Fortunately though, we humans are moral agents, who have the power to design a sub-system of our own : an ethical society, which is intended to be Fair and Just. — Gnomon

The problem here is perhaps expecting a rosy outcome in terms of a human social geography where “all are winners”. The natural dynamic at the heart of the human social order is a balancing of competition and cooperation. This is how the basic systems dynamic of global constraints in interaction with local degrees of freedom plays out in a biological species that then becomes organised by the greater entropic possibilities of language and reason.

So for a system to persist as an entropifying structure, it has to develop some set of global constraints - a way of life - that shapes the individual degrees of freedom within it - the people whose actions then reconstruct that way of life in its adapted and thus persistent form.

The human social system depends on having rational agents who can make creative choices as that is what allows sapiens to climb up the entropic ladder. We can go from being a few thousand foragers to a few million agriculturalists to billions of oil burning technologists. The ability to be strongly self interested in our actions is the kind of people that our social order is interested in producing.

But then to close the system as a persisting state of generalised progress, society must also have its long run political and cultural institutions. It must be able to place constraints on its people so that the individual energy is statistically at least managing to recreate the same way of life for a next few generations. A cooperativity has to also be prioritised to match the production of a useful degree of free self interest.

So neither competition nor cooperation are bad in themselves - something to be suppressed rather than promoted. But the art is in tuning the balance between individualism and institutionalisation.

The moral order is thus a negotiation between these two distinct imperatives. To foster the kind of rational agent who can live within a global order and play hard by the rules.

In a perfect world, that might look rather like social democracy. :razz:

But regardless, at least the debate over fair and just can start with this recognition that a system depends on this apparently “paradoxical” dichotomy of being a system of constraints that must be in the business of shaping up the degrees of freedom that can keep rebuilding that very same persisting state of generalised constraints.

Like a biological system, it is all about the capacity to repair and reproduce. The body of the organism is constantly falling apart. But it only has to rebuild itself a little faster than it decays to stay ahead in the entropification game.

So as a society, the same applies. You don’t need perfect and idealised outcomes for all to succeed in the basic game of existing as a long run entropy system. You only have to achieve enough repair and reproduction of the fabric which keeps everything hanging together.

That is basically the philosophy of a social democracy with its free market and safety nets. It isn’t a utopian vision of selfless and individually perfect beings. It is a recognition that the game just has to be kept going in a statistical fashion.

This is what pragmatism looks like from the political point of view.

How does it make sense to ask which of these is closest to thermodynamic equilibrium? — Banno

Hah. That is the problem of argument by Hallmark card cutesiness. You would have to be thermodynamically-informed enough to tell the difference between a closed Gaussian equilbrium and an open powerlaw one.

So sadly, an F.

A post-scarcity, demarchic social system is as "fair and just" as I can imagine. — 180 Proof

:up:

Flux contains the paradoxes. The Logos is not within it, the Logos is about the paradoxes flux brings. — Fire Ologist

Flux is material chance. Logos is structural necessity. The hylomorphic formula.

Heraclitus’ Logos did not resolve the paradoxes — Fire Ologist

Is a river not a good example of a balancing of stability and plasticity? Is reality not in general a balance of logos and flux?

I think Heraclitus got it. But still not many get Heraclitus.

Yeah, nah.

If good versus evil become good in the resolved middle, then what happened to evil? — Fire Ologist

I wasn’t accepting good and evil as a useful set of terms in a discussion of moral extremes. I was saying good as a direction in which to move makes more sense as the return towards the balancing middle.

Evil drops right out of the vocabulary at that point.

Each (human) "individual" is a (eu)social being first and foremost. — 180 Proof

Eusocial doesn't quite cover it as that applies to a social organism and hive mind at the level of ants and bees.

Humans have their biology – the eusociality of a chimp troop – but then also the further levels of semiosis that result from language and logic. So it is this further level that arguably is first and foremost these days. Well it was language until logic started to take over once science could harness fossil fuels through technology.

So the question of political organisation – what constitutes the fair and just – has ramped up through some actual sweeping transitions. We have evolved from ape troops to agricultural empires to free trade/fossil fuel economic networks.

Good and bad, fair and just, are terms that take some redefining as we move on up this hierarchy of dissipative order.

That leaves three things - the good, the evil, and the nuance in between. — Fire Ologist

It leaves three things. But in a fundamental sense, the systems view talks about balances that are complementary and thus "good" in that their contradictions (woo, bad!) are in fact the oppositions that can lead to the resolution or synthesis of a dynamical balance (hey, good!).

Are pleasure and pain the psychological equivalent of good and evil? Well pleasure is the signal to approach and pain is the signal to avoid. And between these two, we get steered towards the security of the safe harbour of a mental equilbrium.

Now feeling safe and sound – neither overly pleasured or pain – seems rather middling. But that is where our evolved neurocognition is channeling us towards. A mild and prolonged contentment ... which we know is going to get interrupted by perturbations from the world beyond anyway.

So having a baseline of a middling balance is what is "good". And being able to feel which way to go when we get jolted out of that – to approach or avoid – is also "good". Even it we don't say pain feels good, we know it is a most valuable and necessary part of the overall equilibrium-producing part of the cognitive equation.

What I am trying to say is that. if we live in a world of nuance, we don’t just live in a world of nuance; a world of nuance can only be so nuanced with it’s good and bad, and so these two are NOT nuanced but absolute. — Fire Ologist

The middling state of things being generally OK is just a whole bunch of tiny nuance. It is the feeling of not really knowing your are even happy or disturbed. There is a poised restlessness in both of these positions. We feel just OK. And that is a feeling that is vague.

Then pain and pleasure can kick in as oppositions that extremitise our mind towards the opposing limits of action. Absolute approach or absolute avoidance.

Good~evil takes this kind of natural dichotomy and politicises it in a religiously transcendent form. It indeed gets made an absolute constraint on individual behaviour – which may have been of use in the age of kings but doesn't make so much sense in the age of self-aware democracy.

Why seek to attack or defend an ancient jargon that has anyway outlived its value as social construct? It is a debate now passed into history.

