It's not a reification that I am sensing things — schopenhauer1

Who is this "I" if not a reification? It is the socially constructed objectification of the quality of "you-ness" that arises as a necessity of semiosis.

So yes, we do feel like a self in it is world as that is the essence of the modelling relation which makes for a sentient organism. That is what the enactive view is about.

But the idea that this "I" is an inhabiting spirit, a soul, a fundamental simple, is just the dualistic claim that underwrites panpsychism.

Semiotics says it is just how modelling gets done. A sense of self emerges in opposition to a sense of world. Both the self and its world are the two halves of the one-ness that is the modelling relation.

No need to rewrite physics. You just need to look for the point at which a machinery of semiosis could begin to earn its entropic keep in organismic fashion.

Feeling the self as "other" to the world is how the organism functions. Feeling the self as "other" to society – the burden you always complain of – is just this same organismic organisation being lifted to another semiotic level.

Semiosis in terms of genes and neurons becomes colonised by the even more abstracted semiosis by words and numbers. We have the rise of society as a super-organism.

You as a person in his world now have to be able to talk about being a person within the "other" of the social collective.

So it is no surprise that propaganda about spirits and souls, or eventually the magical material property of "consciousness" and "the authentic self", etc, becomes such a big social deal.

Individuals must be taught to objectify their existence in this fashion to become the suitably constrained elements composing the next level of an entropy-driven modelling relation.

How about, consciousness is a fundmental simple of experience? — Wayfarer

And yet it is "fundamentally" dichotomised into attention and habit. I can drive a car in busy traffic on automatic pilot. Not to mention that I can go to sleep, get drunk, or feel time freeze in bike crash, etc.

Neurology explains the vast variety of our mental states. It also explains the generality of "being conscious" in terms of being an organism in a pragmatic modelling relation with its world.

So calling consciousness fundamental is wrong from a naturalistic point of view. It ain't fundamental so far as our best models of natural causality.

And calling it a mereological simple is also wrong. What we lump under the singular title of "consciousness" could not be gunkier. Where do the neural and biological aspects of being an organism with mindful unity bottom out in some particular necessary parts exactly?

Why do we attribute agency to evolution? Saying that evolution does things or creates things or produces outcomes? When the way natural selection acts is as a filter - it prevents things that are not adaptive from proliferating. Evolution pre-supposes living organisms which adapt and survive, but to say that evolution is the cause of the existence of organisms seems putting the cart before horse. — Wayfarer

Well yeah. That is what the holists in biology keep telling the reductionists. Evolution is fine and dandy, but don't forget the other – dichotomous – thing of development.

My departure point here is that view from within biology which says evolvability itself had to evolve. It was a pretty purposeful step in its own way.

So reductionism always leads to chicken and egg issues. Holism instead focuses on the dialectical logic of mutually dependent co-arising, or what Haken called synergistics.

I think there is a tendency to attribute to evolution the agency that used to be assigned to God. It's kind of a remnant of theistic thinking. — Wayfarer

Or rather, German and Russian biologists tended to be pretty comfortable with holistic thinking and so were ready to read agency into organisms, thus never had to be too hardline in their rejection of theistic versions of agency.

Peirce likewise.

But the Anglo world did embrace hardline material reductionism and so had to police its language, rid itself of any hint that evolution was anything other than blind chance.

A lot of this is just where you were brought up. A cultural thang.

As regards consciousness being the product of an evolved nervous system - what about the panpsychist (or maybe even pansemiotic) idea that consciousness is an elemental feature of the Cosmos, that exists in a latent state, and which then manifests itself through evolution. — Wayfarer

Hand-waving. What is latent consciousness when it's at home? What kind of causal model lies behind this "manifesting"? How can it be both a general elemental feature, and yet not an active feature, except in the most exceptionally particular and materially atypical circumstances – like life on Earth?

The lecturer I had in Indian philosophy used to say, 'What is latent, becomes patent'. — Wayfarer

Sure. And biosemiosis is a theory of exactly how that happens. It can specify the physical conditions where semiosis first becomes a possible thing.

But panpsychism is just hand-waving. There is no causal theory of how a potential got actualised. Unlike biosemiosis, it can't pinpoint a moment when the latency became present in the Cosmos – due to the very particular circumstances of the being a watery planet circling the free energy source of a sun – and so just handwavingly says "the latency was always present as a fundamental simple of material existence itself".

