Comments

  • Masculinity
    You seem rather ignorant to the fact that small butterfly affects can change political and social landscapes in the long term. — universeness

    You are ignorant if you think that political and social landscapes aren't instead ruled by structural attractors. They have memories and thus place constraints on their variety. They evolve as information systems and don't simply unwind as an accumulation of accidents.

    So to the degree that semiotic systems have sensitivity to initial conditions, this is a designed-in level of accident. Evolvability itself evolves. The criticality that grounds a living and mindful system is precisely tuned.

    You might have familiarity with the maths of non-linear dynamics, but citing the butterfly effect in this context is yet another irrelevancy you have tossed into this thread.
  • Masculinity
    ↪universeness
    Keep whistling. But I can see how tiny irrelevancies do set you off on ever wilder gyrations. You can’t follow the line of the argument.
  • Masculinity
    ↪universeness
    Add chaos theory to the list of things you are not expert in. :rofl:
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    That is why no definition is finite: there still might be a thing that fits the description, but is somewhat different. — Jabberwock

    Agreed. A description or interpretation is open or vague in the way you describe as there is no value in being more precise than the occasion demands.

    The line between lumping and splitting itself has to be drawn exactly at the critical point where neither the lumping nor the splitting adds value to the game. To split more hairs would subtract from the cohesive identity being claimed, while to go the other way would be to risk losing meaningful shades of distinction for a small gain in greater generality.

    A good definition has to strike that tricky context-sensitive balance. Which is why atomistic definitions of words rarely seem very good.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    I would make the opposite claim concerning Kantian Idealism. It is more popular among allegedly anti-Idealist empirical realists than they realize. — Joshs

    Do you accept the realism of the enactivist/pragmatist as having properly gone beyond Kant now? What we experience of the world is the self-centred reality of its affordances?
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Is 'the epistemic cut' avoidable, do you think? It seems a necessary condition of existence. — Wayfarer

    The cut in organisms separates the material dynamics that constitutes the physical world from the information or algorithms that are the regulating model of that world. So you have the chemistry, and you have the genome. You have the environment, and you have our self-centred, self-producing, neural model of it.

    When it comes to philosophic detachment, this came about with the further levels of the epistemic cut represented by the codes of words and numbers. Mainly numbers. The Greek concept of logic and proof as the ultimate way of modelling an utterly abstract environment from the point of view of an utterly abstract selfhood.

    We became causal thinkers existing in a causal cosmos. Rational and detached.

    The pay off of such a modelling relation with the world was the technology that could regulate the realm we call the physical. Western natural philosophy took things to that level. It built a culture around that habit of thought - especially after the industrial revolution saw us hop on the entropic rocket of fossil fuel.

    So the epistemic cut speaks to the modelling division that pays its way in the world. It is a necessary condition for life and mind. But we didn’t have to get so technological in some inevitable sense. It was an accident of history that a Europe undergoing a minor post-Enlightenment agrarian revolution stumbled into a use for lumps of black burny stuff that appeared to come in unlimited supply.
  • Masculinity
    ↪universeness
    What can I say? My point was about labelling ourselves in predicate logic fashion as a bundle of atomic attributes. You started withering on about being labelled by our proper names as well. If you can’t understand the irrelevance of that to what I was arguing, then so be it.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Is there a tentative solution to this? — Tom Storm

    There are plenty of ecologically informed scientists who have fingered how we wound up in our current bind. The short answer is fossil fuels want to be entropified. Humans stumbled into that role of becoming dedicated to the mission. The industrial revolution was about reorganising society - it’s politics, economics, and other “humanitarian” subjects - around this new task.

    But that is not a solution so much as the late in the picture diagnosis of a terminal condition. :confused:
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    But this isn’t how people use words. The actual use of a world creates a distinction not between it and an indiscriminate infinity of alternative realities, but between it and contrasting meanings that are specifically RELEVANT to the context in which the word is being used. — Joshs

    Of course I agree. We don't use words as reductionist units of meaning. We use them to weave the webs of constraint I mention.

