speak from a viewpoint that enjoys the advantages we call the third person.

Leave cultural constructs aside for a moment and given an honest proposition regarding what factually is in therms of your consciousness: do you in any way occur as a first-person point of view that is now reading this text? — javra

Same tactic keeps repeating. And this is instructive. It is the only argument that sustains the Hard Problem. The insistence that there is a first person point of view that has primacy.

But listen again to my third person description based on the semiosis of the modelling relation.

Our Bayesian models of the world include the construction of the self within the model as the necessary "other" of this world. It is the construction of an Umwelt.

Until you start to deal with this as the primal fact – the co-arising of the self and the world as the dichotomy that drives the Cartesian division within the model itself – you aren't going to have a clue where I am coming from.

Semiosis is an empirical theory of the "conscious self" around which a world of experience is made to dance – for good pragmatic purpose.

Science is now seeing this as the way to account for the self as a product of the "world" it constructs, the totality that is its Umwelt, so that it can then function "selfishly" within the actual real world in a reliable and largely automatic or unconscious and unthinking fashion.

I didn't say "currently untested". I said "currently untestable". A major difference for those science savy. — javra

I pointed out how it is failing the test in terms of being a generalisation that ought to contain supersymmetry as a particular feature. And in being thus currently tested, that makes it doubly a problem if you want to say it is currently untestable – the stronger claim that it can't even be tested in principle.

Claims like this make one doubt one is talking to another human rather than some AI robot. — javra

Would Chat GPT make as many rookie errors? There are whole shelves on the social construction of the self that could be poured into its pattern-matching data bank. It would at least be familiar with the relevant social science.

Which still leaves the question, is unscientific infinitesimal probability a sufficient ultimate scientific answer to how everything appears from nothing? — magritte

But my position is the opposite. Everything is self-cancelling itself towards nothing. The probability of that was so high that it the Big Bang was a story of exponential decay. Almost everything self-cancelled almost immediately. Very little was left in terms of energy density even after the first second. We are now into the asymptotic last flattening of that curve as the average density of the vacuum is a few hydrogen atoms per cubic metre and the temperature is a frigid 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

M-theory is currently an untestable theory and so is not of itself science — javra

Is it an untested theory or the mathematical generalisation of tested theories? And is it not indeed failing the test because supersymmetry is not showing up and looking increasingly dubious at available particle accelerator energies? The generalisation of the particular case is not worth much if the particular case is becoming so constrained by experiment in routine scientific fashion.

If you find any disagreement with either definition, it would be important that you then express your differences. — javra

I find plenty of disagreement. But not much of importance. You articulate a cultural construct with a long social history. Explaining the neurobiology is one thing, explaining the social history is another. I could do both. And you wouldn’t be happy with either as that would require seeing they are indeed their own narratives,

Being is a verb, isn’t it? — Wayfarer

I would say it should be according to my metaphysics. But it is normally treated in terms of a substance rather than a process or action. Something with inherent properties rather than imposed form.

So rather than an ontology of passive existence, I would favour the “other” of active persistence when it comes to being or ousia.

In other words, starting with a manifold of input such as shapes, colors, etc., it is unclear how the brain ultimately recognizes something as a distinct object. — NotAristotle

Note that the brain has a matching visual path for movement and spatial orientation. So the brain dichotomises by not just seeing a recognised object, but also seeing it in terms of its context, it’s relative position and motion in surrounding space.

Then also think how hard it is to see the trees for the forest or remember all the furrows and gullies that mark the sides of a familiar mountain.

Aspects of our world pop as objects because they strongly contrast with their surroundings as being separate entities rather than just a slight variation within a large ragged patch of variation.

So the eye is trained to recognise that which is an object in terms of having crisp boundaries and high probability of moving in a coherent fashion. Like an animal or other living creature. Or in the modern world, a chair or bicycle,

But when faced with landscapes, branching shrubbery, cloudy skies, it is looking a fractal objects with random markings and indistinct boundaries.

This again is a dichotomy the brain can latch on to as organisms maintain clear boundaries and move “as one”, so that pops out against a background of “objects” that instead do the opposite as they have random patterning as their visual characteristic.