Maybe it's not a hard problem at all, only it seems hard to people, like me, stuck in outmoded habits of thought. It's just a name for an issue (possibly a pseudo-issue) that needs addressing. — bert1

Sure. And I always address it with the specific anti-reductionist stance that is enactivism, pragmatism, biosemiotics, Friston's Bayesian brain, Rosen's modelling relation, systems science, and so on.

I've addressed it plenty.

but I don't deny that there is a serious issue called the 'combination problem' that panpsychists have a burden to address. — bert1

So address it. All I ever see is folk saying consciousness is a fundamental simple of the Cosmos, but somehow the complex functional neurology of creatures with evolved nervous systems are needed to get it to the point of being able do stuff that gives evidence it exists.

It feels like the panpsychists just copy our homework. :wink:

The only way I can reconcile everyone's claims to be non-representational direct realists, is to interpret each and every person as referring to a different world. — sime

Where’s the problem with always different and yet also usefully similar?

The standard pragmatist answer that has the benefit of explaining both the similarity and the differences - the differences being constrained to the degree they are differences that don’t make a difference and hence ensure the useful degree of similarity observed.

A rebuttal would be a counter argument. It is pretty obvious why consciousness is a bigger problem for anyone who thinks it arrived early in the Universe’s evolution. So much more than your glib assertion is required here.

You won’t even support a definition of consciousness that could be counterfactually determined one way or the other. You don’t even have the beginnings of a real argument.

How is a series of this responding not some sort of Cartesian theater fallacy? — schopenhauer1

Brains and nervous systems model the world, they don’t display the world. Just start with that thought.

The fallacy is only being committed by those who believe in homuncular reifications like “consciousness” and “experience”.

On the other hand, the Aristotelian interpretation of structure you have presented does bring the problem of time front and center as a matter of principle. — Paine

Yep. Time is tricky. But at least modern physics agrees on some general things, such as the Universe embeds a cosmic temporal asymmetry. There is a global thermodynamic arrow pointing every event in the same general direction.

It's a problem for anyone who thinks that consciousness arrived late in the universe, however that is construed. — bert1

That’s an assertion and not an argument.

Provide the evidence for a belief that consciousness had to arrive early. Provide a definition of consciousness that could even meet the counterfactuality criteria such that you could have evidence either way.

If the wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum is of the red frequency, and this hits rods and cones, and this goes down the optic nerve and the cortical layers, and the neural networks, and the peripheral environmental things of time and space.. how does any of this account for the actual sensation of "red"? — schopenhauer1

We've been through all this. You seem to have completely forgotten about opponent channel processing and how the brain sees "red" as also – counterfactually – not "green".

It is difficult to even begin to give you a neuroscience account that connects to a general biosemiotic or modelling relations account unless you can keep these kinds of beginner facts straight in your discussion.

A "red" cone cell responds to all the light. It switches off when it "sees" too much "green" light. It can switch on when it "sees" a general lack of "green" light. So right from the get-go, it is turning physics into information. It is reacting to electromagnetism with its own interest-driven logicism.

You have to account for this interaction in terms of biosemiotic mechanism – the very clever way that molecules can be messages.

Junk your boring old computationalist tropes. The way brains work is just fundamentally different. And you need to immerse yourself in that difference at the point where semiosis meets world - as in the actual biophysics of sensory receptors.

Another way of putting the ratio issue is the existence of angles. To have 45 degrees, or a difference between 45, 45.55, or 46 degrees, etc, you have to have an embedding space in which the symmetry is "as broken as possible". You have to have the orthogonality of an x and y axis. A geometric dichotomy, in other words, in which x-ness is completely at right angles to y-ness. Rotate past 90 degrees and you start coming back into y's world again.

So orthogonality is the natural or dichotomy-based measure of a dimension. X is the other of y and y is the other of x, in mutually defining fashion.

Having broken the symmetry in this extremal fashion – taken its "thisness" to two limits so opposed they are no longer even in sight of each other – you then set up the third thing of all the angles of lines which express some cos~sine trigonometric ratio. You have the universe of lines that are some blend of x-ness and y-ness.

That a constant like phi might have a weirdly specific value – 1.61803.... – may seem fundamentally inexplicable. But step back and realise it is just the number marking the point where a broken symmetry achieves its self-similar balance point – a unity under the constraint of growth operations – and this golden ratio is not mysterious at all.

