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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not convinced — 180 Proof

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

As Wiki notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Hence tychism?) — Srap Tasmaner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re dodging the question at hand. — schopenhauer1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What W. doesn't reject is the notion that language can reach beyond the world, into the world of metaphysics. — Sam26

The step from real worlds to possible worlds. But then that also requires the same inherent criteria of being worlds from a point of view. Worlds dichotomised in terms of their “objective vs subjective” poles.

You can find all this within language as a semiotic tool. The motif repeats at the lower level of neurobiology and higher level of scientific inquiry.

The secrets of existence - the answer to “why anything?” - is to be found in the immanence of semiosis, not some transcendent manoeuvre, whether this be the transcendence of the lumpen realist or deluded idealist.

Semiosis is what Peirce could see as the immanent wellspring of reality whether we talk epistemology or ontology.

This makes a tool like language neither arbitrary nor necessary, neither PoMo subjective nor AP objective, but just an expression of the pragmatic dynamic that organises a state of persisting being.

Language does not need external grounding. Worlds and selves co-arise as complementary poles of being. Or initial conditions and boundary conditions if we are drilling down (and up) in terms of pansemiotic cosmic generality.

We want to see others fight the entropy. — schopenhauer1

I talk of play and mastery. You turn it into fight and misery.

Why not ask a surfer or procreator and discover what actual metric seems more accurate of their experience.

Pessimism is projection. As bad as the pollyannarism it welcomes as its congenital “other”. A systems view speaks to the balance of flow states and habits that integrate selves and their worlds.

Neural networks? — schopenhauer1

Semiotic networks now. Bayesian mechanics has been generalised to include life and mind.

Indeed, but your systems view discounts that procreation is a choice. Ascetics exist. Birth control exists. Abstinence exists. Pessimism exists. Realism (informal) exists. — schopenhauer1

The “other” must always exist. The systems view adds the constraint that the fundamental dynamic must express a win-win dichotomy. That is how nature works. That is how we could measure the degree of pathology in the current stage of the human story.

You want to deal in absolutes. If things ain’t perfect, then they are a disaster. But that isn’t how systems thinking would set up its metric. The spectrum would have to be instead based on complementary limits on being.

With a society for example, it would be how well does it maximise both local differentiation and global integration? You want a relation where each is reinforcing its other rather than negating its other.

There is an agenda behind every human point of view. The "agenda" of entropy barreling towards a heat death does not necessitate humans shooting out another POV into the world. — schopenhauer1

We are entrained to the telos of the Cosmos. But that doesn’t prevent us showing our mastery over entropy gradients by surfing, dancing, gardening, cooking, procreating, and all the other ways of just having a little fun.

You can choose the misery of not having hobbies or activities. You can dismiss these as worthless diversions. But don’t expect me to agree that this is a sensible point of view to have just because I’m human.

Energy is energy is energy until it has a point of view. — schopenhauer1

If you want to talk in terms of psychic energy, then Bayesian information is as close as you could get I guess.

But it sounds now like you are falling back into the incoherence of substance dualism. And even physics, let alone the sciences of life and mind, has been doing its best to move on from the substance ontology that talk of “energy” once implied.

Science now takes the systems view where gradients must be constructed down which outcomes flow. Teleology is built in to animate the Cosmos.

Your complaint is that intelligence has been dropped into the heat bath that is the Universe and is being required to do work. A planet was orbiting a star. The laws of entropy demanded that life and mind arise to accelerate the dissipation of the resulting thermal gradient.

All this effort we humans are putting in to burn all that accumulated fossil fuel. My god, what is it all for? Etc.

Exergy would likely be the better term for what you want then. Biology prefers it because it is the useful work that can be extracted by a system coming to equilbrium with its environment.

This speaks to the particular energy potential being dissipated. It might be chemical bonds, solar radiation, whatever.

Or even better are still more specific measures like ascendency. This deal directly with the material closure that sets ecosystems and societies up as dissipative structures which can repair the living fabric that is metabolising it’s environment.

Ascendency is derived using mathematical tools from information theory. It is intended to capture in a single index the ability of an ecosystem to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size.

One way of depicting ascendency is to regard it as "organized power", because the index represents the magnitude of the power that is flowing within the system towards particular ends, as distinct from power that is dissipated naturally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendency .

That is the fun of thermodynamics. From the super abstracted notion of entropy (and information), you can derive all sorts of metrics based on the same fundamental maths.

Out of the ground of a “heat death”, we can conjure up all we hold dear. Including vibrant rain forests or the throb of daily city life.