    We speak in sentences. We speak grammatically. Speech acts have the recursive organisation of the nested hierarchy.

    If I just mention "cat", then the implication is that this is enough. I don't need to be more specific, nor more general. The dynamical balance in terms of hierarchical recursion is judged about right so that you will take my "true meaning". The least has been said in a way that the most has also been said.

    You could still suspect that with my bad eyesight it is in fact a small dog. There is one in the house and the cat is in fact on your knee. Or the house may have three cats and you want to know exactly which one I mean.

    But these small fine-tunings only emphasise just how much can be left out in terms of either the more global generalities or more local particulars.

    If I had said there is an animal on the mat, that lack of specificity might have alarmed you. If I said there was a dead cat on the mat, that specificity might also alarm you.

    So the deadly dullness of the "cat on the mat" account of a "state of affairs" is chosen by me quite deliberately as evidence for all that naive realism wants to leave out when applying its lumpen account of language pragmatics.

    As a statement of facts, it sounds like the kind of thing no reasonable person could dream of disputing. The world just is all that is the case. And anyone with two eyes can see that without further debate.

    But even the cat being on the mat is a claim dependent on an unspoken weight of context. It depends on linguistic holism and not logical atomism.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    ↪Tom Storm
    Flicking through a bit more of Lawson, I also want to point out how selfhood - the “reality” of the first person point of view - is a product of the closure, the epistemic cut, that produces the self-interested view we then call “the real world”.

    So the ideal gets manufactured by the othering of the real. They become equally "real" as two sides of the same coin. In our consciousness – our semiotically-organised Umwelt or experiential state – we find a self appearing in interaction with its world. We experience a world that has a selfhood as its sturdy centre, giving everything its meaning.

    Reductionist metaphysics - which includes the dualised reductionism of Cartesianism and Panpsychism - makes a problem of this. The self is either everything or it is nothing. The self-referential natures of modelling is treated as a fundamental paradox – an acid of contradiction that eats away at all philosophical certainty.

    But a holistic metaphysics says the self-reference is how selves become real as actors or agents in the world. The mind's ability to close itself – to learn to ignore the world in the quite concrete way now modelled by Bayesian Brain neuroscience – is how a meaningful engagement with the world, the claimed essence of a "realist metaphysics", can in fact arise.

    Of course actual closure – picking up Lawson's principle theme – leads to solipsism. We might as well be living the confusion of a fevered dream.

    So pragmatism speaks to the dynamical balancing act of closure and openness. As epistemic systems, we want to become as closed as possible, but only so as to also be as open as possible in terms of what is actually then surprising, significant, or otherwise worth paying open-minded attention to.

    Science is set up in this fashion. Make a prediction. Look for the exception. Beef up the model. Go around this knowledge ratcheting loop another time.

    Brains do the same thing every moment of the day. The self sits on the side of well-managed predictability and reality – the phenomenal – is discovered by its degree of noumenal surprise. Harsh reality is what we least expected.

    Again, reductionism wants to reduce the complexity of a dichotomous relation to the simplicity of monistic choice. Either the ideal or the real has to be the fundamental case. Pragmatism says instead that the closure in terms of the self-centred view of reality is the feature that makes possible any growth of knowledge about the "truth" of the real world.

    Lawson goes off on the usual Romantic tangent of wanting to give art the role of exploring reality's openness. But that's a bit too Cartesian again.

    Science is set up as the relentless machine for mining the "truth" of reality. Science's problem is not that it ain't sufficiently open to having its theories confounded by surprises. It's problem lies in its failure to be holistic and realise the extent to which knowledge is an exercise that is making the human self as much as comprehending the world.

    Science by and large accepts the Cartesian division between itself and the humanities. It's understanding of causality is limited to material and efficient cause. Formal and final cause are treated as being beyond its pay grade.