It is the stable attractor that must emerge as the new feature of an orthogonal symmetry-breaking under the further constraint of its own self-compounding growth. It is a Platonic inevitability. But that is hard to see until you get used to how Platonism organises dynamical systems and not just a realm of static entities.

Talk about muddled blathering. Intention, will, is proper to the individual — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure. Will and purpose can arise in biosemiosis as the local particular in contradistinction to the global generality that is the Universe entrained to its "law" of thermodynamcs.

So what is particular at the globally general level of the Comos – its will to entropify – becomes the context that makes sharp sense of its own "other" – the possibility of tiny critters forming their own local wishes and ambitions within what remains still possible in a small, but personally valued, way.

We can't of course defy entropy. But we can apply ourselves to the task of accelerating it. We can buy local negentropic freedom of choice by burning stuff faster than the Cosmos has been able to consume it on its own.

But finality is known to be a bottom-up cause, as the will, the cause of motion of the individual. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is just your special pleading for a theistic metaphysics. You haven't dealt with my naturalistic argument.

The issue is that the fine-structure constant are ontologically prior to anything evolving whatever. If they were different in some slight degree then there would be nothing to evolve. — Wayfarer

But the effective breaking of the electroweak symmetry was only going to produce some ratio, right? Given the input structures – the symmetries to be broken – some stabilising balance was going to emerge in post-hoc fashion.

So I don't see how it makes sense to claim α was prior. It was already implicit as a thing in the fact there was a symmetry, and thus in short order – the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang – the breaking and rapid thermal stabilisation of that symmetry.

Again, like pi or other mathematical constants, the ratios as values are already implicit in the symmetry breaking. They only "pre-exist" in the sense the input geometry can arrive at no other self-stable and scalefree balance.

Pi is 3.14159265358979..etc in a dimensional world constrained to exact flatness. Positively or negatively curved spaces would have ratios of radii to circumferences ranging from the pi = 2 of a sphere to the pi = infinity of a hyperbolic plane.

So if a universe can only persist, hence exist, if it is flat, then that is what selects for a flatness as near 3.14159265358979..etc as can be managed.

Our universe would have quickly collapsed it it had started with a hyperspherical geometry and hence a pi less than that "magic ratio". And it would just have quickly spread out to a contentless nothing if it had had a hyperbolic geometry.

Our actual universe turns out to be more geometrically complex than either of these two stories in that it may have had inflation to first stop it being too hyperspherical at the beginning, and then by about 10 billion years, it also had a tiny touch of hyperbolic tendency in the cosmological constant to do the opposite thing of ensuring it will keep on expanding to infinity forever.

So perfect pi is a flat balance ratio. But making real universes involves producing inevitable material clutter as further symmetry breakings with their own ratios become possible. Shit happens like the electroweak and electromagnetic symmetry breakings, disrupting the flat flow with their gravitating particles that screw with the local geometry of the universe.

The fine structure constant is an example of one of those extra ingredients that needed the "luck" of compensation constraints to keep the general evolution of spacetime at near enough a flat balance to go on "forever" in its familiar cooling~expanding way.

So the details of the cosmic metaphysics has a lot of explaining still to do. But you are very focused on issues which don't seem like the actual issues.

The fine structure constant might seem fine-tuned for a cosmos capable of life. A lot of popularisations like to stress that pseudo-theistic point. Yet it is also fine-tuned simply not to fuck up the Big Bang in general.

And gee, which was the major evolutionary bottleneck that a flatly thermalising universe had to survive, which is the special pleading on the part of us, its biofilm-sustained linguistic monkeys?

I've seen your Aristotelian influence. you conflate formal cause with final cause. — Metaphysician Undercover

I just did the exact opposite of distinguishing them as the general and the particular when it comes to the downwardly acting constraints of a system.

The desire is the generality as it only cares for the achievement of its end, and not the particularity of the form needed to achieve it.

The pure potential of matter cannot properly act as a cause, so you need to place intention, final cause at the base of the "bottom-up constructive cause'. — Metaphysician Undercover

More muddled blathering.

Of course chance and spontaneity – as the character of pure material potential - must be entrained by top-down finality to produce an in-formed stable state of actualisation.

So "cause" is always too strong a word – with its monistic modern overtones – when Aristotle was breaking causality down into its four constrasting "becauses".