Both is a third thing. This third thing is a paradox. — Fire Ologist

Nope. The synthesis is the resolution of the paradox – or rather the equilibration of that which has been dichotomised. It is the fact that the division is complementary that gets proven by the synergy of the resulting coming back together at a higher level of organisation.

This is a physicalist, scientific, currently predominant worldview - it is just for steel to cut flesh, for the moon to orbit the earth, as it is for the electron to orbit the proton; all is fair and just, following along as if in perfect willingness to follow every law to the letter. — Fire Ologist

But this is speaking from the reductionist paradigm – the rather religious view that the Church took of the scientific revolution and the need to maintain some separation of powers between an all-powerful God and an all-mechanical realm of material being.

Look into even Newton's laws of motion and you find the triadic structure of its three laws where the holism lies in the third law of action~reaction. To be a motion could only be measured in terms of the world that stood in resistance to that motion. A force could be impressed if a world was there to press back. The third law just axiomatised the fact this had to be a stable balance as its outcome.

And physics has since – with general relativity and quantum field theory – become explicitly holistic in this fashion. The cosmos emerges from the dynamical balance that is its complementary actions of expanding and cooling. It persists by doubling its distances and halving its energy density in a way that can run down the gradient of time for pretty much "forever".

So yes to triadic structure. But exactly where things go wrong is when you allow the physical to become separated from the ideal.

Aristotle is the saint of systems thinkers because he got this with his doctrine of hylomorphic form. Material potential and formal constraint are the two complementary limits that between them allow the rich and hierarchically complexfied "nuance" that is the kind of world fit for us to evolve within.

Yes. We humans, however, are too often not "fair and just". — 180 Proof

But does every individual have to be fair and just or should we build a social system that is on average fair and just?

To expect individuals to construct their world all from their own "goodness" is rather an unrealistic ask. Instead what works is for the world to impose its own "good balance" – in the familiar form of a state, a justice system, a democracy, even a religious code – that stabilises the individual actor in some "fair to all" fashion.

For goodness (or evil) to be a system property, it has to be embodied in the dynamical balance between the top down constraints and bottom-up freedoms of the collective organism.

It is notable – particular from Fukuyama's trilogy on world political history – that all stable societies have had to invent some transcendent principle that can stand even above its hierarchical rulers so as to close the system in a fair and just fashion. You have a people, a management, and a vision.

The King is the attentional focus dealing with the short-term and immediate. An army paid by taxes is what underpins that.

Then a God or some philosophical creed stands for the accumulation of long-run habit. The disembodied wisdom of generations of "the people" distilled into some kind of transcendent structure of belief.

Kings come unstuck when societies get too large and entropic for a person to actually both dispense justice and speak for the collective transcendental ancestor. Executive power has to be divided from priestly power so as to better organise the reciprocal things of immediate choices and long-term habits.

It takes a lot of political engineering to recreate the brain's dynamical balancing act at the level of a nation state able to act with the rationality of a self-aware people's collective. (And we already need to do that at the level of a whole planet, now that nation states are past their sell-bys.)

Small is not Large — Treatid

But small is not not-large. So small is the least possible large. Thus largeness and smallness are defined in terms of the excluded middle. But the LEM as applied to defining the contrasting limits of a potential rather than a pair of actualisable states.

Circular definitions are an artefact of trying to define Object A. — Treatid

The way out of circularity is hierarchy. A feedback growth spiral. This is what is missing from your notion of logic. It is what Peirce's logic of semiosis (or logic of vagueness) was intended to remedy – after he had already sorted out regular logic before Frege got in on the act and won the credit.

So you can go round the circle – the symmetry-breaking that is the dichotomy - and come out at a higher level. Ascend a hierarchy. You don't need to be bamboozled by circularity because going around in a circle – as a point – is what in fact creates a circle as now a new level of symmetry to be broken.

The world is exactly what it looks like. And it looks like relationships. It does not look like objects. — Treatid

Well yes. But there is then the hierarchical story where the dyadicy of relations (Peircean secondness) becomes such a thickness of interacting that it takes on the solidity of a statistical equilibrium. It becomes the regularity or continuity of a Peircean thirdness.

And that then becomes a state of form or matter which can now in turn have its symmetry broken.

A quantum vacuum fluctuates freely and so expresses its zero point average. This then allows the production of actual particles when higher level constraints are placed on the vacuum. Those particles in turn can thermalise and form their own collective average. Fundamental particles can become a condensate that then develop their own new topological order – the phonons of the condensed matter view.

You need a Peircean strength logic to talk about "relations" in terms of what the world is actually like from a cosmological and particle physics point of view.

The world looks exactly like how you expect it to look – that is normal psychology. But even at the level of the logic, we have an upgrade available that makes much sense of what ought to be seen.

The mature world is no longer Good vs Evil, but a nuanced environment that can be managed by rational actors into a worldview where we can look forward to waking up tomorrow in a familiar place with new challenges to manage. — Gnomon

Yep. This is the general structure of cognition. The balance that is the rearview mirror of accumulated wise habit and the forward view of creative possibility. Automatism vs conscious deliberation.

Neither of these is inherently bad and thus "not-good". And the balance that is then "the good" is the arrow of action that arises out of the ability to flip from acting out of habit to acting out of attention.

Habits are the accumulation of simplicities. Attention is the exploration of complexities. And the "arrow of causality" points to the feedback balancing act where today's destabilising complexity is being turned into tomorrow's stabilising simplicities. We move along the gradient of cognition that pragmaticallyt assimilates the world to our model of the world.

Although I'm not comforted by scriptural assurances that "all things work together for good", I do infer a kind of Logic to the chain of Cause & Effect in the physical world --- and an overall proportional parity between positive & negative effects. Of course, that mathematical & thermodynamic symmetry may not always apply to the personal & cultural aspects of reality : to people's feelings about those effects. I won't attempt to prove that vague belief in balance, but it seems that philosophers have always been divided on the question of a Just World — Gnomon

First up, logic does say that balance is what emerges from the very possibility of a dichotomy or symmmetry breaking. If you have a dividing, this in itself brings the further thing of a mixing. There has to be a unity of opposites as the final result. The action going both its way has to arrive at its own equilibrium average state.

