Comments

  • Masculinity
    So why do you use your own name or 'apokrisis' — universeness

    Clearly I was talking about predicates and not names when talking about self-labelling. A name makes no claim about the qualities you possess.

    But then when forced to pick a name on a philosophy site, it seems at least useful to adopt one that does reflect an area of interest and provide some context.

    Apokrisis is the term for dichotomisation or symmetry breaking in the metaphysics of Anaximander, who I regard as the first recorded systems thinker.

    And now you know. :grin:
  • Masculinity
    A person may see themselves as X but yes, as you suggest, they then have to convince others that they are in fact X and that X is justifiable. — universeness

    And how useful is it to label yourself? Who benefits exactly?

    My own view is shaped by systems science. That says an organism relies on a dynamical balance. It’s identity is fluid in ways that make it adaptive. It’s identity is not tied to some absolute constraint as that is mechanical. It is instead tied to the homeostatic ability to find a productive balance that matches the demands of its environment or larger context.

    So labelling yourself is counterproductive in that it over-constrains your sense of self in a mechanical fashion. As a system, that makes you brittle. It is a shallow strength that breaks suddenly rather than a supple strength that adjusts.

    But then on the other hand, at the level of humans as part of a social collective, encouraging self-labelling is useful. Society wants to fix people into predictable roles and attitudes so that they can play parts within larger political and economic scripts.

    Again this is the logic of systems science. Hierarchical order is based on higher level constraints acting downward to shape the parts that construct the system. Complexity of form can arise when it is based on the simplicity of material that it can produce.

    So civilisation requires humans get turned into citizens. Lists of attributes like honour, loyalty, industriousness, diligence, etc, become ways in which behaviour is restricted so as to produce the right kind of cogs for a more complex level of social machinery.

    Or as we move into the modern economic paradigm, the worthy attributes become entrepreneur, self-starter, winner, influencer, etc.

    This is how it is. Society finds life simplest when we do answer to labels. But society functions best when our behaviour is intelligent and expresses a dynamical balance. Labels then become the dichotomous signifiers of the conventionalised limits of behaviour. We can dance within the space defined … or step back to critique the settings of social system that is seeking to over-simplify us.
  • Masculinity
    all you've really said, over and over again, is that you don't recognize the way I understand myself and my society as valid. — T Clark

    I argued that it was invalid and gave reasons. Simple as.
  • Masculinity
    I'm still confused, about why you think your post was responsive to what I wrote. — T Clark

    Again, I was pointing out that it speaks to a reductionist metaphysics. What's so confusing? That I didn't reply in the same terms as if I might accept them as analytically valid?

    My post was based on introspection, which I consider a valid epistemological method. Perhaps you don't, but you didn't say that. — T Clark

    Well, I'll say it now. But what would give it validity would be to add the cultural context shaping those "discovered" traits.

    I share much the same list. And I can trace them to the specifics of being heir to a Scots/colonial/Presbyterian/pragmatic/settler tradition and all the values held dear for good reason within that social frame.

    So even in terms of introspection, you looked inward for your encultured sense of being "a man" and I read it as far more accurately a description of your experience of coming from that familiar kind of colonial settler stock – male or female.

    You say you are a philosopher (Yes I saw the wink), but really you're a western philosopher, apparently rejecting what I find most important about philosophy - the chance to examine and understand, be more aware of, how my mind works. — T Clark

    That is a little ridiculous as I in fact grew up in the East. So on top of recognising you immediately as the same kind of social type as myself, I am sensitised to these kinds of contrasts because I lived in five different countries before I was 12.

    At 50, I eventually decided to live where my own parents grew up and was shocked to discover how much everyone was "just like me" in ways I had always thought were a bit peculiar to my parents and myself.

    So I had had wide experience of many cultures – with a mangled accent to match – and yet suddenly felt totally at home somewhere, for the first time, in a place I had only ever paid a flying visit.

    I don't look inwards to then find "the real me" though. I know from experience and science that this is just how cultural construction works. I don't have to be the epitome of the type of person that my grandparents geography would seem to dictate. And I don't have to rebel against it either.

    I can just appreciate the prosocial aspects that this specific cultural history represents, along with its various shortcomings. Some of the habits are good. Others demand some ironic detachment.

    I did not describe what it means to be a man, I described what it means to me for me to be a man. — T Clark

    Again, my response is that at best it told me more about the specifics of your cultural identity than of your gender identity.

    I'm sure you will now tell me I'm quite wrong about the Scots/colonial settler/etc heritage. :grin:
  • Masculinity
    For many masculinities the oppositional point, to speak to apokrisis's point, isn't feminity as much as boyhood. — Moliere

    Good point. This goes to the prosocial behaviour a society must extract from the individuals that are going to compose it. It speaks to the differences that are actually going to matter in whatever is the current concept of "the world of proper grown-ups".
  • Masculinity
    I think there are masculinities which pit themselves against the feminine, absolutely. It's a darker masculinity — Moliere

    I was framing my reply in the structuralist sense that the dichotomies that succeed and thus persist must be intrinsically complementary rather than antagonistic. They must embody a win/win division of some kind. Because that is just how nature works.

    So human social organisation boils down to the complementary dynamic of local competition vs global cooperation. The system works by being globally closed by its laws or habits, while remains open and flexible as it also then composed of locally-enshrined creative freedoms of action.