But this is inconsistent with the common notion of "emergence", because it is teleological and emergence is not. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again you just waste my time by conflating monistic reductionism and triadic holism.

It is quite right that emergence – as understood within the reductionist causal paradigm – can't properly deal with teleology. It has to reduce global constraints in some fashion and so collapses into the familiar range of bad metaphysical choices, such as Cartesian dualism, epiphenomenalism, theism, panpsychicism, microcausal supervenience, and so on.

The failure of monistic reductionism produces a thriving marketplace of metaphysical blame-shifting. Trying to bandage the wound becomes its own considerable academic industry.

Instead of just insta-replying with babble, why not stop and think. Get to grips with the true Aristotle. :cool:

By assuming only one boundary which separates "being part of the system" from "being not part of the system", anything which changes its status must cross that one boundary. But this renders certain aspects of reality as unintelligible, such as the entropy demanded by the second law,. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is why I would upgrade the Second Law – a reductionist story – with the holism of pansemiosis or dissipative structure theory.

The Universe is a good example. Does it actually increase its entropy if it is both cooling and expanding? Doesn't the loss of heat energy get made up for by the increase in gravitational potential?

The Universe can in fact only exist if it strikes this flat balance where all its entropy as local degrees of freedom – cooling particles – is matched by all its negentropy in terms of an ever increasing gravity debt. It is because the two sides of the equation – the dichotomy of atom and void – are tied together in this yo-yo fashion that the Universe can "emerge from nothing".

So in the most general sense, the Universe is a dissipative structure. It exist by tumbling into its own heat sink. It is closed within its own boundaries by the trick of always cooling because it is expanding, and also always expanding because it is cooling.

It indeed has two boundaries – the limits of this cooling and the limits of this expanding. But it approaches then asymptotically in infinite time, never actually needing to cross them so as to exist for infinite time.

That's right. I see significant flaws in systems theory. — Metaphysician Undercover

As you are an Aristotelean – albeit of the scholastic stripe – it is surprising you don't immediately get all this.

Aristotle is the inspiration for the systems science movement. He analysed the irreducible complexity of nature in logical detail with his four causes, hylomorphic substance, hierarchy theory, etc.

His hylomorphism spells out the basic Peircean triad of potentiality/actuality/necessity – the dichotomy of pure material potential and pure formal necessity which combine to create the third thing of actual or substantial material being. Prime matter plus Platonic constraints are the bottom-up and top-down that give you the hierarchy of manifest nature. A world of in-formed stuff.

The four causes expands this analysis to reveal the further dichotomies to the fundamental dichotomy.

The bottom-up constructive causes and top-down constraining causes are split by the dichotomy of the general and the particular.

You have material and efficient cause as the general and the particular. And you have formal and final cause as the particular and the general.

So Aristotle provided a rich analysis of how reality reduced to a system of relations rather than to some kind of monistic stuff. Reality is irreducibly triadic at base as it self-organises into concrete being via a self-contained causal logic.

The parts make the whole, and the whole makes the parts. This starts in the "less than nothing" that is Anaximander's apeiron, or Peirce's vagueness. Or what cosmology today likes to call a quantum potential.

To say that something is "irreducibly complex" is to say that it cannot be represented by a ratio. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It is to say that reduction is perfectly possible. Just not to the simplicity of a monism. Only as far as the complexity of a triadic or hierarchical relation.

And the point about the 'fine structure constants' is not that they're 'spooky' but that they're irreducible - no reason can be given for why they are just as they are — Wayfarer

But my structuralist or systems metaphysics is saying that they are irreducibly complex. Thus not reducible to monistic simples. However capable of being reduced or explained as an inevitable relation, such as is represented by a ratio.

So you are thinking monistically. And reading my replies in that light. I am instead saying that things like a constant are the product of triadic complexity. They are that type of dichotomous relation where there is a separation into two that then produces the third thing of their mixing - their arrival at a self-stabilising balance.

This is the Siegel’s neat point about alpha. It speaks to the fact that the Cosmos evolves into a dichotomous story of atoms in a void. At one extreme, you wind up with “real electrons” that have a located charge and thus a spatiotemporal repulsion. But balanced against that is all the quantum fluctuations of the gap that is defined by having two exactly located classical particles. The sum of these virtual contributions then amounts to a small countercharge, a positive attraction.