So forget good and evil for a moment. This just is the logic where a symmetry-breaking must play itself out to become a symmetry-equilibrating. The wrinkle then is that the equilibrium balance is then itself a new ground of symmetry – now raised a level – that can once again be broken and equilibrated.

Hierarchies of structure can arise in openly growing fashion as each level of symmetry-breaking below it becomes some closed and stable balancing act.

This is a tricky kind of causality to contemplate. It is not the reductionism of "cause and effect". But it was already where metaphysics started with Anaximander and his pre-socratic cosmology.

So there is a general metaphysical model of division and its balancing. And then the further possibility of stacking up these "phase changes" on top of each other in hierarchically complexified fashion. A rich cosmos can emerge from its simple dichotomous origins.

And then we get to the vexed issue of good and evil. Which is problematic because it replaces the complex systems causality of the natural world with the polarised story of a cause and effect world. A mechanistic viewpoint. Instead of a pair of actions that are complementary – as in a dichotomy or symmetry breaking – we have just a single arrow from a here to a there. There is a high and a low, a good and a bad, a wonderful and an awful. There is a place to leave behind and a place to approach.

So we have now the reductionist causality that seeks to encode reality in terms of a one-way traffic system. If you discover that two directions exist, one of the ways has to be the correct way, the other thus the opposite of the correct.

But the systems approach says the only way anything is caused to exist is by it going in both its directions in a symmetry-breaking fashion, and the place that this dichotomising "leaving behind" then approaches is the symmetry-equibrating thing of its overall dynamical balance. A holistic state of globalised order ... which then can be the ground of departure for yet another rung of hierarchical complexity in the form of dichotomising~rebalancing.

So in terms of human moral social order, good and bad would be arrows pointing between some lower level and some next step level of stabilised equilibrium balance. The arrows wouldn't be the simple and brutal monotonic ones of reductionism. One path mandated and the other path forbidden. The arrows would point the way from one state of naturalistic balance to the next more complexified state that might be attained.

The lower level isn't intrinsically bad as it has proven itself to be a stable platform for some kind of higher aspirations. But the goal is to break it as symmetry so as to step up to some higher equilibrium state – that likewise is good to the degree it can prove itself a stable platform for steps even beyond that.

So in that organic or thermodynamic context – which moral discussions can at least dimly grasp in terms of a Maslovian hierarchy of needs – good is to be building community to a degree of stability that creates the potential of further steps, and evil is the back-sliding destabilisation of the teetering house of cards that already exists as the relatively stabilised platform on which we stand.

Good~evil is tarred jargon as it does speak to the simplicities of reductionist models of causality. But we can sort of get what the terms are getting at from a systems perspective and its ecosystem style, richness constructing, hierarchical complexity.

There is no need to climb an endless ladder of complexity or goodness of course. But for a natural system that must exist in an uncertain and destabilising world, there is a value in maintaining a potential for taking next steps as situations demand. We have to be able to step up because there is a reserve to spend.

This trade-off between stability and plasticity in organisms that live and act is certainly yet a further wrinkle in the whole causality deal. But who says metaphysics has to be simpler than it actually is?

For instance, there would be some sort of phenomena awareness for orange juice in a blender, a corpse, or water in a river? — Count Timothy von Icarus

But we know what living organisms have that these things lack. An active semiotic modelling relation with world based on an encoding mechanism like, principally, a hierarchy of genes, neurons, words and numbers in the case of us socially-constructed humans.

This is the central fact you fail to engage with – the way that life and mind are indeed mechanistic. A system of informational switches regulating entropic flows in the way anyone can recognise as being alive and mindful. Or in other words, constituting an organism.

But continue to talk past the epistemic cut that is what bridges the so-called explanatory gap...

but that these are two paradigmatic ways of describing and explaining the one thing, and that they are conceptually incommensurable — Janus

Describing vs explaining is a good way of putting it. The would-be phenomenologist says I can describe, and you can't explain.

But my first psychophysics lecture flipped that one on its head. The professor explained Mach bands as a neural contrast enhancing and boundary making mechanism in the visual pathway. I walked out into the bright sunlight and looked up at the sharp edges of the tall buildings against the sky and for the first time noticed that these illusory contours were indeed right there.

So explanation led to the description – the phenomenal experience. It showed that the causal gap had its proper bridge.

You just have to stick with it and bring the whole general show across with you. Arrive at a general explanation that grounds all such specific explanations. Develop a model of biosemiosis, the modelling relation, epistemic cut, Bayesian mechanics, or whatever it gets called.

If neural activity just is mental activity, if the two are one thing seen from two different (and conceptually incompatible) perspectives, then there is no interaction between them, and thus no explanatory gap. — Janus

Sounds good as this is most surely the epistemic reality, but the claims folk want to make are ontological in the most basic way.

A "just neural activity" point of view is normally as guilty of avoiding the issue as a "I just know I have a mind from direct experience of it" point of view.

The explanatory gap is at least correct in pointing to the failure of the conventional reductionist model of causality employed by even well-meaning scientists. If you end up saying there is all this busy material complexity and ... hey presto, strong emergence! ... then you haven't solved the causal issue at hand.

That is why I set out Peirce's semiosis, Rosen's modelling relation, Pattee's epistemic cut and Friston's Bayesian mechanics as new models of causality that are not just generally holistic but deal directly with the question of how the two sides of the causal equation are joined in practice.

So what is on offer from biosemiosis is an explicit model of the mind~world relation as a self-organising or organismic causality. It speaks to mindful systems in the ontologically general sense.

Of course this then leaves non-science types dissatisfied as they want an specific account of their own phenomenology. They want not an account so general that it covers life and mind in any possible form within the constraints of our physical Big Bang universe, they want to have a science account of why their back itches right at this moment in the hard to put into words way that a back itches, but it must have been itching before you really noticed it, and then when you reach for the spot, it doesn't seem to be actually there, and it was also a little bit pleasurable while also rather annoying, and giving the skin a good dig with your fingers was painful, yet also better. Etc, etc.