Colour itself mainly evolved to make shapes pop out in the same Gestalt abrupt way. Objects that are indeed objects in being coherent and organised will tend to have a surface that is also coherent in its reflectance because it is all made out of the same material.

Colour vision makes that a big clue. A red plum in a green tree is easy to spot - once you are a primate who has evolved a third retinal pigment tuned to make that slight wavelength difference appear blindingly obvious from the brain’s point of view.

So the object recognition path is already being delivered a sharp contrast in terms of a landscape carved up in a variety of useful ways.

The eye is caught by the cat in the corner - a familiar coiled black presence of unpredictable movement against the contrast of the very bland and predictable furnishings - until we take a second look and see it is really something else, like a tossed aside blue sweater in a heap. The brain does a rough sorting of the visual field to find not only putative objects, but objects worth proper attending and making some further effort in recognising.

Mostly the world pops out in ways we don’t even have to pause and think about. We experience it as a flow of the ignorable. And that then grounds our sense of their being objects we need to properly recognise and take note of.

So the brain is set up with recognition capacities even more complex than you realise. This is the Gestalt figure-ground principle.

The brain is recognising what to recognise by also recognising what is to be ignored. Being “an object” puts something high on the list to being “properly seen”. As does being in “independent motion”. The two going together really grabs our attention.

What this means is that what we know of consciousness, we know because it is constitutive of our existence and experience. It appears as us, not to us. — Wayfarer

And yet who are the drongos who are reifying it as something apart from what is being done?

Is life something apart from the process of living? Does a verb need to be confused as a noun?

Sign on the door says “philosophy forum’. — Wayfarer

.
The complaint was about science’s “failure” to answer the question. That would need to be supported by examples of science failing.

Does this pass as making an epistemological argument? :roll:

(BTW, the advocacy provided is directed primarily at apokrisis's comments.) — javra

But how much neurobiology do you know to make such sweeping dismissals? What definition of “consciousness” can you present here such that it could be subject to experimental investigation?

Sure, you know what it feels like to feel like you. But where can you point to the failures of science to say something about that? Give us an example from psychophysics or cognitive neuroscience.

That’s pretty clear from extrapolating the fossil record isn’t it? — Wayfarer

The line between chemistry and biology gets murky if we do wind all the way back to the first metabolic process. That doesn’t fossilise so well when it could be just a bit of organic crud lining the porous serpentine rock of an ancient alkaline thermal vent on the ocean floor.

But the past 20 years have seen remarkable progress on the question of abiogenesis. And your friend, Barbieri, got it right in figuring out the ribosome was the central player from the biosemiotic point of view.

Science should be able to explain something as fundamental as consciousness, shouldn't it? And why is "consciousness" in quotes? — RogueAI

You sound like the kid in the back seat. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

You have failed to engage with the points I made and I don’t feel I need to run you through it again.

When did consciousness first show up? Are insects conscious? Can machines become conscious? — RogueAI

Shouldn’t the question be when did semiosis first show up? What first counts as a living organism? And then what counts as the first version of neural coordination with the wider environment? Is a bacterium where it starts as a sensor is connected like a directional switch to its flagella?

A theory of “consciousness” is just the pursuit of a ghostly spirit stuff. Or can you frame the task in a way that is scientific rather than a search for immaterial being?

You can only paper over problems for so long. Eventually the shut up-and-calculate approach fails, and the hard problems become more and more embarrassing. — RogueAI

The article shows how little some folk have changed since the era of the first ASSC meet. Friston is the only one who has made actual proper progress since then.

Neuroscience realises it is dealing with a process rather than a substance. Thus whatever one might mean by “consciousness” has to be reduced mathematically to that kind of pragmatic description. We seek a theory not about some fundamental substance with its inherent qualities or properties. We seek some kind of general “cognitive” structure that can be generalised across many related systems.

This is what Friston has achieved with his Bayesian Brain model - semiosis turned into differential equations.

The same basic process explains cognition or the semiotic modelling relation at all levels of life and mind. It fits genetic as well as neural codes. It covers verbal and numerical encoding too.