    Social democracy as "peak human politics" in a nutshell. We strive for a win/win where our legal system and economic goals provide the general cohesion that knits everything together while also doing as much as possible not to flatten out all the competitive differences between the individuals making up that society.

    So same would go with the social construction of the male and female roles. They should be framed in ways that stress the complementary. The differences shouldn't be arbitrary traits but evolutionary sensible traits – like the good old hunter~gatherer mobility dichotomy which saw men go out for days chasing dangerous meat while women and children hung close to camp while collecting tubers, berries and hunted small game.

    There are genetic tweaks for these roles. But all that is a long time ago now. Modern society has a different economic base and so this particular division of labour lacks its evolutionary logic. It feels displaced. Instead we've gone down paths like the social construction of property rights. Ownership in the form of slavery, dowries, custody, relationship contracts are all thinkable ways of human life.

    There is a lot of still quite recent social history based on race, gender, ethnicity, class, etc to work through with better framing.

    That is why I am favouring a systems view of the topic – one which is pretty alive in current political history and social science.
  • Masculinity
    If I tried to take a stab at it, I'd say masculinity is a set of behaviors biological males tend to exhibit and society expects men to have, both good and bad. Since men often exhibit these behaviors and also are expected to, it forms a closed circle of selective reinforcement. — GRWelsh

    An intelligent point at last.
  • Masculinity
    The celebration of the woman is just as real, but looks much different. Their hand rocks the cradle and therefore rules the world. — Hanover

    Oh the casual misogyny of celebrating the little homemakers who "are really in charge" because they tend your heirs just as your wonderful mum tended you. Pass the sick bag.
  • Masculinity
    So, would you agree that 'what is a human?' — universeness

    Of course. But then again, as opposed to what?

    Humans need to be understood in terms of the dichotomies that give reality to the notion of life involving "choices", or at least a flexible range of options so that behaviour is not reflexive and stereotyped.

    If you label yourself as X, then you are locked into "being X", and this mostly measuring yourself in terms of actually too often "failing to be perfectly X". It is a broken way of thinking when it comes to being a man, a human, an engineer, a whatever.

    What you need is some intelligible spectrum that is bounded by its opposing limits. Then you are free to range over the spectrum in ways that are adaptive to a world that is increasingly changeable and complex.

    So you might find it useful to have a spectrum of human behaviour that runs between the masculine and feminine. Being able to move about this range "at will" – as a personally adaptive choice – seems a good thing as who wants to be stuck in the rut of a stereotype?

    But then the other side of this is that you need to indeed find the maximally adaptive positions on this spectrum and even largely stick to it as a general habit. That is also part of the same systems deal. Having choice, but making a choice, and sticking to it while it works. The definition of self-actualisation in the healthy sense of discovering yourself through intelligent action, not trying to live up to some cultural stereotype.

    Personally, I just don't find categorisation behaviour by the masculine~feminine spectrum of supposed traits to be particularly useful when living my life. It is weakly a predictive factor at the collective statistical level, but a poor predictor at the everyday personal level of the folk you have to get along with.

    Why not have a debate about the prosocial~antisocial spectrum? That would be a more general human level alternative to a gender-based dichotomy. And it would for instance capture more of what @T Clark looks to want to claim about his personal identity.
  • Masculinity
    How true is this? How do you know? How helpful is it to use extreme positions of 'right' and 'left'? — Amity

    There is a ton of literature now analysing what is going on right under our collective noses. Fukuyama's book, Identity, is a good example. He tracks this back to events like the "therapeutic turn" in the US psyche, as exhibited in the 1990 Californian task force report, Toward a State of Self Esteem.

    Here is a chunk of my notes on where Identity directly touches on this if you want to check it out. (I'm writing from my own "ecological economics" viewpoint, so some of the jargon may be unfamiliar.)

    Fukuyama p113 notes that as left politics turned towards woke grievance industry - chasing the marginalised beyond the traditional working class of a nation in pursuit of the international - that left the Marxists seeking a new relevant politics. Working class turned to right wing nationalism (rather than right wing economic liberalism). Upper class elite also likely to back traditional cultural identity over the very multiculturalism their economic platform was predicated on.

    So an irony where domestic working class and economic elite found a new common cause in an assimilationist politics losing out to a globalist multiculturalism. The new dichotomy where a nation was just the local part of a larger internationalist project.

    The left kept growing its scope to take in an ever expanded moral view - third world, ecosystems, historical injustice - and the right was formed by its homing in on core verities. It could be abortion, gun ownership, small government, and other defining narrow issues. Short-terminism in which the past was fossilised, the future more of the same.

    So old left-right was a class war. Workers vs capital. Physical labour vs form and goals. The Aristotlean dichotomy of a local-global rational order now growing and changing too fast as people became divided between being near robotic machines and the hero boss class with all the ideational power and dignity.

    This has mutated as globalisation exported all grunt work to China and US workers either became tradies and soldiers, or office workers slowly being computerised and professionals becoming time managed. The new dichotomy is still ideas vs mindless muscle, but even the muscle is going, and even the autonomy of choice is eroding.

    Consumers are being given endless choice of purchase decisions. But in the workplace, choices are templates and scripted. How to do a job is less creative for white collar as well as the original blue collar factory hand.

    Bringing it together, the left-right dynamic boils down to final vs material causality and what happens as that is carried to workplace extremes. Then overlaid is the personal side of politics and social institution building - the romantic response to the erosion of balanced life meaning. The old human who lived inbetween as a happy farmer fighting occasional battles.