So reductionist science falls short. But we can fix that with not just a more holistic model of causality but a completely specific general model of mindful organisms.

The trouble then is that this requires some very deep learning. It is hard work that takes a long time to relearn how to think and reason as a holist and not a reductionist, then as a semiotic holist and not just an ordinary "it emerges" one.

The lay person with an interest in "consciousness explained" has a very long road ahead. They can easily grasp why reductionism – it just neurons firing – is a causally inadequate account. But even crossing through a grounding thermodynamic level of physicalist holism is a journey too daunting. Biosemiosis may as well be from another planet.

Producing a world doesn’t mean coding a world but performing one. — Joshs

But the claim is that this performance is based on a mechanism that connects. Take away genes, neurons, words and numbers, and what have you got? Can you still have your organism in a meaningful relation with its world?

If you want to to convince people (and maybe you don't, but surely most people don't think the explanatory gap has been solved) it might be helpful to lay out the core premises and how the conclusion is supposed to follow from them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. I can happily leave you with your self-proclaimed mystification.

Do we build a world of intent and expectation ‘in our heads’ or in our embodied patterns of material interaction with an environment? — Joshs

The latter is of course the deeper phrasing. :up:

What’s the difference between a model and a representation, and the difference between both of these and the enacting of a world through sensori-motor coupling with an environment? — Joshs

A model in the modelling relation sense is there as a machinery of semiotic control over the world. A model in the more usual sense – like a plastic kitset Spitfire – is indeed just a representation.

So I am making that sensori-motor coupling distinction. Bayesian mechanics is about how brains minimise the environment's capacity to surprise us.

It has all the energy. We have all the smarts. We learn to make it a predictable relation. And that is how we insert an "us" into "our world". That is how a modelling relation arrives at its biosemiotic Umwelt.

Isnt normative point of view (intent and expectation) the hallmark of all living self-organizing systems rather than just conscious ones? — Joshs

Again, what else have I ever said? Humans even acting at the level of habit and automatism have that same hallmark. Metabolisms and societies too.

The relationship is much the same as that between Newtonian Mechanics and General Relativity. There is no iterative path from Newtonian Mechanics to General Relativity. General Relativity does not make sense given the assumptions of Newtonian Mechanics. — Treatid

What? There is no path from mechanics with Galilean invariance to mechanics with Poincare and eventually de Sitter invariance? Tell me it ain't so. :cry:

You can't have logic and dichotomies at the same time.

A relational universe is incompatible with an objective universe.

It isn't possible to comprehend one in terms of the other. — Treatid

More piffle. As came up in another discussion, Aristotle codified both. The Organon was followed by his hylomorphism.

Of course folk can take them as incompatible or contradictory. But done properly, atomism can be shown as a subset of holism. They indeed form a dichotomy. A complementary pair. Both the same and yet also different as they are each the other's inverse operation.

Except, of course, it isn't possible to specify an initial set of premises in a fixed and unambiguous fashion. Before we can wonder if the premise is static we have to deal with never knowing exactly what the premises are in the first place. — Treatid

All this is true but built into the structure of Peircean logic. He accepted chance as real – just as real as law or globalised constraints that then emerge as the "other" to the logical vagueness of an indeterminate (or yet to be contextually determined) potential.

This is all perfectly familiar ground. We can move on.

As a kicker we can round off with General Relativity, wherein the notion of objective truth can get bent. — Treatid

Or another way of looking at it is the triadic systems approach to causal structure. GR defines the coherence of the metric, QFT defines its incoherent content. Decoherence within a de Sitter spacetime metric is how you arrive at the critical balance that is the Cosmos in terms of its VeV – vacuum particle action – at some given temperature and pressure.

So GR and QFT make the bounding dichotomy on what Peirce called synechism (global continuity) and and tychism (local chance). A flexi container and its flexing contents. Then these two opposites get mixed over all scales in a fractal or powerlaw statistical fashion. The thermal decoherence constraint that "collapses" the quantum wavefunction of the Universe itself.

This then turns your epistemic dichotomy of objective~subjective into the more useful one of an internalist vs an externalist metaphysics. Peircean logic and Systems Science speak to an internalist view of nature in which "objectivity" is what a community of inquirers hopes to arrive at in the limit.

The goal can't actually be achieved – that is assumed. But it can be approached asymptotically. And that is demonstrable as agreement becomes increasingly universalised among those doing the inquiring.

So GR seems pretty robust on that score. QFT too. It is agreed by all who rely on GPS systems or semiconductors at least. And too bad if you hold some different metaphysics that would want to quarrel with that level of detailed reality modelling.

A consistent system cannot illustrate what a contradiction is. — Treatid

Only consistency could be held up as the proper measure of what we might mean by inconsistency. Relativity is already built in by standing in opposition. The question then is only to what degree they are able to stand far apart.

How much inconsistency does it take to undermine a claim of consistency, and vice versa?

Everything that is possible within the universe (including languages) is possible. Language works with the same mechanism as the rest of the universe. Just like the universe, everything that is possible is possible. — Treatid

I think your theory of possibility needs more work. It presumes modal realism and so would need to be supported against other possibilities, like Peircean propensity for instance.

There is a whole history of metaphysical case-making that you just glibly dismiss in your scattergun mini-rants.

However, your comment regarding the foundation of science makes me think your pragmatism is superficial. That you are holding onto old assumptions despite the evidence. — Treatid

Of course you must find ways not to engage with actual arguments. Discussing is losing. Thinking is hard. Researching takes up too much time.

But against this, we might consider global workspace models of conciousness and the decent empirical support that suggests they get something right, which would seem to suggest that something much more definiteness is required to result in phenomenal awareness than having a metabolism, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I was talking to Baars back in the 90s at the same time I was talking to Friston. While the workspace story had some metaphorical value, it wasn't a real theory. Friston has developed a real theory. It is mathematical rather than metaphorical. It actually claims to have the status of a mechanics – a Bayesian mechanics. It comes with equations.