    This lack of holism is why modern life seems a little shit. And any amount of art ain't going to fix it.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    I'm pretty sure Lawson has argued this too, — Tom Storm

    I’ve not read Lawson. A quick squizz suggests he is rather lightweight. :grin:

    The difference looks like being that jump from epistemology to ontology. Saying that our models of reality are an exercise in pragmatic self-interest is one thing. An everyday kind of point.

    But showing that this organisational logic is indeed the way that the Cosmos “reasons its way into existence” is the big step that Peirce takes. This is the metaphysical shock that naive realism is still to confront.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Does Lawson have a point about idealism and the necessity of a realist theory of language? — Tom Storm

    Peircean realism would be considered pretty idealistic by some. :razz:

    But it leads to pansemiosis rather than Panpsychism or other Cartesian stories. So language as epistemic practice is also more generically the deep ontology of existence itself.

    This cashes out in models of the “real material world” in terms of holistic systems of constraint rather than reductionist systems of construction.

    This cashes out in self-reference being the feature rather than the bug.

    When it comes to Wittgenstein, Cheryl Misak gives a good account of how Peirce was an unacknowleged influence in his eventual “turn”.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    ↪Tom Storm
    The basic issue from a semiotic point of view is whether you consider meanings to be constructed or constrained.

    Does a word have to positively put you in mind of some definite thing? Or does it really operate by limiting your thoughts so you pretty much have no choice but to be thinking of something much like what I had in mind, for all practical purposes?

    So realism aims to speak about what actually exists. But practically speaking, this is achieved by establishing it as the contrast to all else that could have been the case.

    It I say there is a cat on the mat as a real fact, I hope to get away with offering that single word “cat” and thus by implication eliminating every other interpretation you might have had.

    There is no tank, or armadillo, or Empire State Building, on the mat instead. You can be sure of that. An infinity of alternative realities are being dismissed by my plain speaking realism. But by the same token, all those unactualised realities now seem confusingly like “actual possibilities”.

    The trick is to understand how constraint does the heavy lifting here and not construction. Realism is not a construction of facts. It is a hierarchical nest of constraints. It is a pragmatic limitation of uncertainty made efficient by our willingness to go along with the game of taking utterances at face value.
  • Masculinity
    Would you not agree that a human name was not normally arbitrarily chosen? — universeness

    So you want to shift the argument from the general syntactical point – the conventions of mathematical logic - to one of social pragmatics?

    Sure, as I am arguing from the viewpoint of Peircean semiotics, I would be the first to agree that the hard distinctions of syntax always have a soft underbelly of semantics.

    The syntax claims its limit distinctions. The arbitrary is not the necessary, and the necessary is not the arbitary, by dichotomistic definition. But then this claim is itself semantic. Godelian incompleteness rears its head.

    The semiotician says of course. Arbitrary~necessary are the ultimate limits on being ... at least for all practical purpose in terms of a pragmatic system of measurement.

    So the human use of naming as a semantic act is going to reflect the pragmatics of human discourse rather than the absolutism of mathematical logic.

    But the question for you is do you want to argue that the names that humans give other humans, or even the names that humans give themselves, must come with the force of strong necessity?

    To say that the arbitraryness relation can be instead merely somewhat weakened – for the obvious reason that humans have semantic grounds for wanting to signify hereditary connections, job occupations, religious conventions, boastful claims about their children's supposed qualities or social status, or whatever else – is quite something else, and is already covered by my semiotic approach.
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    "Simplisticator" and "complicator" are two words I coined — wonderer1

    Complexity theory has the useful dichotomy of simplexity-complicity to show how simplicity and complexity are in fact connected in mirror fashion.

    The apparently simple - like some iterative algorithm - can produce huge complication in pattern. But then the apparently complex, like many things in interaction, can become complicit in producing a very simple coherent outcome.

    So the point is that what looks like two extremely different modes of analysis can be shown to be the “other” of each other. The old yin-Yang thing. The simple is actually complex. But then also the complex is actually simple.

    And reasoned argument is going to fare better when it seeks to “break down” the world in those terms.
  • 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:
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