So that is a good example of how - when you lift the veil - the material universe exists because there are processes in opposition that can arrive at a balance that is distinctive. The charge is distributed in asymmetric fashion so it’s value - its ratio - sits at some definite point between the contrasting extremes of a classical atom and a quantum void. It becomes something measurably inbetween and produces a world in which charge plays an interesting emergent role. The electrostatic force can be a thing.

Imagine if the charge of the quantum void was the same as the charge of the located particle. You would have no electromagnetism to speak of as it would all cancel out. And indeed, that is what happens down at the Planck scale before the relevant symmetries are broken. No charge or particles to speak of.

So when anything exists, it is already complex in this triadic systems sense. Monism is too simple a metaphysics to account for an interesting universe of any kind. That is why - per the OP - it is the structure of relations that is “fundamental”.

And Peirce, as you well know, obtained to a form of scholastic realism. — Wayfarer

How are these remarks about epistemology relevant to this discussion of ontology?

Yes, human discovery takes an abductive leap of imagination. We can see the outcomes and guess at the complex triadic relation that was their probable cause.

And yes, by analogy, we can say the Cosmos bootstrapped itself into existence as some kind of abductive leap - a retrospective justification for why its evolution could only pan out a certain way. In the face of radical quantum instability, only our observed Universe had the right balances of its component processes to become the definite something we inhabit.

But I don’t believe this is the Peircean argument you had in mind.

It's a philosophical point - that the value in question is invariant, doesn't change over time, has no units associated with it //and furthermore that it exists only as a measurement//. — Wayfarer

Think of a mathematical constant like pi, e or phi. Are they values or are they ratios?

Do they represent some magic quantity - some measured amount of substantial being, that thus raises all sorts of counterfactual questions as why the Universe chose that particular number and not any other that would seem, prima facie, just as good? Or do they instead represent just the relation of two ideal limits that simply have to have the number that they do?

That is the philosophical point here.

A lot of people make a big deal about the physical constants for that reason. It seems the Universe could pick any value. But if you understand the deeper structure - the metaphysical dichotomies that represent the relations which can divide unformed potential so as to give it actual and real dimensionality - then the constants cease to be surprising. Your attention can turn instead to focusing on the possibilities of the relations which are Platonically fundamental, and so must characterise any actualised existence.

So what physicists call constants are not fundamental values but emergent ratios. And being ratios, they speak to the deeper dichotomies which are the structure - the Platonic-strength necessities or constraints - that are what force an organised and logical Cosmos into concrete being.

Things exist because there is nothing to prevent the anythingness of unformed potential interacting enough with itself to become restricted to its most basic dialectic possibilities.

Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce laid all this out. This is the metaphysics worth knowing. Not all the tired old hard problem crap and other reductionist tropes.

Sounds awfully like 'an idea' to me. — Wayfarer

So your argument is an ad hom against a professional’s exposition so as to create pro hom support for your own amateur opinion?

Hmm. :cheer:

I think that since intention is personal, the immaterial final cause acts in a bottom-up freedom fashion. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hence you aren’t a structuralist or systems thinker.

I wonder if those could be conceived as analogous to the fundamental existence-enabling constraints identified in cosmology (e.g. Martin Rees' 'six numbers')? — Wayfarer

The constants of nature are ratios or balances. So they are “fundamental numbers” that emerge from processes in opposition.

The fine-structure constant alpha, for example, is the effective balance of the electrostatic repulsion between two charged electrons and then the quantum vacuum contribution of all the virtual particles that the close proximity of two such classically-imagined particles creates.

So you have the two aspects of physical reality - the classical particle and the quantum vacuum descriptions - as the limit state constraint descriptions of the cosmological system. And then a local constant of nature - alpha, with its measured ratio of near enough 1/137 - popping out as the average of these two sources of action.

The constant is constant enough at low temperature or large scales. But then making things very hot or very small will turn up the sizzle of quantum fluctuations and so alpha reduces to something more like 1/128.

See https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/05/25/ask-ethan-what-is-the-fine-:grin: structure-constant-and-why-does-it-matter/?sh=3f6f77145671

So constants speak to the fact that the constraints of reality are emergent or effective balances that themselves can evolve.

Alpha tells us that science has to arrive at its fundamentals by framing its observations in terms of opposing limit state descriptions of the Cosmos.