    So scalefree growth was what the reorganisation of the industrial revolution was about. That led to class war in a century. And it led to a deeper spiritual malaise a century later. First the psychic rot showed in the new materialistic foundations of the Maslovian enterprise, then in the self-actualisation upper levels - even as the growth seemed to answer the foundational needs of society, in the short term view at least.
  • Masculinity
    Maybe that doesn't fit in with what you think I ought to think and feel, but that's your issue, not mine. — T Clark

    I was addressing how to think. A question of epistemology. This is high on the bullet point list of things that make me “a philosopher”. :wink:

    For me, it's not. I'm not a man in opposition to anything. — T Clark

    Well that is silly. Even there you have those who are less of a man versus more of a man. All those who rank higher or lower than you in your atomic list of essential traits like aggression, competition, paternalism, loyalty, honour, responsibility, etc.

    How men treat women, how people treat other people, is not a political question, no matter how much political ideologues try to make it one. — T Clark

    What is it that attracts you to philosophy exactly? Is it the opportunity to counter all the fancy talk with your bluff and manly plain-speaking? :grin:
  • Masculinity
    So the opening question: What is a man?
    And the titular question: What is masculinity?     — Moliere

    There are certain characteristics I have that I am confident about - that are part of how I think about myself, my identity. — T Clark

    Ask a reductionist question and you get a reductionist answer. Masculinity gets defined as being the kind of matter which possess a certain collection of properties or essences.

    So a problem is created right at the start. We have to identify a set of characteristics that are then arguably just accidents and which lack any contextual justification.

    This is not a good way to proceed.

    As a holist, I would ask what does masculinity seek to oppose itself to? What does it dichotomously "other".

    Of course, that would be the feminine. Well perhaps. We might start down this road and start to think that the masculine~feminine dichotomy isn't that massively useful after all. It kind of gets at something, but lacks strong explanatory value.

    Logic demands we get down to useful dichotomies – polarised limits that capture a critical axis of difference. And the truth of biology is that male and female involves considerable overlap. The truth of culture is that humans are remarkably plastic.

    How are we telling the truth of the world when we allow dialectical argument to drive us to opposing extremes that are mostly about just putting small tilts one way or the other under a giant magnifying lens?

    So sure, we could give an accurate answer about maleness as biological identity and masculinity as cultural trope. We can put the small statistical differences under a spotlight. That is an interesting game, especially when you are a masculine male wanting an easy check list to confirm what you suspect.

    But philosophically, we have to start by realising how the current gender wars are a cultural symptom more than a metaphysical question.

    The right of politics has turned its aggression and frustration outwards on migrants and liberalism because the political realm is simply stalled when it comes to addressing humanity's real problems of climate change, food insecurity, etc. And likewise the left has followed its own inbuilt dialectical tendency by turning its frustrated rage inwards on the question of identity within the social collective.

    One others to construct the outsider. The other others to deconstruct the legitimacy of leaving anyone out. The right promotes over-exclusion. The left promotes over-inclusion. And for both it is the only political game left to them as real world control has been taken off the table.

    To join in with a reductionist analysis is not going to help solve anything. Male~female is already a marginal kind of dialectical difference, not worthy of cashing out in the language of substance ontology – what is the "right stuff" in terms of a set of metaphysical-strength properties.

    What we should be more worried about is how left~right became such a politically neutered debate in terms of actual economic and institutional power, even as it became such a fevered debate in terms of gender politics and other superficial identity issues.

    Personal identity counts for shit in the world of real politik. Because real politik has now institutionalised the impersonal flows of capital and entropy.
  • Is our civilization critically imbalanced? Could Yin-Yang help? (poll)
    ↪BC
    Turchin is worth reading. Here's a precis of his argument...

    Snipped from Atlantic article 2020…

    Turchin has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020.

    Problems are a dark triad: a bloated elite class; declining living standards; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”.

    In Saudi Arabia, princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the US, elites over­produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility. Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do. Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats,

    Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations. Bannon is a “paradigmatic example”. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people.

    As pandemic handouts show, the elite are jumpy. The final trigger of impending collapse tends to be state insolvency. At some point the elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.

    For medieval France, its noble class became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/
  • Science as Metaphysics
    But at this time it is a conjecture. — Wayfarer
    :roll:
  • Science as Metaphysics
    Do you think that the dark matter conjecture qualifies as metaphysics? It’s a conjecture based on abductive reasoning, arising from apparent contradictions between theory and empirical observation, positing the existence of an unknown force or substance which has never been, and may never be, directly observed. — Wayfarer

    Dark matter might be as bad an example as you could pick for science and it’s willingness to follow the Peicean method of rational inquiry. There is something to explain - why the observable mass density of the Universe is too light to do the job of creating the observably flat balancing act. This is cashed out in the maths of predictive theories. Science then looks and starts throwing even its favourite babies out as they fail the test - like the supersymmetry which would have been such a neat discovery for the string theory camp.

    Where has science done anything but follow the book on this?

    And in what sense do you think any particle or force is directly observed? Isn’t having a gravitational signature coupled to the lack of an electromagnetic one enough to say there is something to be explained?
  • A challenge to the idea of embodied consciousness
    If consciousness is strictly a bodily function, we'd have to explain how it is that the body doesn't adapt, but the mind does. — frank

    Neurobiology explains the embodied consciousness of an animal. Language and maths is what then promotes humans to the kind of selves that also live life through a social and technological lens.