If Toyota, the City of Miami, and memes are all "concious" they seems to be so in at best an analogous way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, this is simply because you have fallen into the Cartesian representationalist trap of reifying phenomenal experience as a mysterious substance. You can't get away from the primacy of the looks and feels. They have become what "must be explained".

To break out of that, you need a more general account of what brains actually are doing – which is biosemiosis. Neurons, like genes or words, are ways of informationally constructing a modelling relation between an organism and its world.

So step one for science is giving a mathematically rigorous treatment of this modelling relation.

Step two is to turn from the generality of one mechanism that speaks to all kinds semiotic order – that of a corporation or tornado even – and apply that back to the human condition. What we as the only biology, and even neurobiology, to be enhanced with the further levels of semiotic technology in our language and logic systems, might "feel" as organisms engaged in just that kind of reality-modelling relation.

Once you add enough social psychology, psychophysics, neurocognition and other good stuff to your understanding, it is easy to see why being on a modelling relation with a world would have to feel like something. How could it not feel like something to be a self engaged in a world in this feedback loop way?

If I turn my head, do I feel my head turn or does the world suddenly spin before me in alarming fashion?

Bayesian mechanics models that modelling relation for us. We build a world of intent and expectation in our heads so as to feel we are in control of the world instead of the world being in control of us. We insert our being into the world as the new centre of its being. Consciousness is the feeling of standing apart in ways that subjugate material reality to our mental whims. A difference between us and the world is what must be constructed so that there is then an us that can be deeply engaged in the flow of the world.

Cartesian representationalism reifies the self and its feels. It only sees the dualistic separation and not the triadic unity.

"Strong emergence .... It's a very popular way of hand waving because of seemingly intractable problems with physicalism defined under causal closure. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see I have already attempted to explain this to you ... how biosemiosis is indeed a way to close the explanatory gap, and how mechanicalism is involved in a surprising way.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/667548

And these further flesh out the thesis...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/67659

Most of the pragmatism that occurs on these forums is not Peircian — Leontiskos

This may be true. Philosophy ain’t a strong suit on PF.

Pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870, and now presents a growing third alternative to both analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who first defined and defended the view, and his close friend and colleague William James (1842–1910), who further developed and ably popularized it.

A second (still termed ‘classical’) generation turned pragmatist philosophy more explicitly towards politics, education and other dimensions of social improvement, under the immense influence of John Dewey (1859–1952) and his friend Jane Addams (1860–1935) – who invented the profession of social work as an expression of pragmatist ideas (and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931)

Also of considerable importance at this time was George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), who contributed significantly to the social sciences, developing pragmatist perspectives upon the relations between the self and the community (Mead 1934),

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/

Mead of course leant into the “anthropological theory of cognition”angle with his symbolic interactionism.

Natural selection would never ensure that phenomenal experiences don't drift arbitrarily far from whatever the world is actually like because the contents of awareness have absolutely no bearing on reproduction if they don't affect behavior. It's self refuting. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such confusion. Talk of "phenomenal experiences" is just the standard sin of reifying a process as a substance. Tell me what process you might have in mind here and we will get a lot further. Consciousness is a pragmatic modelling relation with the world and not a "thing" or a "state of being".

And even if you reify the ability to act mindfully in the world – to have a flow of experience that constitutes a semiotic Umwelt – it is always going to have a bearing on reproductive success in a biological creature that depends on reproduction to exist.

Yours is the argument that self-refutes. The semiotic approach indeed explains how our phenomenology indeed does "drift arbitrarily far from whatever the world is actually like". The world is not actually coloured, is it? The redness of a rose, the sweetness of its scent, are neurological constructs rather than material properties.

Our primate eyes are tuned to making a sharp red~green wavelength distinction for the pragmatic purpose of ecological tasks like making the very slight reflectance difference of a ripe fruit "pop-out" of the green background of a forest's foliage. Evolution inserts a hue difference that leaps out in a binary fashion when a more "realistic" reaction would be seeing two barely distinguishable hues of grey.

The mind doesn't need to represent the world in faithful Cartesian fashion. It in fact wants to ignore the world as much as possible so that only what matters in terms of significant information "pops out" in ways we just can't miss.

All the worthwhile theories of mind are based now on this semiotic principle. Perception itself is an encoding of telic purpose. What matters in an evolved information processing sense is built into the structure of our sensations let alone our cognition.

All we have is multiple competing "suggestive" theories, none of which can gain currency. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Friston's Bayesian Brain seems to have taken the field by storm. We were discussing it 30 years ago when it was still rather radical and leftfield. Now he has the field's highest impact rating – even if a lot of that is due to his work sorting out the analysis techniques needed for functional brain imaging.

On the other hand, if a theory allows for something along the lines of "strong emergence," to get around these problems, I have no idea why we would be talking about mindless entropy gradients and intentionality as good in a remotely univocal or even analogous way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Strong emergence is just reductionism plus supervenience. A complete non-theory. A way of hand-waving rather than actually explaining.

Goodness, as we experience it, would be defined in terms of an irreducible intentionality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good luck with that. I thought you were here to discuss pragmatism in some way.

All of what you're saying may well be quite accurate from a scientific perspective, without amounting to a metaphysics. — Wayfarer

The truth of this relies on you being an expert in what counts as metaphysics. So...

By the way, and as we're now discussing science, have there been any updates to the declaration from CERN some years back that the Universe shouldn't exist? — Wayfarer

Sources of CP violation have indeed been found. Just not enough.

Rather than just react to catchy headlines, you ought to invest some effort into learning about what you just hope is good verbal ammunition.

Entropy is perhaps (that is, as far as we can tell) a global tendency, not a purpose. — Janus

Which is what I said and why I cited Salthe as the source.

The idea that the Cosmos is governed by some overarching (transcendent) purpose is necessarily a theistic idea, — Janus

Yep. It elevates the realm of human concerns – the purposes of a confused species not long departed from the life of an ape – to some transcendent "Mind of God" status.