So folk can continue to witter on about the Hard Problem as if explaining the specificity of your feels is what the science needs to deliver. Science has more sense. Progress is about the generality of showing how consciousness is just the result of the evolutionary elaboration of biosemiosis - the stepping up of the Bayesian world modelling through the successive levels of genetic, neural, social and informational codes.

Biology starts with how molecules can be messages. How information can regulate dissipation. Once that was made clear, folk stopped harking on about elan vitals and other mystic substances. Life was a general kind of process.

The Bayesian Brain speaks to the same thing. It offers a mechanics which puts neurology and biology on the same mathematical footing. It is pretty easy to recognise this as big progress indeed.

The ASSC was only ever a club for those on the crazy fringe. A fun event because of that. But unrepresentative of serious neuroscience.

It is making the broad scope of experience "clear" and the MOST salient feature of this, is affectivity, and certainly not the very useful movement on a dial in a statistical gathering of information. — Astrophel

The problem is that I read this sentence and feel utterly unconvinced by claims that affectivity = truth. Do I trust this judgement? What’s the next step?

I'm not convinced — 180 Proof

Yeah, digital physics fails at the gate for me even as an epistemology, let alone an ontolotgy.

As Wiki notes:

Extant models of digital physics are incompatible with the existence of several continuous characters of physical symmetries,[7] e.g., rotational symmetry, translational symmetry, Lorentz symmetry, and the Lie group gauge invariance of Yang–Mills theories, all central to current physical theory.

Informational atomism has to be able to handle the dichotomy of the discrete-continuous. It must make a world that exists as a dynamical balance between these metaphysical limits. Every bit must be both locally separated and yet globally connected. The openness of local degrees of freedom must be closed by global constraints. Etc.

So even constructing a map of the territory is an issue according to this no go argument - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.1963.pdf

And when it comes to taking literally the claim that “reality is a computer program”, you have to scratch your head at how it can in any sense run without material hardware or a handy power socket.

Digital physics was a weird one. The Planck triad of constants does surely tells us something deep about the fundamental grain of the Universe. But that would be that nature is triadically structured (is irreducibly complex) in systems fashion and arises out of the dichotomisation or symmetry breaking that can oppose spacetime extent to spacetime content.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/586530

It is relations rather than computations that are going to be metaphysically fundamental.

The lesson of philosophy since Kant is that we can't see the Universe from some point outside our own cognitive apparatus - that the world and the subject are inextricably intertwined. — Wayfarer

So where are you standing when you see that embodied modelling relation?

Pragmatism/semiosis is about going the next step of discovering the extremes of a disembodied view by starting with the extremes of the embodied view.

This is why Peirce began with phenomenology. He tried to excavate the Firstness of qualia of “mere flashes of feeling and sensation” as they are before being complexified by language and logic.

Then he flipped that to show how that then looks from the other perspective of maximally disembodied material reality. Hence his “objective idealism”. Which might as well be called his “subjective realism”. The two are just reciprocal in being organised by dialectical inquiry.

So one thing can always be described or measured in terms of its dichotomous other. Instead of the equals sign - which would describe their dynamical balance, you just need to have an inversion sign (a reciprocal equation) that defines the same dynamical balance in terms of its complementary limits.

Gray = gray. But black = 1/white. And vice versa.

The same game allows us start where we first find ourselves - usually in a grey fog of vagueness or uncertainty - and figure out that there are these psychological limits in terms of self and world, first and third person views, embodied and disembodied cognition.

Kant started a ball rolling. But he was not the last word.

They're neither 'in here' nor 'out there' but structures within the experience-of-the-world. — Wayfarer

So everything is “just models”. Except then there is the further thing of not all models being equally rigorous.

You suggest a dichotomy of formal-phenomenal. That is the right start in terms of logical rigour as it posits qualities that mutually quantify.

But I think you can see how it bakes in category errors. It looks to mix up epistemological and ontological qualities. Or if you are really wanting to talk about Platonic ideas, then you are straying into the pitfalls of Cartesian substance dualism.