What is enthalpy's relationship to entropy? — schopenhauer1

A simple answer is the two talk about things at different levels of generality. So enthalpy is a measure of useable heat. Entropy is a measure useable information. One focused on the primary interests of the steam age. The other on those of the current information era.

So two different, yet related, ways of reducing reality to mathematical quantities that make sense from their respective embodied points of view.

Pessimism could surely pull the same trick and quantify the notion of burden as yet another thermo-metric? The level of disappointment that could be generated by some amount of simply being alive and so generating the steady metabolic heat equivalent of running a 100 watt bulb?

The higher the initial expectation of a life of effortless joy, the greater the “work” to be extracted in terms of generating a sense of crashing disillusionment. Is that the ethical equation you had in mind? :smile:

Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair (see Rorty, and, I guess, most analytic philosophers). To see a truth IS an aesthetic experience. — Astrophel

Following Peirce, I would argue any notion of truth is semiotic. And science now tells us that humans engage in semiosis at four levels of encoding or sign relations.

We engage with the world via genes, neurons, words and numbers. Or more broadly, we are neurobiological creatures first, but have become also sociocultural creatures as well.

And so I say you are confusing the levels at which we “exist in the flow of nature”. Neurobiology sets us up as affective selves. We respond to the world as we find it in “emotional” ways. We read our surroundings in ways that deal with our basic survival. Our responses are the physiological states and behavioural habits appropriate to that level of world modelling.

Then philosophy comes in at a very different level. It is based on the abstracted notion of universalised reason and the specific of measurement. It is based on the third person absolute detachment that we imagine as the God’s eye objective point of view that it dialectically opposed to our embodied, affective, subjective, first person point of view.

So in reality, as living breathing human beings also carving out space in social communities, we of course feel as well as reason. We see as well as measure. It can seem impossible to split off the neurobiological aspects of our semiotic organisation from our socialcultural ones.

Yet the sensible definition of philosophy is just that. It is the attempt to reach the limit of detachment from the point of view of a creature rooted in embodied subjectivity.

Reasoning still depends on affect as we well know. It feels quite different to be certain vs uncertain. We get a feeling when something clicks and seems right - the aha! response.

But in the interests of fostering philosophical detachment, that is why we have come to lean on the pragmatism of the scientific method. We take claims of feeling convinced out of the equation as much as possible. We invent statistical methods to quantify our proper position on spectrums of certainty-uncertainty.

We aim to feel no more strongly about some conviction than that of the response of the click of pattern recognition. We have been presented with some complicated puzzle. There is then some satisfaction in making the last piece fit to complete the whole picture.

So sure, truth isn’t just propositional. AP types got that wrong. Truth comes in its grades of semiosis. The body has to react in ways that are “affective” to be effective in its world.

But then truth as a game being played at the highest level of detached abstraction is understood as “other” to this embodied affectiveness. It is Peirce’s community of reason that aims for objectivity via the cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Make a guess at a general causal relation, deduce the particular logical consequences of that being true, then test to see how those expectations turn out in terms of numbers on dials.

Flickers on needles rather than flickers of the heart are the currency of rational inquiry.

A curiosity here is that the speed of light is fixed. And yet it is tha fastest rate at which something can "change" location (velocity). Could this mean there's some strange union between that which remains constant and that which changes the most rapidly? — Benj96

Relativity builds in the fact that the “speed of rest” is a reciprocal limit. So a photon experiences no time separating locations as it moves at c, and a mass “at rest” in its reference frame experiences the most time passing possible. It is a yo-yo relationship in which as the mass then appears to accelerate in its reference frame, it experiences time dilation.

So you are right that change vs stasis is a unity of opposites. To be stably at rest is to know you have spent the longest time just sitting there doing nothing. To be the swiftest change is to have the least notion that there was anything other that could have been done except that abrupt something.

The Universe started out so hot that everything moved at the speed of light. But it also started out with so little effective distance that there wasn’t any real space to cross anyway.

It took about half a second for things to start to separate out in ways that made a difference between the maximum and minimum rates of change a thing. You could have more slowly moving masses dropping out of the general flow of radiation and now moving at all relative speeds down to the theoretical minimum of being “at rest”.

Eventually after a few billion years, the universe had grown so large and cold that the right kind of reference frames could exist. We could have the rather extreme separation of c and rest that we experience today.

You could sit as lumps of matter in a vast frigid void with mostly bugger all happening to disturb your peace.