I prefer a deflationary metaphysics that brings us humans back down to the Earth – the reality that we need to do a better job of tending.

The fastest route to non-existence is not a teleological explanation, sorry. — Wayfarer

You're talking bollocks. Science is based on the axiom of the principle of least action. It is enshrined in Newtonian Mechanics, Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Field Theory. And guess what, it appears in thermodynamics too once it is upgraded to dissipative structure theory.

You only understand thermodynamics in closed and gone to equilibrium terms. The Heat Death as it was understood in Boltzmann's time. But the Heat Death is now a de Sitter spacetime story. The Comos expands and cools eternally as a story of constant growth (and contraction). It does come to a halt in eternalised fashion as it hits its Planck scale quantum limits. But hey, that is the effective end of time too.

This journey has a start because the Planck scale defines the "hot and small" that could be the Big Bang's beginning in terms of the reciprocality of its Heat Death – the Heat Death being 1/hot and small, or the inverse in being the "vast and frigid".

So – as biosemioticians discussing cosmic pansemosis would put it – there is a natural tendency, an arrow of time, built in. And all of physics reflects that in its grounding on the (rather metaphysical and holistic) principle of least action.

Listen up. You are critiquing old model thermodynamics which is just a model of equilibrium balances. You need to catch up with dissipative structure physics which shows that equilibriums are something different from the point of the view of something as large and growth-predicated as a Cosmos.

Closed systems are Gaussian equilbriums. Openly growing ones preserve their balance by maintaining a log/log or powerlaw direction of action.

There is thus a good reason why we find the Universe tumbling headlong into a heat sink of its own creation. That is how the Universe manages to exist as a process that persists. If there was not this tellic trick of heading towards its own inverse, we couldn't be here to inquire about it.

What is amazing about the Big Bang is how the Cosmos has kept up its doubling and halving powerlaw equilibrium despite a number of major phase changes brought about a dropping temperature and expanding space. Through Darwininan competition, new modes of thermalising keep self-organising and so keep the larger game going.

Radiation gets replaced by matter as the fuel. Then as matter splutters out, dark energy is able to take over.

Telos is there in natural selection fashion. The critical mass is maintained even through huge material disruption.

But all this is perhaps "too new" for you to realise how old hat your views of thermodynamics is?

I just cited Salthe's tellic hierarchy of tendency/function/purpose a few posts back. I've also cited it to you half a dozen times at least over at least a decade.

If you have an argument against that approach – other than it is not what a Platonist/Buddhist/Idealist/Ordinary Person/Whatever would mean by final cause – then trot it out.

And it doesn't even matter if Aristotle did not unpack the point. It is a distinction that has only become possible because of modern science and its understanding of what actually grounds the Cosmos and where negentropic complexity might fit with that in a holistic and hylomorphic fashion.

Stop asking me to do your homework. I've learnt it is a thankless exercise.

Systems science takes Aristotle as its founding figure. It expands on the holism and organicism of his hylomorphism, whereas regular science riffs off the atomistic causality of Aristotle's earlier Organon. (Francis Bacon got modern experimental science rolling with his publication of the "New Organon".)

To which a Platonist response might be: so what? — Wayfarer

To which natural philosophy would reply, so what? We're Aristoteleans.

Have you never heard of natural philosophy as a metaphysical tradition then? :roll:

https://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/NatPhil_of_entropy.pdf

In what sense can anything be "good" "from the perspective of the Cosmos?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

And how can the Cosmos be self-organizing while lacking any self? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are trapped in a search for meaning in an ordinary socially constructed use of these terms. You are not receptive to a technical redefinition that could make good metaphysical sense. So the discussion will just loop.

Stan Salthe is a natural philosopher and biosemiotician who defines three grades of telos sufficient to span the range of natural systems from the physical to the biological to the cognitive.

The Cosmos would have its entropic tendencies. Life has its telic functionality. Cognition can be said to have its deliberative purpose.

So there is a hierarchy of systems. Those with self-organising constraints and gradients, but no informational codes. Those with biological codes. Then those with the benefit of neural codes, and in the case of humans, the sociocultural level of semiotic self hood and telos that comes with verbal and numeric codes.

This is what makes biosemiosis a natural philosophy. It puts us firmly in the Cosmos with its general thermodynamic constraints, but then is a theory of the negentropic freedoms that levels of encoding and world-modelling can buy.

Everyday language is shaped by its need to function as a way to organise everyday society. You need to develop a more technical use of language to have a more technical understanding of our situation as semiotic creatures riding thermodynamic gradients.

For one incomplete example, lies can be very pragmatic (in the sense of, "with a great deal of usefulness") — javra

But this is not a theory of truth. This is not the application of the Peircean process of rational inquiry - the truth towards which a community of reason would tend. This is just lying for selfish interests.

The point of pragmatism is to transcend individual minds and overcome solipsism by following a method of evidenced argument. You are talking about social manipulation as “being pragmatic”. Something else entirely.

I think it's possible that you're overlooking much of what the terms good and bad signify in everyday use. — javra

I am happy to have a technical discussion about epistemic method. If you want to talk about the social construction of everyday terms, that again is a quite different inquiry. No point mixing the two.

By some, sure, but how would this relate to the Good as that via which we, for one example, discern that a correct argument is good and an incorrect argument is bad? — javra

What else is pragmatism about as a ground for a theory of truth?

For instance, is Nature bad/evil that must be conquered or is Nature good and goodness that ought to be aligned with? This issue regarding control over nature has little if anything to do with being in the flow. — javra

Nature is its own self-balancing flow. And there is room for us in that.

It is not me that is defending good/bad as valid terms. I’m just pointing out why they are so reductionistically deficient.

Using the word “control” was obviously a bad move on my part. You have seized on the same reductionist connotations to drag this discussion into what I see as irrelevancies.

Why should stability be valued - aka be deemed good - to begin with? — javra

Again, you are wanting me to defend wordings that I don’t advance.

If “good” is pragmatic balance, then stability-instability has some good balance. There is indeed the plasticity-stability balance as is modelled in neural network learning models and other models of neurocognition.