I see some sense to the cut you want to make. But I don’t think it is a sufficiently clean cut.

If you hit the dichotomy between its eyes, you would then also have a metric by which formal thought and bare consciousness could be measured. The qualities would be quantified by their status as the polar extremes or a reciprocally causal relation.

In my view, you are talking about mindfulness at the level of neurobiology vs sociocultural construction. But I argued that these are all hierarchical levels of semiosis done with increasingly formal abstraction and material range.

Types of “consciousness” - or the Bayesian modelling relation - are being stacked up with broadening scope and greater organismic being.

Semiotics sorts out the foundational basics of what is going on causally. Now we are talking about the specifics of grades of semiosis and how they are indeed developing along a natural arc towards the limits of symbolic abstraction.

Forget naked feels and atomistic qualia. They aren’t evidence of anything definite or rigorous, despite what phenomenologist would like to claim. Or at least, rigorous phenomenology discovers holistic states of sensory, motor and affective integration when it zeroes in on “what it is like to experience redness”. Qualia are reductionist constructs. Holism discovers gestalts when it indulges in drilling down to psychological Firstness.

So yep, there is always the dichotomy, the dialectic, to make our ideas clear enough to be measured. And neurobiology has its system of measurement in the way we respond bodily to a “stimulus”. Social construction had its own measurements ranging from the rather informal constraints of “does this conform to traditional convention” to fully formalised acts like reading the numbers off a dial.

There are levels of semiosis that express a sort of dichotomy in developing along the path from concretely embodied to abstractly disembodied. But genes are not “other” to numbers. Biosemiosis is about how information breaks entropic symmetries.

Organisms exist by giving nature a direction. And broadly this is always metabolic. Even philosophers have to eat. But then we have gone on to create metabolisms at the level of agrarian societies and industrialised economies.

Homo sapiens invented articulate speech and kicked the collective metabolism up a gear. The Ancient Greeks took the Pythagorean turn of seeing maths could be closed by proofs and so opened the door to the giddiness of Platonic idealism. But what then actually made maths and logic matter in human lives? It wasn’t the discovery of a new realm of being. It was just the practicalities of turning a shit-load of fossil fuel into population growth that wasn’t just exponential but hyperbolic. The rate of increase was increasing up until about 1990.

Pragmatism says sure, maths and logic seem to speak to maximal disembodiment. Silicon Valley believes it to be the future reality. The Metaverse and the Singularity. But those wet dreams of computer science forget that humans are still just doing metabolism. The only thing really changing is the scale.

This is the anthropocene. The population is topping out at 10 billion hungry mouths and ecology says we way overshot the actual carrying capacity. Our economic models that got us here were all wrong as they did not factor in the other side of the equation - the environmental capital that is being converted into social capital. Etc.

So again, a clear view of the reality is critical. Maths may be unreasonably effective in describing nature - from the much simplified reductionist point of view. But the holistic use of maths in modelling is a whole lot tougher. We need robust systems modelling to rejig our metabolic systems to continue any further as civilised beings who can also live within ecological limits.

All this is to say that slicing across the complexity with the right dichotomies has become mission critical. Ways of thought appropriate to agrarian societies are in the past. Ways of thought constructing the world as it is today are about to hit the wall.

That is why I promote the combo of dissipative structure and semiotic regulation. Or what some call ecological economics. A practical philosophy of how to be an organism with all these stacked up levels of semiosis and cranked up future expectations.

Platonism is fun with ideas. My point is that in some sense the formal does transcend the materiality of being. But human systems of thought are then closely tied in practice to achieving basic needs. And for the majority, a bucket of KFC is the ultimate Platonic good. (Well, it has pragmatically become the quickest way to get protesting inmates down off the roofs around these parts.)

So judging by what society does rather than what philosophers might call “the truth”, the realm of civilised concern remains the metabolic reality of giving the entropy of chemical reactions a usefully constructive direction. And reductionist maths is unreasonably effective when pointed towards that end.