    So we have stuff like self-aware or introspective consciousness – how things would look if we could see ourselves from the socialised point of view of a linguistic community,

    We still live embodied in our neurobiological personal point of view. But then we add the perspective of ourselves as social actors embodied within a realm of culture and socially rational meaning.

    So there is a faultline in the human psyche that just isn't properly realised even within mainstream psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It is only in sociology and anthropology does this extra level of situatedness simply seem the bleeding obvious.
  • Science as Metaphysics
    Metaphysics is the outside borders of science. It's an epistemological distinction. — Pantagruel

    Yep. Metaphysics reasons about possible worlds, cashing out as general logical argument. Science reasons about the actual world, cashing out in terms of models and measurements.

    One grounds the other to the degree that the distinction is rather arbitrary. And indeed. they used to be combined as natural philosophy. That they seem separate is only because science has exploded as a human practice.

    Of course there is then those who give another contemporary definition of metaphysics as that which enjoys the prestige of an academic discipline, but then gives them social licence to go around claiming ... anything. Especially if it puts upstart science in its place.
  • What is self-organization?
    Is there another external agency, that counters the Linear momentum of the initial Cause? — Gnomon

    Non-linearity is generic in nature. Newtonian physics is the special case. Every trajectory in nature is subject to a context of accident and fluctuation, starting with the quantum mechanical and progressing to the emergent constraints that organise turbulent flow and other dissipative structures.

    Newtonian physics just hides the irreducible holism of nature. You can see this in the way space and time are the “acausal void” added by hand. We know of course that they are intimately part of the dynamics.

    It also hides in the reaction force of the third law. The impact of the rolling ball on its world is seen as the “agential” action - the action force. But to make sense of that, to bring in the world that can give such a thing its proper holistic measure, we balance the book-keeping by saying the little momentum vector is matched by another little momentum vector representing the fact that the world “pushed back” and so closed the system for momentum as the conservation of energy would require.

    So if you understand the metaphysics of physics, you can see the games being played with “causality” so as to model the world in the way that humans find the most practical and convenient.

    And you would thus also understand what is being left out or papered over as the larger metaphysical content of our understandings.

    The subtlest notion in fundamental physics is gauge theory. It speaks to causal holism in ways you haven’t even begun to consider.

    And what do you know, the Bayesian Brain crowd are now looking to ground their biosemiotic theory of mind on gauge theory. It is all coming together nicely.

    On Bayesian mechanics: a physics of and by beliefs
    https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0029

    Time to get hip to the latest trip? Information theory is so 1990s. These guys are the names you want to start dropping and quote-mining to make it sound like you are up with the game.
  • What is self-organization?
    Or am I missing the point? — Gnomon

    By a country mile, as one would expect.
  • What is self-organization?
    This is because "causes" implies agency, an act whether its intentional or not, and the discussion of how specific acts are prevented, or allowed for, can never produce an understanding of the act itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

    So what is the cause that retards your progress as you try to push through the rush hour traffic constrained by the weight of other cars and all the stop lights? What do you say made you late for work?

    How is it that science can measure entropic and viscous forces?

    Why is agency just half the story of the world when the other is the frustration of agency that follows from the interaction of agents?

    Even if we accept your idiosyncratic framing of causality as agency - an ontology of animism - the logic of systems still applies.
  • What is self-organization?
    But there's only one system that's so well balanced that it's stable, right? Namely the heat death of the universe. — Srap Tasmaner

    The Universe is the stable context which is then colonised by further hierarchical levels of dissipative complexity, like stars, blackholes and biofilms.

    But the Big Bang is the featureless start, and the Heat Death is the return of things to a featureless end. So it is only in the middle that the Universe can get more interesting in that it plays host to its local dissipative structures. Gravitational clumps of particles that become negentropic residues wanting to be broken down if a mechanism like fusion, Hawking radiation or redox metabolism can exist to do the job.

    There's a sweet spot -- like how much a dissident can get past the censors, or how much an artist can challenge convention. In that zone, the whole thing produces wonders that are only possible because they are temporary. — Srap Tasmaner

    That’s it. We are only around as an interested party because any turbulent flow has eddies. The Higgs symmetry breaking turned a smooth flow of expanding-cooling radiation into a lumpy mix of radiation and clumping particles. Stars were turning hydrogen and helium back into simple radiation but at the expense of having to make nickel, carbon and other crud as the other half of the equation.

    In the short run, on the local scale, the second law can run backwards. It’s not a big deal.
  • What is self-organization?
    (Pretty close, apo?) — Srap Tasmaner

    Yep. :up:

    The systems approach is based on the four Aristotelean causes. So it dichotomises the notion of causality into two complementary types of cause. The top-down action of formal/final cause, and the bottom-up action of material/efficient cause. (Each of these causal pairs being further dichotomised as the general and particular of their kind.)

    We can then talk about this more simply, more naturally, in terms of global constraints and local degrees of freedom. That is how physics itself is set up. Differential equations which encode constraints as holonomic constants and freedoms as contingent variables.

    And in turn, we can get even closer to ordinary language by talking about constraint or limitation versus construction. We can see how there are two kinds of cause in that either an action is being prevented, or that action is being left free to happen.

    And being free to happen, it must happen – with some regularity. But then for the global constraints to survive, this free generation of local actions must also be reconstructing rather than eroding that larger world that is allowing them to exist by not ruling them out.