And yet still, as lumps of matter, we have those aspects of our being - such as a gravitational field and a little bit of warm radiation - that do spread out from our sense of unchanging location at c. So the falling out of the general c flow is relative.

We're aiming for the philosophical 17th Century. Somehow we keep missing it. — frank

The twisty journey that all must take from lumpen realism, to the body shock of idealism, to the eventual resolution of enactivism and pragmatism.

I've been heavily involved in the design of hardware, firmware, and software of a device that NIST and other national metrology institutes pass back and forth in order to compare the primary reference standards of different nations against each other. — wonderer1

Life is sweet. My position is Peircean semiosis and pragmatism. Peirce, among other things, was the founder of serious US metrology.

So all credit to your “heavy involvement” in instrument manufacturing. But…. :kiss:

Why not then just say what you mean rather than ask dumb questions and expect me to take them seriously.

On your actual argument, the simple reply is think more carefully about what I said. Black and white are useful to the degree they bound all the possibilities that constitute grey.

As absolute values connected by a reciprocal relation, they would in fact make all shades of grey measurable as specified mixtures.

So science is founded on this analytical move. It is how the dynamics of nature can be measured in terms of precisely articulated theories.

This is how we “map language and reason onto the world”!

I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent. — Srap Tasmaner

Pragmatism is not about individual belief but about a community of mind. It is “truth” at the level of the social organism. What it needs to believe to live - to sustain an existence - in “it’s” world.

Language and culture are the genetic information system that organises humans as functional systems of belief. Words are how we feed mouths, not just noises mouths make.

As educated individuals, we can then use the tools of verbal coordination and rational argument in all sorts of other personally-motivated activities. But what society cares about as a whole is keeping its evolved show going by pragmatically modelling the world in which it must thrive.

Why are you pretending not to understand?

Well on the common understanding of “advocating”, what is it that you might doubt and so sustain a view that I am in fact attempting the antithesis of that?

We can probably rule out that I failed to state the position publicly. What reason makes you think I don’t in fact support it?

Are you advocating such a view? — wonderer1

Do you believe it or do you doubt it? How are you going to proceed here so as to minimise your uncertainty? :cool:

You can get around this by bootstrapping the convention non-conventionally, and that means granting that not everything is conventional. — Srap Tasmaner

Pragmatism roots itself in the logical consistency of the dichotomy. We could either believe or doubt. Each extreme is logically rooted in its “other”. Together they simplify your options by excluding all other less polarised options.

So pragmatism is about getting past Cartesian doubt by accepting the challenge of hazarding belief. We form a hypothesis and work to find cause to doubt it. To the degree we fail, we have strong grounds for acting on what looks to be working.

Calling this acting on convention is a negative way to frame it. Habits are thoughts that have proved their long-run worth. Logic itself is conventional. It relies on the habit of dichotomising to uncover polar alternatives that are the most informational. They divide the vagueness or ambiguity of possibility into the counterfactual definiteness of self-complementary extremes.

Pragmatism fixed epistemology by recognising this is logically what works. And ontically, even the Cosmos had no choice but to employ the same symmetry-breaking principle. So when it comes to “grounds”, how could this foundation for analysis come with better authority?

This universe is formed from the fact that chaotic systems naturally produce order.
Chaos is also demonstrated in ever human, all the time, by means of 'random thought.' An ordered thought can naturally form from that process. Watch something like: — universeness

Pretty pictures but like getting a postcard from the 1980s.

You haven’t made any argument in support of your rash assertion as yet. Give us an example of how sensitivity to initial conditions is relevant to human social and political structures.

Are you really wanting to claim they are simply chaotic and random outcomes like the weather? Provide some evidence.

Biosemiosis puts it the other way round. Criticality is the resource that informational structure harnesses. It takes just a spark to explode petrol, gas or even powdered coal. We then wrap the machinery of an engine around that useful fact. And control the spark with a flick of a switch.

So you are making a claim about the physical world as it is without being wrapped in its human system of mechanistic constraints - the formal and final causes represented by our notions of social, political and economic order.

The “butterfly effect” is already notorious as the most pop-sci hot take in non-linear dynamics. Let’s see you flesh out your claims here in some fully argued way.

Sure, there is a tempting metaphor there. Any spark of unrest could be claimed as the tipping point in that it later produced the political storm. But try that on with any real life example like the Arab Spring or Jan 6. You will soon find you are hand-waving as it is the generalised criticality rather than the specific fluctuation that is the material “cause”.

The key is that it is “any spark” that will do the trick. And biosemiosis is about how to harness such criticality and milk it for scalefree growth.