The logic I "find" in the world is an approximation I make; — Srap Tasmaner

I think it helps to see we are pursuing a model of causality when we talk about the logic, structure, rationality or intelligibility of nature. Otherwise you are getting too hung up on the human mathematical practice and it’s semiotic peculiarities. You get caught out by the fact that semiosis is itself a symbolic and mechanical way of regulating the material world, and the material world then has its own organic logic - that of a self-organising dissipative structure.

So we have to be able to step back and see the whole of a modelling relation in which the model and the world have their own causalities, their own logics. And what would then universalise them as aspects of the one “logical” cosmos is the further step of understanding how the mechanical and the organic are the two poles of a meta-dichotomy. They can mutually exist as “other” to each other.

So the usual monistic and foundationalist instinct is to reduce our models of cosmic logic or cosmic cause to a single central truth. But semiosis and systems science explain why this quest proves so hard. It is because causality/logic is irreducibly complex in the triadic way that systems thinking describes.

The approach to the goal of a unity of opposites has to begin with the grant that anything might be the case. The “ground” of being is a pure material potential/pure logical vagueness. An everythingness of unstructured fluctuation.

We can know this is the most reasonable starting point or initial conditions as we can wind back from the developed state of the Universe today. We can see that the Universe is the most fundamental expression of an organic causality in that it is the grand self-organising dissipative structure that constrains all else due to the laws of thermodynamics and symmetry breaking.

And we can also see that one of the possibilities that exists in this general dissipative state of order is life and mind - the evolution of an informational causality, a localised symbolic and mechanical regulation that cuts across the Universe’s global dissipative project.

Modelling can control entropy flows for its own purposes as it has codes to create memories that stand outside the world of ordinary self-organising dynamics. It can manufacture networks of switches - like enzymes, neurons, utterances, logic gates - that switch material flows off and on with dichotomous certainty.

So we can say nature just self organises under the logic/causality of dissipative structure. But that itself is a statement we are then making about “the real world” from the cosy mechanistic confines of our modelling relation with that world.

And therein lies the problem. Or at least the knot of complexity which makes people’s heads explode with its self-referential Goedelian incompleteness. We can only seem to map the territory. We realise we are applying a mechanical perspective to what it itself now claimed as being the “other” of the organic. This doesn’t compute. The regress appears infinite. We are spat back out of our metaphysics into dualistic confusion.

Yet this need not be the case. If we can understand the world vs model relation in terms of an actual natural dichotomy - one that unites the organic and mechanical as complementary and reciprocal aspects of being - then we can formulate a triadic vantage point that sees both sides to the one more complex whole.

That is why I champion biosemiosis. It goes beyond pragmatism to speak to the scientific “how” of how negentropic organisms exist by mechanically ratcheting the entropic gradients of a dissipating cosmos.

In a nutshell, the material world has physical dimension. It costs time, space and energy to cause things to happen. And the way to then stand outside this world so as to model and regulate it is to thus lack the constraints of being dimensioned. To systematically reduce that dimensional involvement between model and world until it becomes the zero cost presence of an information bit or Euclidean 0D point.

The sly trick of life and mind, with their memories and informational order, is that they don’t actually have to dematerialise themselves to be literally dimensionless ghosts or whatever. As processes, they just have to be able to encode the world using a symbolic machinery that involves a small and constant entropic cost per unit of information captured and stored.

The brain burns nearly a quarter of our calories. But we can afford that because we use our brains to feed our mouths. And while feeding our mouths has been top of mind for most of history, the brain is a flexible enough bit of hardware that it could also learn to run verbal and mathematical systems of semiosis on top of its evolved genetic and neural ones. Homo sapiens could ascend the ladder of world models to ever greater dimensionless abstraction and so aspire to regulate the material dimensional world from some ever less materially constrained - and hence more purely informational - place.

So again, our big metaphysical question here is what is the fundamental model of the causality/logic of the Universe? And this quest is already irreducibly complex because we are mechanical systems modelling an organic world in the mechanical way that looks to contradict everything about that world.