    It is a virtuous autopoietic loop. The right kind of limiting constraints must evolve to produce the right kind of constructive actions. That is, the ones that rebuild the system of constraints in some general, statistically robust, way.

    Evolution describes just this. What works is what out-reconstructs what doesn't. In the beginning, everything seems possible. But as everything starts to happen, it interacts in every possible way. This eventually selects for whatever balance of local and global causality works – which has the hylomorphic order that proves stable and lasting rather than unstable and quick to perish.

    So causality broadly is a unity of opposites – the partnership of downward-acting constraints and upwardly-constructing degrees of freedom. The overall goal of this system's causality is to discover a persistent dynamical balance.

    And so the Universe itself must exist as an evolutionary solution to this riddle of self-organised persistence. Its system of laws and particles was the one that won the Darwinian race in the metaphysical space of all possibilities.
  • What is self-organization?
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    As usual, you just don't listen to what I've said. So no point continuing.

    Life evolved metabolic power by learning to recycle its materials and thus learn to be able to live off just sunlight and water. The ways it was either open or closed became increasingly organised to maximise the gap between its capacity for entropic throughput and its need to repair the inevitable entropy damage to its own negentropic material structure.

    Everything in the body is falling apart. But you don't want to let it escape the bounds of the body if you can help it. You want to resuse it to rebuild the body again.

    The opposite is the case for the entropic flow from source to sink that is then spinning the wheels of this system. You want to have a bodily structure that can suck in environmental negentropy at one end and blast it out the other as entropy. Breaking things down and shoving them back out is the flip side of the same metabolic equation.

    So a dichotomy is what creates a distinction between the energy driving the machinery, and the matter constituting the machinery to be driven. The greater the division, the higher the power rating of the organism.

    And the same goes for ecosystems as a whole. They have to scale up the recycling of the materials at the planetary level of biology. It becomes one big Gaian organism.

    You are still stuck on page one of the thermodynamical analysis. Open vs closed in the context of the physics of steam engines – hot vessels in cold sinks – is just to get you going.
  • What is self-organization?
    My lack of authoritative credentials is a stumbling block for you. — Gnomon

    Stop making excuses for yourself. It is your lack of credible analysis and understanding of the subject matter itself.
  • What is self-organization?
    I eat my dinner, therefore this biological system is not closed for materials. — Metaphysician Undercover

    If you were a Chinese peasant with paddy fields to manure, you would know that material recycling is what nature does.

    But keep blathering away. :yawn:
  • What is self-organization?
    ↪wonderer1
    The rustle of sweet wrappers heard from the cheap seats.
  • What is self-organization?
    Doesn't matter to a switch, what happens, but it matters a hell of a lot to an organism. — Wayfarer

    An organism is a network of counterfactual switching. It is constructed of the very possibility to flip between polar opposites at any level of its hierarchical organisation.

    Counterfactual clarity is the basis of meaningful agency. You can pick a particular direction only to the degree you can exclude all other alternatives. What you do, and what you thus don’t do in any moment, are the complementary aspects of making “a choice”.

    And it is the same dichotomistic logic down at the level of sensory receptors or enzymatic regulation. You have to be able to make a choice, and indeed not choose that in the most definite sense by doing its very opposite, to in fact have choices, and thus what we think of as creative agency or freewill.

    To turn over the whole question to impersonal laws, like thermodynamics or atomic physics, is in a way to dodge the question that our particular point in the evolutionary cycle has brought us to. It's to wash our hands of the responsibility we must take for our own choices. — Wayfarer

    Why must we take responsibility? It is enough to suffer the consequences. You have an inflated sense of the power of the individual in a world of near eight billion people. If you want to debate the shaping hand of morality, let’s get real about what really drives modern social structure. Examine political economies rather than appeal to folk to consult their conscience.
  • What is self-organization?
    I question whether evolution is an agent at all. — Wayfarer

    Maybe I should have used scare quotes. I meant it is the general top-down constraint acting to shape the upwardly constructing degrees of freedom.

    So yes, it winnows variety so that all the actors in an ecosystem fit together in a mutually optimising way. But then those local actors can be creative in their resulting developmental trajectories. They can do their best to beat the odds when it come to reproducing.

    So agency - if we must use the word - boils down to a capacity to make choices. Constraints create a space of such choices. Actors then react to their constrained environments by making choices - informed or otherwise.

    From nature’s point of view, it doesn’t in fact matter that organisms make particularly smart choices. It is enough for evolution that they just definitely either do one thing or it’s other.

    If an organism chooses the wrong option, then the selection algorithm can tilt action towards the opposite choice the next time. But if responses are merely vague and confused, neither one thing nor the other, then nothing can really be learned.

    Agency at its simple level is just the bacterium swimming in a straight line as it keeps moving towards the scent of food and then switching to random tumbling when it has lost the scent.

    We don’t have to invoke any kind of divine inner spark. Just a molecular switch that flips the spiralling flagella from entangled straight line motion to disentangled and tumbling mode.
  • What is self-organization?
    The biological system itself, being an open system, is not constrained by the second law. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Enough idiocy. A biological system is closed for its materials and open for its energy flow. It sets up the metabolic turbine that an environmental entropy gradient can spin.

    That is the difference between a physical dissipative system like a tornado which is helplessly spun into being by a gradient and an organism that can intelligently construct the dissipative structure to tap an otherwise blocked entropy gradient.

    Read the quote I provided carefully. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Learn some biology.