China’s belt and road policy is a good example of this in practice.

Transport networks - as systems of trade flows - are naturally fractal because of agglomeration effects (and no-one calls them “affects”). They reflect millions of individual decisions about where to move to and set up shop once enough economic energy is flowing through a populated landscape.

To maximise growth, the social and political constraints are tuned to maximising this freedom of free attachment over all geographic scales. For something like airports - the classic example - you have a long tail of tiny fields but also the super-hubs that - with a lot of political re-engineering - are allowed to grow to any scale.

So human infrastructure generally reflects this understanding of growth as being the smart harnessing of the vitality that the physical world already provides. Nature is organised by its dissipative structure in ways we began to understand through non-linear dynamics - the kind of dynamics in which constraints can develop or emerge from collective action. Human policies only need to work with that dynamism in a ratcheting fashion.

China is an example of a new player trying to enter an established world system. The international trade circulation system had already been colonised by others like the British Empire and the US’s Bretton Woods deal. China had to impose its own fractal transport structure on all this in the hope that it could then spark the markets which would use the logistics network it provided.

Not a huge success so far. But at least China’s understanding of the situation shows how the real world works. No one is waiting for butterfly “affects” to blow storms their way. Both the Arab Spring and Jan 6 were fires stoked by political actors hoping that the scalefree criticality of social media opinion could be guided in particular directions.

So sure, the physics of dissipative structure are right at the centre of a biosemiotic understanding of society and politics. And we have robust mathematical models of criticality, scalefree networks, spontaneous symmetry breaking, and much else. We can see how dynamical systems are naturally structured in terms of downward constraints acting on upwardly constructing degrees of freedom.

And it is against this sophisticated metaphysics that I am criticising your hand-waving mentions of the butterfly “affect”.

That “any spark could have caused the explosion” was a shocking idea for a hot moment there. But the worst interpretation of this sensitivity was that this meant one particular spark must thus be given the credit. Instead, the emphasis should have been on the “any”. The fact that the world would be better understood through the uniformity of a state of criticality where sensitivity is the property that has been maximised.

A butterfly’s wing beat might have done it. So might a half beat, quarter beat and even virtually no beat at all. The frog fart nearby, the bee coughing a moment later - anything can be regarded as the material/efficient cause of a storm. But then what really explains the storm are the boundary conditions rather than the initial conditions. An atmosphere driven by a solar flux and dissipating turbulently. A system of vortical motion over all scales, from the tiniest ones of no reasonable human concern like butterfly beats to ones of no reasonable human control, like weather systems.

But a well placed fan or windmill or sail? Biosemiosis can use its smarts to insert itself into the entropic flows of nature. And that is where any useful mathematics of self-organising chaos - order for free - comes in.

Are you hoping to cause your own little butterfly affect? — universeness

Just one wee point. Could you at least call it the butterfly effect. It would be less cringe.

In news just in, man the hunter has been debunked. Haven’t had time to assess the credibility of this. But it could be a problem for those defining masculinity in terms of risky trades.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

You have mentioned what could be seen as a kind of iterative process going from ground up, influenced, perhaps guided or corrected , by "communications" or signals from above. Elaborate on this a bit if you would. — jgill

It you want to do a pure math model as your project, you probably don’t want to get bogged down in the added intricacies of biosemiotics.

Life and mind are systems of information that can impose their own arbitrary or non-holonomic constraints on the physics of dissipation. Physics just has its boundary conditions. The modelling just needs to capture the holonomic constraints that result in “order out of chaos”.

In simple terms, physics applies some version of the principle of least action on the system so as to close its dynamics. That is all you need. An action functional. A way to integrate in holistic fashion that is the inverse of your reductive differential equations. A global optimisation rule to bring the system’s degrees of freedom “alive”.

Gauge invariance now seems the most generic approach. I cited a Bayesian Brain paper where even biosemiotics is now trying to align itself with that. :smile:

The link again - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0029

I also mentioned before why the complex plane might be better for modelling for real world physics. It offers the dimensionality to capture both the translations and rotations of Newtonian mechanics - wave mechanics especially.

It is hard to turn vectors into interestingly structured landscapes with macro features arise out of micro actions. But spinors offer the kind of dichotomy - of moving in a line vs spinning on a spot - that builds realistic texture into the “world” being described.

You can get the chaos of a turbulent flow as your landscape fills with wandering vortices of all sizes.

The dichotomy becomes one of divergence and convergence over all scales - which is what you seem to want to model.