This seems an irresolvable problem. But it is also the larger semiotic inevitability. Organic order - the evolution of a Universe structure by the logic of dissipation - had to create the possibility of its own mechanical regulation to the degree it became crisply dimensional and thus gave causal reality to whatever could then conceal its dimensionality - ie: the further realm of 0D symbols. Or at least semiotic systems which could afford information storage as a very small and constant cost.

A word is a puff of air. But we can make it stand for anything in terms of some unit of socially meaningful information. An enzyme is a chain of amino acids, but the body can toss one into the biochemical fray and regulate the direction of any metabolic reaction. A neuron is an abrupt act of depolarisation, but it can stack up levels and levels of Bayesian predictive routines. A number can be encoded in the 1s and 0s of a logic gate, but the resulting mathematical structure encoded in a pattern of electrically-powered switching can function as a useful model in any way a human cares to imagine.

The brute materiality of the Cosmos is the ground of its own antithesis in terms of bringing to life - being the cause - of the mechanical symbol processing that transcends the Comos’s strictly dimensional existence.

Yet look closely enough - understand semiosis as physical process with a small but constant cost per unit - and you can reunite the model with its world. We see that life and mind are part of the Cosmic fabric as all they really do is aid its dissipation by applying Bayesian modelling to the creation of paths that locally accelerate the global diktat of the Second Law.

We speak of causality when we talk of material structure. We speak of logic when we talk about informational structure. And both those things are different, yet also fundamentally connected. In formal terms, we would get closest to the metaphysical truth by being able frame them as two halves of the one larger dichotomy. And to do that, we have to dig away at the third thing of the way the two halves indeed connect. The story of the switches and ratchets which are the Janus interface bridging the epistemic machines with their ontologised environments.

Or if we switch from this synchronic perspective to the “other” of the developmental/evolutionary diachronic perspective, then we have to dig away at the third thing of the way the two halves could co-arise from some shared initial state or a vagueness … which is neither dimensional, nor dimensionless, but now “other” to dimensionality in general. In other words, the Apeiron - the everythingness that is neither yet a something, nor yet distinguishable from a nothing, but “exists” as a logical ground for any resulting structured material being.

This is certainly a twisty saga. But it is the systems metaphysics Anaximander first articulated, Peirce formalised, and which science is cashing out in twin pronged fashion as it comes to model the Universe as a self-organising dissipative structure and life/mind as itself the machinery of models that can further ratchet this generalised cosmic flow.

It would certainly be more satisfying to have a story in which a single process gives rise to the constraints on its continued operation. Without such a story, you in effect imagine the universe to exist within a bigger universe in which there are already certain rules in place -- the rules of universe creation, these laws of thought -- and you simply decline to explain that one. You would face a similar problem if anything simpler and more general than your story were conceivable -- but you knew that going in and have aimed at maximal simplicity and generality. — Srap Tasmaner

Oh, on this, we start with the need to explain at least one world - ours.

And to the degree that a tale of immanence and self-creation is achieved, that does serve to rule out a more pluralistic metaphysics.

For example, some use the quantum collapse issue to argue for an infinite multiverse. But a Darwinian self filtering mechanism - like quantum decoherence - can then close the story in effective fashion. You can prune away the modal argument that all possibilities exist. Only the possible universe exists as it is the one making all the other universes impossible.

There are still problems of course. To include vagueness in a concrete fashion is a delicate operation if vagueness is suppose to be an ultimate lack of the concrete.

So I might talk about the Apeiron, quantum vacuum, Ungrund, vagueness, or other concrete attempts to frame this notion of unlimited and formless potential. A sea of pure fluctuation … that pre-exists … any existence.

But again, we start knowing that there is indeed a something with intelligible structure. There is a world. We can start in the middle of things, as Peirce urged, and work out to the edges.

Don't you think that might be a tad bit grandiose? — wonderer1

Again the rustling of lolly papers from the cheap seats. If you want to join in, make a counter argument. Otherwise … :yawn:

Onto heat death. If energy cannot be destroyed, could we say that "cooling" of the universe is the sublimation of energy back into potential of some form? — Benj96

Yep. The Big Bang was just going to be a spreading-cooling bath of radiation. So it was an accident that it got caught up in the phase transition turning it into a void full of gravitating dust. The appearance of matter is just one of those things will have to go through to get to where it was originally going.