It is how brains are known to work. They must learn easily but also not learn too much - add too much destabilising novelty to their hard won memories, habits and skills all at once.

Is it good to have brain that works efficiently, that can both change its mind and have a mind in the first place?

If you agree with this definition of goodness, then it is mathematically supported by models of cognition. Organisms live in the flow of their worlds by having this kind of neural balance.

Here, you're trying to rationalise 'goodness' in terms of physics, where 'serving the Second Law of Thermodynamics' which is like the scientific replacement for 'serving God's will'. — Wayfarer

Or putting something mathematically grounded in a jokey fashion.

You were. I am here applying what I take to be the implicitly maintained common sense interpretation that all of biosemiosis is taken to be fully governed by pansemiosis - hence, to be perpetually governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics in part if not in full, this without exception. — javra

I was pointing out that negentropy seems antithetical to entropy, but a systems approach explains why it ain't.

From a human point of view, negentropy might be celebrated as good and entropy bad. That is a position normally seen. But from the Cosmic point of view, negentropy only exists to the degree it better organises dissipation. So it is also good from the Second Law point of view. And probably bad from the human point of view to the degree we let out structure building civilisations run out of synch with the larger environmental entropy flows that must be their "liveable contexts".

So good/bad can be grounded in this larger thermodynamic view. That was my point.

Not all. Control of Nature is coveted by some. Others seek to be at one with Nature, often utilizing (consciously or otherwise) different metaphysical interpretations of Nature from those who view Nature as a given to be taken control of. — javra

Being in the flow is just being well balanced as you scoot down the slope on a pair of skis. It is the effort of control minimised so that the outcome has maximal efficiency.

You hit a tennis ball harder by relaxing all the muscles that would otherwise coarsen the silky skill of the shot. Semiotic modelling approaches just make this deep principle explicit.

Yet the Cosmos is constituted in part of sentient beings - rather than being in any way metaphysically ruptured from sentience. — javra

Words like sentience are a problem unless you can provide some pragmatic definition. I know what you are vaguely gesturing towards. But by contrast, biosemiosis is a model of the modelling relation itself. Friston's Bayesian Brain even cashes it out in differential equations these days.

The two (biology and physicality) are in Peircean interpretations entwined, rather than distinct. — javra

Peirce of course was a creature of his age and there is a lot of residual religiosity in his writings.

Also the genetic code wasn't discovered in his time. He was still working at the level of protoplasmic biology – the striving life force of Naturphilosophie. He couldn't anticipate how deeply correct his pragmatism/semiotics was going to be once science properly could get to the bottom of the secrets of life (and mind).

So sure, he left hostages to fortune like "effete mind" – which is still perfectly fine as a metaphor, only inadequate as a specific metaphysical claim. Unless you still believe in "spirit stuff" ontologies.

You can dilute a substance. But what is the equivalent when it comes to a process? Especially a process as rigorously modelled as biosemiosis now is, cashed out as I say in Bayesian equations and a general systems science architecture.

Process philosophy as an umbrella school of philosophy tmk simply affirms that all things are in flux, hence that there is no thing(s) which is eternally stable. Which also brings to mind the view you seem to endorse that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is eternally stable, whereas Peirce would at the very least entertain the notion that this law of nature (here granting this human appraisal of what in fact is an unquestionable verity) too progressively evolved and yet evolves together with the evolution of the physical cosmos (i.e., of the effete mind). — javra

Again, Peirce did reflect his social constraints. We know his father, the way Harvard was run, his reliance on a religiously-motivated sponsor, the general New England fervour. As someone who didn't fit in, he had to at least try to fit in somehow. Imagine Peirce supported and set free within the context of a German or British university in the same era.

But anyway, if all things are in flux then that is how stability is what then evolves from that. It gives stabilising constraints something pragmatically useful to be doing. Giving a concrete persistent shape to existence as a process (of cosmic expansion~cooling, or thermalisation).

It is the mechanical view of reality that has the problem of starting already substantially stable and existent. It is just there, and has nothing then to do. Purpose of any kind – even the most basic thermal imperative kind – is left out of the metaphysics.

If so, then your affirmation here is a reflection of your own personal proclivities rather than a defining factor of process philosophy. — javra

I use "process philosophy" in tongue in cheek fashion as the best known process philosophers are those who are the bad examples. Peirce was the only proper process philosopher ... as he was really a structuralist. Sort of an in joke here.

First, this - because it by all means seems to affirm that all biosemiosis is governed by pansemiosis — javra

Semiosis is a hierarchical systems model so speaks of top-down constraints – the structuring regularity or synechic continuity that emerges from the chaos of tychic Firstness, to use Peirce-speak.

It is the mechanical view that sees laws governing all action. The systems view says the global order only places limits on local action. And what is not forbidden is free to happen.

Constraints are essentially permissive. And indeed – as they are themselves part of what must emerge from a balancing – they must persist because they leave exactly those freedoms that are the most constructive in terms of building the system in question. Constraints must "do good" in terms of shaping the parts that go on to (re)construct the system - the system that is defined by these self-same contraints.

So the causality is very different from the causality you are criticising here. A global balance between synechism and tychism is what makes for a system that can exist because – like an organism – it can repair and reproduce itself. It has the entropic metabolism that means as a Big Bang cosmos, it can persist until the end of time itself. Or until it arrives at its own reciprocal Heat Death state, in other words.

yet either a) denounces any valid ontological occurrence of the Good which sentience ought to aspire toward or, else b) affirms that the Good is pansemiosis's very end-state, in which, in part, all awareness ceases to be, thereby again equating the objective Good to non-being (problematic for reasons mentioned in my previous post: it endorses means toward non-being in as quick a time-span as possible via, for example, suicide). — javra

Again, you are reading my words through the wrong causal lens. As well as doing what I completely reject, which is ontologising this unplaced and reductionist notion of "the Good".

That is the misstep I set out to unpick by wheeling in a better causal model of "existence".