    Now the issue at hand is the agent which imports the negative entropy into the system, or we could simply say "the cause" of that importation. You can write this agency off to "symmetry-breaking" or some such thing, but this is nothing more than just saying that chance is a causal agent. And that is not logically sound. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Listen more carefully to what I actually say.

    Life is agency in that it harnesses chance. It ratchets thermal randomness to sustain its organismic order.

    The Universe wants to entropify. Life says here, let me help you over the humps. The second law gets served in the long run, but life gets to swim in negentropic loopholes it discovers.

    Oxidation is a powerful natural force. So life came along and harnessed that for respiration. It even invented photosynthesis to close the material loop and use the inverse operation of fixing CO2 to
    ensure the Earth's atmosphere had a stable life-supporting mix of gases.

    Bacteria closed the whole planet for materials so a biofilm could live off sunlight while tightly regulating a Gaian O2~CO2 balance that also kept the planet at a steady liveable temperature.

    In terms of top-down constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom, this is a direct demonstration of the balancing act that maintains Earth as a Gaian level superorganism.

    Life on Earth grows as freely as it can. But collectively it is restricted by the metabolic dichotomy that is the complementary processes of respiration and photosynthesis. The upper limit of the ecological carrying capacity is defined by a narrow range of atmospheric gases and a temperature band that keeps the Earth mostly ice free. Closed for materials in this fashion, the planetary biofilm can then maximise its entropy production in terms of turning 5600 C degree sunrays into 20 degree C infrared radiation.

    So life as "agency" is about this Gaian wholeness. There is a will being expressed at the planetary scale just as much as at the local bacterial scale.

    The bacteria want exactly this kind of world so that they can thrive. And the world wants exactly these kinds of little organisms – ones that can both photosynthesise and respire – so that such an optimised planet can continue to be the case.

    Then in the larger picture, the Cosmos itself wants a planet like Earth to arrive as its Gaian self-stabilising and long run optimum.

    Oxidation is the biggest bang for buck going if you are carbon chemistry. And carbon is the biggest bank for buck material if you are talking about a propensity for chemical complexity.

    It would woo to suggest that the Cosmos actually has a mind, or a designer. But Darwinian evolution is the agency that ensures life did keep stumbling towards the biggest entropic combination the Cosmos had to offer.

    It nearly didn't work out. When bacterial first invented photosynthesis, they produced so much O2, removed so much of the insulating atmospheric methane blanket by oxidation, that they nearly killed life as the Earth froze into a snowball. Fortunately the chemistry could be inverted and a stable dynamical balance could result. The O2 could be eaten and CO2 excreted instead.

    Is this your confusion? Individual organisms might seem to answer to your simplistic definition of openness. They transact raw materials with their environments. But then the environment itself is a Gaian superorganism. Life is now woven into the material cycles of the planet itself.

    Without life, Earth would not have an oxygen rich atmosphere and all its water would have boiled off due to a lack of a protective ozone layer. The chemistry of the planet wouldn't be the same.
  • What is self-organization?
    Is it possible that your "understanding" is out of date? Not wrong, just outmoded. — Gnomon

    Nope. The problem is you rabbit on about moddish stuff without having any technical understanding or metaphysical grounding. Thus your "thesis" amounts to nothing more than hand-waving pronouncements like this...

    Scientists now know that mathematical Information plays many roles at all levels of reality. It's no longer just inert Data ; it's also Meaning, Causation, Organization, etc. — Gnomon

    It's a shame you don't actually take time to study and understand since you seem to be so excited about what is indeed a really interesting story.

    You want to hang on to the coat-tails of something while pretending to be a thought leader in it. It should be enough to just actually hang on is coat-tails and show a competence when discussing the latest developments.
  • Science as Metaphysics
    Incidentally the definition of energy is 'the capacity to do work'. — Wayfarer

    Exactly. And that capacity is measured against the incapacity of a "gone to thermal equilibrium" system to do work. So energy as a measurable concept is derived from the more fundamental thing of entropy.

    But oh wait. Entropy can't be fundamental as the Big Bang had to be some kind of highly negentropic and Planck energy dense state so that it could then unwind down to a Heat Death.

    But oh wait. The kinetic energy of the Big Bang seems to have been in perfect balance with its gravitational potential energy, and hence its expansion was adiabatic, not really increasing or decreasing the total cosmic entropy count as the Universe flatly expands and coasts towards absolute zero degrees in infinite time.

    But oh wait. The KE and PE doesn't quite add up to this flat balance after all. It seems there is this extra dark energy that now ensures the Universe reaches its energyless heat death condition in finite time. The trajectory is faintly hyperbolic rather than flat. The Universe will wind up closed by its holographic information limits – the de Sitter solution where space keeps expanding, but this space will be empty of everything but the faint sizzle of the quantum vacuum itself. A kind of content that is only virtual.

    But oh wait. Be sure that science still has a bit of distance to digging its way down to the bottom of all this metaphysics.

    Entropy and information are concepts getting us somewhere. But that is mainly to the next level of intelligible, or counterfactually-posed, questioning.
  • What is self-organization?
    Maintaining the true status of "open" in a biological system, requires that the system's interaction with its environment cannot be modeled as top-down causation, which is the modeling of a closed system. — Metaphysician Undercover

    But the biological system is still constrained by the Second Law. It can develop local negentropy because that overall increases the global entropy of the Cosmos.

    Biology’s big trick is that it is open for radiation flows by becoming closed for material flows. It can transact pure sunlight because it efficiently recycles its organic matter.