We have two theories of nature - the classical and the quantum limits on this useful notion of “being”. We have formally reciprocal accounts of the top-down ultimate boundaries of nature. Everything is to be found “somewhere” between the dichotomy of “absolute counterfactual definiteness” and “the absolute lack of counterfactual definiteness”. :grin:

We can then get on with measuring where the balance point between the repulsion of two classically imagined electrons, and the matching attraction of a small and warm region of bubbling quantum charge, actually falls.

It turns out to be a sliding scale, depending on the larger thing of how small/hot or cold/large the Universe happens to be at that point in its developing history.

The take home is that physics sounds reductionist to most ears, but it is actually structuralist in its metaphysics.

Reality is neither fundsmentally classical, nor even quantum. These are just the two matched limit state descriptions we need as our dichotomous metaphysical frame so as to actually be able to measure anything of any use, like the predicted charge between two particles at some size and temperature scale.

There's Apokrisis 'pansemeiosis' which puts meaning as fundamental, or near-fundamental, and then, by stages, as complex systems evolve, they gain more of the constituents of consciousness (attention, predictive ability, some other stuff (can't remember)) until eventually we have a creature that can be said to be fully conscious.

Personally I don't think that touches the hard problem, — bert1

The thing to remember is the hard problem is a problem about fundamental “stuff”. It is an argument about physical materials and their putative properties. Dualists are confounded by their inability to escape their mistake of thinking of “consciousness” as another kind unformed “ultimate simple”.

I am instead a structuralist so subscribe to a completely different ontology. Neither matter nor mind could be an ultimate simple. All things are structures and so irreducibly complex.

The hard problem is simply not an issue on that score. Indeed, structuralism says our models of reality must be “dualistic” in the Aristotelean system’s sense. Substantial being is irreducibly hylomorphic.

An apparent division of causality - such as between mind and matter - is the feature that the ontology predicts rather than the bug that bedevils the metaphysics. Nothing can exist except by being a system that marries Aristotle’s four causes in bottom-up “material” construction and top-down “immaterial” constraint fashion.

Believing there is a “hard problem” is thus a symptom of being locked into a reductionist metaphysics. It is built into the worldview. The only escape is a radical shift in worldview.

There's a strong tradition of pessimistic thought there. — schopenhauer1

But your quote spoke of an epistemic trauma and your own complaint is of an ontological trauma.

Shome category error shurely?

So how are…

[quote"]the traumatic kernel that resists symbolization, of the traumatic encounter with the Thing that cannot be represented"[/quote]

and …

[quote"]…us being an animal that has habits but can also break free of those habits.. A being with the self-awareness understanding bad faith....[/quote]

… the same concern?

Zizek might not agree. — schopenhauer1

Post your support for your assertion. Do the work.

If memory serves, you lean toward indirect realism. Is that correct ? — plaque flag

Correct enough. I'm a pragmatist if I have to wave any flag.

Are you offering a model or a map that is not the territory itself ? — plaque flag

As I stressed earlier, the modelling relation says the map is a model of a territory with us in it. So it is a selfish view. An Umwelt as von Uexküll put it. Thus it ain't actually a map of a territory in the usual lumpen realist sense.

Peirce chose to call it objective idealism. But that confuses folk too.

Again think of the pilot who sees the world as the still centre of a rapid flow. The centre is parsed as the self and its target. The flow is parsed as reality whizzing by until the feeling of wheels kissing a runway.

The map contains two fictions – the "self" and the "world". As Kant says, we are stuck in the phenomenal and cannot truly represent the thing in itself.

But on the other hand, this semiotic relation is what works for life and mind as encoding structure that can surf the world's entropic gradients with practiced habit.

Epistemology is mad if it thinks there is something to "fix" here – all those tired old AP moans about theories of truth and Goedelian incompleteness.

Even other apes, and complex mammals and birds don't have that kind of self-awareness. — schopenhauer1

Or more critically, the social context which could even give such ingrained negativity any kind of accepted cultural interpretation.

There is no "you" having these thoughts without the romantic response to be the "unrequested self behind the forced social mask" that has a social history going all the way back to Ecclesiastes and Gilgamesh, as you so triumphantly proclaim.

But let's not derail another thread with your persistent Pessimism. That wasn't the subject here.

You give too much credence to this romantic notion of the romantic reaction to the industrial revolution. It was there in Ecclesiastes and Gilgamesh. — schopenhauer1

Argument by non sequitur.