In everything from neo-Platonism to Buddhism wherein the end-state we all "ought to seek" is deemed to be beyond notions of existence and nonexistence - an end-state yet described as complete and perfect bliss and, hence, wherein awareness of bliss is yet necessarily present (even if necessarily devoid of any I-ness) - balance between ready occurring opposites is antithetical to the obtainment of, or else closer proximity to, the Good as these set of systems can be interpreted to appraise the term "the Good". — javra

Once more, the mistake here is expecting an answer in words other than "it is a critical balance".

Analysis progresses by dichotomising, but must then continue on to the proper answer. We can't separate the world into the good and the bad, then treat one as the only real thing.

Psychology tells us that what is mentally healthy is to be "in the flow". So not just somewhere between orgasmic bliss and nihilist despair as the two limiting poles of experience, but instead always smoothly surfing the possibilities of the world in terms of well-honed skills.

Being in the flow does feel like acting at the level of unthinking habit, but in pursuit of some generally pragmatic conscious goal. We want to feel "good" and "in control" by having mastery over actions as we move through a life. And we want our communities and societies to be organised by the same flow psychology.

The pragmatic definition of "good" is really very simple from a psychological, sociological and ecological viewpoint – the view from the scale of the self, and the semiotic levels that bracket this selfhood.

But we have absorbed this mechanical metaphysics of being helpless cogs in a world machine. We believe in a causality that is flawed and so get confused about how to live a life in practice. Or at least when we get out of the flow of our well-honed daily existence and start to philosophise, then we can confuse ourselves as all the habits and words are wrong for the task.

Semiosis is how to straighten out philosophy from the ground up. Peirce is the touchstone because he created a consistent metaphysics from mathematical logic to psychological phenomenology.

Śūnyatā is not a metaphysical posit. — Wayfarer

Rejecting metaphysics is still metaphysics. The clue is in the use of logical imperatives such as the word "not". A dichotomising epistemological claim is being made.

But all definitions within a system are circular. — Treatid

Incorrect. They are dichotomies. They are reciprocally connected by the constraint of being mutually exclusive yet jointly exhaustive.

So take a basic definition to any vague notion of "a system". It is hierarchically divided between its local and global scales of being. It is bounded in measurable fashion in that the local is defined as that which is the least global, and the global is that which is the least local. Or local = 1/global and global = 1/local.

What you call going around in a meaningless circle – a rotational symmetry adding no information – is always in serious metaphysics an effort to split possibility towards its mutually complementary aspects. And this is the basis of science as it is the basis of measurability. We place reality between limiting bounds that are then each the proper measure of the other ... even when the reciprocality is between the infinite and the infinitesimal.

So circularity can be a problem for some folk. But dichotomies have been going strong since ancient Greece and now stand as the metaphysical foundation for our scientific descriptions of nature.

I was listening to a talk by Michel Bitbol yesterday, in which he tore strips off Frithjof Capra (in a friendly way): 'the language of physics is mathematics, and that of Buddhism is Sanskrit. The only thing they have in common, is that most Westerners don't understand either of them.' — Wayfarer

Buddhism, Continental philosophy and quantum mysticism have so much in common. Claiming you understand is the proof you don't understand. Truth has to be placed beyond the grasp of mere reason to secure the prestige of the priesthood protecting the holy fire.

I think 'Pierciean semiotics' is a metaphysics - a kind of scientific alternative to the creation myth, with the second law of thermodynamics being envisaged as the kind of driving force. — Wayfarer

It is a metaphysics of systems science for sure. It speaks to the triadic holism of Nature. So rather than a myth, it is a specific architecture of how Nature self-organises into the Cosmos we can recognise.

If you want to argue against it, you need to engage with its specific claims, not just shake an angry fist in the air.

But in Buddhism, the 'driving force' is neither a Biblical God nor a physical law. Beings are bound to the wheel of birth and death because of avidya, ignorance, which is another difficult thing to fathom. — Wayfarer

Again Buddhism (like Continental philosophy and QM mysterianism) is stuck on the ground floor of dualising paradox and has failed to climb up to a clear systems view of reality.

There is a murky view of the triadic structure to be found in co-dependent arising and that sort of stuff. Just not the crystal clarity of Peircean semiotics.

One can always cancel away intellectual progress by pointing to the existence of contradictions that seem to defeat the mechanisms of reason. Science can't explain mind. Yadayada.

The systems view is what lifts reason beyond this conventionalised impasse.

I mean even quantum mechanics clicks into place when you place it within the Thirdness of its thermodynamic context. Decoherence sorts things out pretty fast.

But then, where the non-occurrence of one's self as that which is in any way aware to be claimed as the objective good in the "true pansemiotic point of view", this would then rationally run directly contrary to all aspects of life which seek a continuation of awareness: everything from self-preservation to greater, else deeper, understanding regarding the nature of Nature. — javra

Humans are complex creatures. We could just as well celebrate the idea of live fast/die young. Teenagers often do.

And I thought I was clear there is a difference between biosemiosis and pansemiosis.

Humans model their reality so as to control it. That is what creates the complexity of choices. We can burn through our genetically allotted span in any way we can freely imagine. Fast and loose or slow and steady. Goodness lies in whatever is the suitable balance. And that in itself is a vexed question because we have not yet lived long enough in the highly accelerated modern world we have created.

The Cosmos by contrast just is its own model. It does what it does. Whatever its entropification balance, that is the one that has evolved and thus proven itself.

the quoted perspective rationally reduces to an endorsement of suicide in as short a time-span as possible — javra

This misses the point that in the process philosophy point of view, all things are a balancing act. There is no such thing as "existence", just persistence.

And while humans can develop some grand ambitions when they find themselves surrounded by entropic wealth, resources are finite. The Second Law awaits in the long run. Humans can accelerate the Heat Death as a choice. But they can't outlast it even by the most frugal and uneventful of lives.

So the human pragmatic task is to define good as a balancing act within a realistic appreciation of that larger Cosmic (pansemiotic) context.

Sounds a little zen, no? Eternalised equilibrium. The end of restless change in a pure state of Sunyata?