    So it is more open to radiation than bare earth. Rock will scatter and cool sunlight to only about 60 degrees C. A rainforest cools it to 20 degrees C. Life can extract more juice from the solar flux.

    But to do this, life must efficiently recycle its material structure. And rainforests are famous for being ecologically closed to the point they manage their own rainfall and need only the thinnest soil.

    So life and cosmos can both be modelled in dissipative structure terms. And when it comes to open vs closed, you have to be alert to whether you are talking radiation or matter.

    The Big Bang itself has this issue. It started off as a pure adiabatic thermal flow. Just spreading-cooling radiation. But then there was a phase change due to the entanglement of local and global symmetry breakings - an interaction between local gauge fields and a global Higgs field that made fermions massive. A smoothly expanding gas became suddenly a gravitating dust. You had a separation that was a creation of negentropy that now needed to be entropified back to pure radiation.

    At the cosmic level, this produced the open dissipative structures we call stars and blackholes. It is going to take a long time to turn the dust of massive particles back to the background thermal sizzle of a quantum vacuum.

    Then life repeats the story at its own micro-cosmic scale. We take what the Sun is doing, mix it with the complex remnants of past super-novae which are the further negentropy that results in the crud known as a planet, and cook up a little Gaian mix or photosynthesis and respiration.

    Life uses the fuel of sunlight to drive the construction of metabolically structured cells. It self-encloses for materiality so as to beat ordinary physics when it comes to the rate at which a released flow of radiation is being entropically cooled.

    The concepts of open and closed are useful in this analysis. But you also then have to be able to follow the practical complexities that help us see what is really going on.

    Without understanding it, Gnomon in fact posted this graph of the creation of the negentropic gap from David Layzer, the cosmologist who saw this back in the 1960s.

    Growth_of_info.png
  • What is self-organization?
    Apparently, that "Causal Nothingness" is the "crack" in the pot that you imagine to represent the thesis of Enformationism. — Gnomon

    I have no problem at all with either the metaphysics or physics of raw potential. Your problem is I understand all this stuff well enough to see that you don’t.
  • The science of morality from the bottom-up and the top-down
    ↪Mark S
    You substantiate my point. :up:
  • What is self-organization?
    It is only by denying the reality of the agent, that the system can be presented as top-down causally, rather than the true bottom-up causation, which is indicated when the agent is included. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Well you are certainly right that it is only by correcting the faultiness of Cartesian dualism and its res cogitans dilemma by moving up to the triadic and hierarchical metaphysics that underpins biosemiosis that one can finally resolve that old logical quandary.

    But you are still stuck in the immediate post-medieval stage of theistic thought. Even Kant and Schelling are adventures yet to be undertaken.
  • What is self-organization?
    Apokrisis has directed me to enough material for me to see that Pattee's theory is hugely deficient. Interpretation of signs, or symbols, to decipher meaning, requires an agent which does the interpreting. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Try reading again and realising that biosemiosis doesn’t talk about agents who interpret but systems of interpretance. The whole bleeding point is to understand things in terms of the irreducible holism of the triadic modelling relation.

    So as usual you are flailing away at a straw man because you can’t focus on the critical technical distinctions being made by a precise choice of words.
  • The science of morality from the bottom-up and the top-down
    Ought we want to live harmoniously in a community? — Banno

    Here we see the reductionist blundering about, missing the point, as per usual.

    Anthropologist Richard Wrangham makes a good case for how Homo sapiens "self-domesticated" over 300,000 years of hunter~gatherer evolution because the unharmonious males in a small band got knocked off with summary justice. Their genes were eliminated from the tribal pool.

    So is/ought covers the fact that hierarchical order develops over nested spatiotemporal scale. To even exist, a system has to become divided into what it is at any instant and what it ought to be in terms of its own hierarchy of constraints.

    A directionality - a telos - is what has to get built into the fabric of its being. At base, any material state of affairs is falling apart faster than it can pull together. But a living system adds the intelligence to tilt the balance in a generally desired direction. As a metabolic network, all the chemistry is being ratcheted so the body rebuilds fast enough to cease falling apart. It becomes an intentionally self-stabilising entity, or an organism.

    Human morality is just our clunky way of talking about this general system principle. Is and ought are opposed only in the sense of being these complementary limits of a global intent that serves to ratchet the local material variety in a cohesive long-run direction.

    A community has to have a generalised harmony to even exist. As Wrangham argues, this necessity is wired into our genes because we down-regulated our reactive aggression neuro-circuitry to the point we can tolerate the close and constant presence of our fellow humans in ways that chimps can't even imagine.

    The other side of the coin – as there is always the other complementary side to the coin once you depart reductionism – is that humans are still capable of proactive aggression. We can make the big flip from seeing our tribe mates as part of our collective in-group selves and instead now framing our fellow humans as dangerous, alien and "other".

    This explains the paradoxical nature of hunter~gatherer communities who seem both incredibly peaceful, yet can then flip to total war on encountering another tribe. Or as Wrangham says, who will simply combine to agree to kill the tribemate who just happens to offend enough people often enough to need removal from the collective gene pool.

    Wrangham tells how grievances are quietly aired in late night tribe discussions with a gradual "othering" of the annoying character as a sorcerer or bad luck bringer. A decision coalesces. Then a few weeks later there is a hunting party trip. The victim is teased about being brave enough to climb a tall tree and collect the honey. He puts down his weapons and climbs to the top, then looks down to see his weapons have been collected up, the other men stand patiently, a look in their eyes....