All the crud will have to either be swept up in black holes and evaporated a return to radiation. Or it will have to flow across the cosmic event horizon and so fall out of communication because it’s effective speed has become supraluminal.

The Heat Death will arrive with out visible corner of the universe about double in size but now filled only by the blackbody radiation of the cosmic event horizon itself. There will be a “glow” of cosmic photons with a wavelength of the size of the visible universe. So the lowest and coldest energy state you could get.

At least this is the current mathematical sketch in its simplest terms.

(Hence tychism?) — Srap Tasmaner

Or better yet – if Peirce had completed his logic of vagueness – he was defining tychism more clearly as that to which the PNC doesn't apply (and generality or synechism as that to which the LEM doesn't apply, so framing the metaphysics more clearly in terms of the familiar laws of thought).

But yes, free generation. Just like a quantum vacuum.

But much of what you write is about how constraints themselves are generated, rather than simply being given, and this is where symmetry breaking comes in, yes? — Srap Tasmaner

Constraints develop or evolve. They are the habits that survive – in that they are not disturbed by mere passing fluctuations any longer.

So at the level of pure tychism, fluctuations are symmetry breaking in equilibrium with symmetry-restoration. Virtual particles are defined by their creation~annihilation operators that don't give them long enough to get established as real particles.

But once there is a spacetime context that is larger in than the Planck scale, brief time, then now there is a filter on this hot and cancelling action. Some kinds of symmetry breaking start to stick. In particular, you get the electroweak phase transition where local fermion gauge breaking gets entangle with global goldstone boson symmetry breaking – the Higgs field that gives particles an effective mass and traps them in longer-lived states.

Whole species of anti-particles get wiped out leaving the particles nothing to annihilate with any longer. The CP-symmetry breaking story.

So all this is just routine particle physics. You can get global constraints kicking in as fast as the spacetime metric grows and so allows interactions on that larger collective scale. A Darwinian filter sorts everything out down to protons, electrons and neutrinos.

You’re dodging the question at hand. — schopenhauer1

You are badgering me for no good reason. I answered your question. How is it ethical for you to keep burdening me with more work?

So I imagine the big bang as not being located "ago". But rather being a "speed" or rate. One we are seoarated from by virtue of the fact that we are precipitant energy - ie matter. The tape slowed down, energy buled out into substance and spacetime stretched out into "billions of years and billions of astronomical units of distance". — Benj96

Pretty much. I would argue time is best measured logarithmically to reflect that rapid slowdown. Everything was happening everywhere all at once, but even after half a second, it was quite transformed.

In those terms, time is telescoped so that it makes more sense. It takes about 40 magnitudes of scale expansion to reach even the "first second" of existence. And the next 50 magnitudes cover the consequent 10^107 seconds to the heat death or practical end of time.

M0 to M7 - Planck scale cohesion forms
M7 to M11 - Inflation epoch
M11 to M31 (with crossover at M21) - Electroweak era
M31 to M38 - Quark-gluon soup era
M38 to M43 - Hadron epoch kicks in
..and the first second has passed...
M43 to M44 - Lepton soup epoch
M44 to M46 - Nucleosynthesis is the next quick step
M46 to M55 - Photon dominated expansion era
M55 to M60 - Switch to matter dominated expansion
M60 to M90 – Dark energy takes over until the Heat Death
...and now the end has arrived after about 1 to the power of 100 years...

So the first second did feel like it moved at light speed. The rest after that has become the longest and slowest crawl.

Yet if you admit deliberation than deliberating the ethics of creating another POVs dealing with entropy is an example of this. — schopenhauer1

But I simply don't accept your one-sided view of existing as a human. If it is a reason for you not to breed then that's fine.

I have often enough expressed my concerns about the way civilisation is going. But that is quite different from your claims that life can't be fun and feel the opposite of a burden.