I am explaining the current conditions. There is no justification... — schopenhauer1

Assertion rather than argument. "Move to dismiss, m'lud."

No other animal has that degree of abstraction, deliberation, and thus self-awareness. — schopenhauer1

No other animal has the entropic drive of half a billion years of dense hydrocarbons flowing through their veins. They are all pallid creatures living off whatever the sunshine brings today, not exploding with the pressure of unimaginable surging energy - all that fossil fuel that just desparately demands to be burned.

You think "self-awareness" is any more than pissing into the tornado here? I live among humans. I'm well aware of just how little will they can actually summon to counteract the constraints imposed by their environments.

The asymmetry or injustice or radical break certainly exists. But – as is always the case – it is entropic.

The human journey is about bumbling into whatever is the next entropic bonanza that makes itself available to our evolving intelligence.

Is that metaphysical image actually the complex heart of a self-organizing, self-articulating reality ? — plaque flag

Metaphysics grounds the science. It establishes the causal logic that gets stuck into our mathematical theories. And from the maths, we can generate the measureable predictions which inductively justify our logical deductions.

This is another crucial feature of Peircean pragamatics/semiotics. It describes both epistemology and ontology in the one causal metaphysics. The way we humans model the world – using a rigourous and objectifying method – is also the causal logic of how that world itself works. It is how the Cosmos developed into being.

That is why both cosmology and neurology have converged on the science of dissipative structure as their fundamental level of description. The Bayesian brain and the holographic universe.

Perhaps you are misunderstanding me. My point was that such a separation was impossible or confused. The truth is the whole. — plaque flag

But the wholeness requires the separation so as to have something to unify. And the separation in turn needs a vagueness which grounds its coming into being as being the being that is beyond being itself.

So wholeness – in the systems sense – is irreducibly triadic. All three levels are "the one".

You sound like you want to make the separation secondary to the unity. Which would be the brand of Hegelianism that Fichte popularised. Hegel was striving to do what Peirce actually did. Show how unity is irreducibly triadic.

Unity itself has to develop into concrete being by a process of logical becoming.

Justification is part of the way humans cooperate and compete, it seems to me. — plaque flag

Yep. Wrangham gives the detailed anthropological evidence.

It is a challenging thesis. To self domesticate – become essentially peaceful and cooperative – we had to kill off the violent males until our primate reactive violence was tuned down to a minimum. We had to weed the Neanderthal alphas out of the gene pool.

That left violence to become proactive – collectively planned – rather than individually reactive and emotional. We could kill others for good social reasons.

The process was a feedback loop once language showed up to allow public rationalisation or justification.

A group's code of conduct could be normed at the level of an intergenerational cultural understanding – a body of customary practice that could undergo Darwinian fine-tuning. That code in turn allowed justified homicide when one dude in a small band of 20 or 30 hunter-gatherers made too much of a regular arse of himself.

The wiseguy would be dared to climb the high tree to get the honey. And after he had laid his weapons down and shinned up the trunk, his mates would gather up his defences and sit about waiting for him to decide to come back down and face his fate.

Shaman rituals through nights in the long house would allow the deed to be debated and coalesce as the agreed right thing. Justification would hang in the air until it developed the weight of inevitability.

Often the entropic loop was closed by eating the victim. Killing off trouble-makers both reinforced the social norms essential to a social level of organismic existence and recycled precious fat and protein within the body of this society.

Call it autophagy – the new fad goal of the biohacker/longevity crowd. :smile:

I agree with you to some extent but then you try to put the order where there is disorder.. symmetry where there is a large break in symmetry. — schopenhauer1

This week I'm reading Richard Wrangham's The Goodness Paradox. You ought to read it too.

It tells how as a species, Homo sapiens self-domesticated its neurobiology in response to developing a new language-enabled social sense of self. We became creatures adapted to being egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands because we could collectively submit to the dominance of the higher thing of a timebound group identity.

The logic of the organism reconstructed its natural structure when given the entropic opportunity. You could call that statistical inevitability ... hence not at all blind chance or unlucky accident.

Science is eating up all your 18th C "romantic reaction to the industrial revolution" dialectical "truths".