    Human morality is built on this neurobiological and sociocultural dynamic of self and other, in-group and out-group, low reactivity and high proactivity.

    It is not about the reductionism which means we can't have both sides of the holistic equation. It is about the fact that this dichotomisation of behavioural state is so sharply poised to go in either direction that it can be a decision taken over any spatiotemporal scale of human organisation.

    To exist, a system has to embody a purpose. There must be an ought, as that is the information, the constraint, that can stabilise what reductively "just is". There can be an actual state of affairs rather than merely a vague uncertainty which is neither here nor there in any factual way.

    Once you have a global ought that is in balance with a local is, then the system is equipped to self-sustain its existence. It knows how to persist.

    Which is why morality seems so important.
  • The science of morality from the bottom-up and the top-down
    Competition becomes immoral when it is exploitative. More work is needed to clarify when that is. — Mark S

    One difference is that the norms of cooperation have to be voiced clearly as these must exist in the public space of the social organism. We must hear the collective view being articulated for there to be a global norm.

    But the norms of competition are then the opposite. They are instead defined as the point where differences of view start not to matter. They are the defacto freedoms. They are the give and take which needs no strong public statement because they tend to get policed on a local, more ad hoc, basis.

    So a well-organise moral system is of course sensitive to exploitation – competition of the kind that crosses the line in some way that harms the global regulative order and so can't just be celebrated as a positive contribution to that social order, or even just laughed off as the kind of local difference that doesn't make a difference.

    Thus we have three options to consider under the banner of the local degrees of freedom. There is the positive behaviour we want to amplify, the negative behaviour we want to suppress, but then beyond that, the neutral behaviour where moral norming simply ceases to care.

    The social system has to be organised in a fashion where it can actually arrive at what is neutral as this is then the foundation for starting to make the more complex distinctions in terms of what kinds of competitive actions are positive vs negative. We can start to define exploitation or cheating in opposition to being enterprising and creative because there is the Peircean firstness – the state of action that is just "a difference" and so not yet a "difference that makes a difference" ... because of some further hierarchical level of contextual framing.

    So while norms of cooperation must be publicly stated, the "norms" of competition rest on this assumption of a fundamental neutrality – the spontaneity of chance events that don't in themselves matter one way or another. It is only when they start to encounter a context of top-down judgement that they can even morally matter.

    Do you run your marathon in green shorts or blue? Who could even find a reason to care?

    If a vast amount of such facts can be simply ignored as morally irrelevant, then we start to boil things down to the kind of local or personal facts which could start to matter in a fair marathon race. Like is your cardio superiority due to the lottery of blessed genetics or EPO?
  • The science of morality from the bottom-up and the top-down
    ↪Mark S
    You are on the right track. From my systems science point of view, societies are organised by the dynamic of competition-cooperation. Which is pretty close in meaning to exploitation-cooperation, without the negative moral judgement on the competitive element of being a “selfish” member of a cooperative group.

    So systems theory describes all natural systems - even the universe itself - as being hierarchically organised through the holism of top-down global constraints acting to shape a system’s bottom-up and locally constructing degrees of freedom.

    This makes a system a self-causing or self-organising dynamical balance. Global laws or habits act downwards to limit local action. And this then gives form and purpose to that local action as it now has the right shape, the right material and efficient degrees of freedom, to be the kind of stuff that is going to construct, or rather reconstruct, the global whole and sustain its long run existence.

    So it is a causal loop based on a win/win balancing act. And in societies, that is what a morality attempts to encode. The constraints of a society are the rules around cooperation. They tilt the social collective to stability in the long run. But a society, like any living structure, must have its local individualism, its local freedom, its local creativity, its local random variety, to be able to adapt and evolve.

    Competition keeps the hierarchy dynamic, while cooperation is keeping it stable. And morality has to be finely tuned to producing the balance of the two complementary forces that are best in terms of the degree of adaptability and change that match a society to its larger environment.

    So morality is not universal in its prescriptions, as every human group may need some different balance. But it is universal in its form in the sense that morality is a win/win balancing act where freedom is maximised for the individual within the constraints of a collective code that says what is historically “the right stuff” for reconstructing the society as it largely exists, with enough variety to also evolve in the face of changing challenge.

    Exploitation is speaking to the competitive element of the dynamic, but painting it as something more negative - an issue that needs to be addressed by adding constraints against cheaters.

    The systems view recognises that the individualistic element is the part of an evolving system that provides its lucky accidents. It is the “requisite variety” to use the cybernetic term. So morality is about limits, but also includes ideas around a suitable degree of give and take.

    The big problem in all this is what are then the global goals of a society.

    A science of morality - as in the systems science view - speaks to the general mechanism by which a society can even exist. And so in a minimal sense, existence becomes the natural purpose of a society. Finding the balance that allows for long-run survival is the embodied reason for being - as with any evolutionary story.

    Can a society really have a grander purpose than simply to exist?

    But on the other hand, what does this moral minimalism say about the modern “developed world” which is starting to cook itself in its own fossil fuel fumes?

    Maybe having the general purpose of just continuing to exist as some kind of successful competition-cooperation balance seems plenty grand enough as a life mission. :grin:
  • What is self-organization?
    Apparently, something about my information-based worldview is discomfiting for you. — Gnomon

    It’s the crackpottery. Simple enough.
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