Apokrisis has just now written about this notion of an impersonal balance of the system, implying necessity despite the fact that humans can deliberate about things like suffering and understand the very fact of suffering. — schopenhauer1

That's just misreading. What isn't constrained is what is free. The Second Law absolute forbids perpetual motion machines. But humans can build any kind of motion machine for which they can stack up the entropic budget.

What's your preference? Roller skates or a Lamborghini? Pink or gold? Leather seats or vinyl? The customer is king.

I am not *comfortable* allowing logic itself to be something like a fact of our universe -- maybe it is something more like a necessity for any universe, or at least for any intelligible universe. — Srap Tasmaner

It ought to help to strip "logic" down to its ultimate simplicities. We do grant it too much psychological status, even though we don't then want to eliminate it as the thread of "cosmic intelligibility" that runs through life and mind too.

The metaphysics of the systems view goes back to Anaximander's apeiron and the general Greek enthusiasm for understanding nature as a dialectic, a unity of opposites.

What it boils down to is the logical principle that whatever doesn't self-contradict is free to be the case. Peirce encoded this in his dichotomy of tychism~synechism – freedoms and the habits of constraint that must emerge once everything starts happening and discovers how that mass of interacting results in its own restricting limits.

If you have to argue against any principle, this would seem the hardest to refute.

Something popping out of nothing doesn't compute. There is no logic in that. But somethingness being whatever is left after a great clash of clashing contrarieties does compute. It is an undeniable conclusion. Everythingness is its own filter as all that is simply symmetric will eliminate itself, leaving whatever is uncancellably asymmetric as a possibility.

If you step one metre left and one metre right, nothing has effectively changed. But if you step one metre left and it is over the edge of a cliff, now you have an event that can't so easily be cancelled out.

This is exactly the logic of the path integral that extracts a concrete world from the probabilities of particle fields. The calculation takes all possible particle events and then discovers the degree to which all the many options cancel each other out.

The vast weight of the possibilities are symmetric – virtual particle pairs that create and annihilate without leaving any trace. But this self-winnowing eventually leaves some "collapsed" actual particle event making its mark on the world.

So both in our earliest metaphysics and our best current physical models, the same deep logical trick is at work. Something emerges out of a self-cancelling sum over everything. We have a foundational truth that we can rely on. Or at least pragmatism tells us no other principle has better survived the test.

I should add that dichotomies encode asymmetries, or hierarchical order.

If everything simply self-cancelled, then that would indeed leave nothing. So what can survive all the cancellation is the dichotomous order that gives reality two complementary directions in which to be forever moving apart from itself.

Again, that is the metaphysics of the quantum view. The Universe is eternally cooling and spreading – spreading because it cools, and cooling because it spreads.

In any instant, from the level of individual quantum vacuum fluctuations, the world has grown both larger and cooler. This in itself is enough to promote some of the self-cancelling virtual pairs to long-term reality.

At the event horizon of a black hole or the edge of the visible universe, you have even the briefest-lived self-annihilating pairs being separated for just long enough to find themselves existing in different lightcones or world lines.

Back during the hot dense fury of the Big Bang, inflation itself was separating virtual fluctuations with enough vigour to keep even a lot of very short-lived particles going. There was a lot of crud to spill into a rapidly cooled void and reheat it with the matter we are familiar with as the lucky survivors.

So the objection to maths and logic is largely to do with the way these fields have wandered off as their own research subjects, remote from the concerns of natural philosophy - the tradition that connects ancient metaphysics to modern physics.

Maths is hell of an arbitrary exercise in the freedoms from physical reality that it grants itself. The logic choppers likewise have strayed from the constraints of pragmatics.

But what we mean by an intelligible cosmos is in fact so simple in terms of its logic and maths that this isn't a great problem. The Darwinian principle of cosmic self-selection tells us somethingness is the product of a symmetry-breaking so rigorous that it left behind only uncancellable asymmetry. The dichotomy that results in the hierarchy.

In the end, the cooling~expanding Universe will end in its Heat Death. All the crud will get broken down into the faintest rustle of a quantum vacuum and exported across cosmic horizons. It will still be something of course, but as near to absolute nothingness as we can intelligibly conjecture.