Every step in the human journey can be seen as completely natural once you have the proper theory of nature.

apokrisis relies too much on the comforts of statistical norms as somehow "telling", but discredits the idea of bad faith. — schopenhauer1

Either that or I’m actually competent in the maths and metaphysics of statistical thought. That is my unfair advantage. :grin:

I take from Hegel the idea that 'subject and substance' (symbol and the symbolized?) are entangled and not truly separable. — plaque flag

It’s the other way around. It is the clean separability that grounds the more complex mixing or entangling.

In the beginning there is just vagueness - any and everything might be the case, which is thus also a vast nothingness. Nothing is actually the case when everything is potentially the case.

That symmetry must be broken by an asymmetry. There must be a dichotomy that separates in opposing or reciprocal directions. Possibility must be divided towards its complementary extremes.

So we can only conceive of motion in terms of its absence - a stillness. But also stillness only is measurable in terms now of the absence of motion. Run this dichotomy to its limits, to its extremes, and we derive the metaphysical dyad of stasis-flux.

Ancient Greek dialectics furnished us with the whole catalogue of such asymmetric distinctions. Chance and necessity, matter and form, one and many, local and global, discrete and continuous, vague and definite. The existence of each category is actualised to the degree it is measureably distant from its dialectical other.

So the maths is exact. Stasis = 1/flux and flux = 1/stasis. They are a Pythagorean unity of opposites where each is real to the degree it’s other is indeed othered.

Where your quote slips up is in reading this dialectical logic as dyadic rather than triadic - mediated by the third thing of the inverting relation that does the separation which then also allows the definite thing of the mixing, the entanglement, the complexification.

So yes, you can make a dichotomy of the subjective and the objective and so appear to create the two antithetical realms of the mind and the world. You can set up the standard Cartesian dilemma which results in a doubled reductionism. A belief in two disconnected substantial realms.

But Hegel was trying to show how the separated are the related. The relation creates the separation at a fundamental level - as a global systems constraint - which then allows the two aspects of reality to become interwoven in a constructing fashion over all scales of being.

At the level of neurosemiosis, that is how the pilot lands the plane. By becoming a still centre of an optic flow. The same dichotomising trick becomes an engrained habit that can be used to navigate a self through any cluttered and buffeted material environment.

Hegel didn’t have Peirce’s logical chops, so his exegesis is often obscure. But it was what he was trying to say.

there are lots of ways to interpret and focus on Hegel, — plaque flag

Depending how much it matters, it might be worth checking out the literature on Peirce vs Hegel.

For instance…

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/self-contextualization.html

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/self-contextualization.html

Do you see us participating in [ coconstructing ? ] a shared symbolic realm ? I like to think of us as tribal [ timebinding ] software running on local biohardware. — plaque flag

This is standard social psychology. Not at all peculiar. How else could it have been?

I am truly willing to take off reductionist goggles (which is not to say it's easy.) — plaque flag

It is hard because it is not taking off dark glasses but re-learning the very habits of vision. Reductionism is embedded in the grammar of speech, let alone in the mechanical turn of the scientific and industrial revolutions. It is what we are trained in from birth.

But surely if you are into Hegel, you can’t have got anywhere without understanding how his triadic system describes logic as the holist would see it?

Was it merely empirical for Darwin to recognise that evolution is the inevitable shaping hand of nature?

This is about recognising that constraint and construction are the co-fundamental dialectic of causality.

Reductionism only wants to admit to the reality of constructive causality, treating constraint as somehow “just a convenient idea”. But holism or systems thinking - in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, Peirce, etc - recognises that constraints are just as real, just as basic, to the existence of a world.

Darwinism rules even the emergence of the Cosmos. The Second Law is seen as the most fundamental law because it models that ultimate constraint in robust mathematics - statistical mechanics.

Do things 'want' to dissipate ? Or do we just project this telos because things tend to dissipate ? — plaque flag

The point here is for the scientist to accept all four of Aristotle's causes and not pretend nature is reducible to just bottom-up construction by localised material and efficient causes.

The scientist then deals with the obvious fact that there are grades of telos because there are grades of semiosis.

Stan Salthe offers the stepping stones of {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. Or in more regular language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.

See: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284

So yes, the physical world lacks a code within which to fix an actual purpose or desire. The Second Law is simply a globally inevitable tendency or propensity. But recognising this as telos at its simplest possible level is still recognising that it is a universal drive that causes order in the Cosmos.

It completes the dialectic where chaos is the local irreducible uncertainty of every event, and yet statistical order is then the inescapable globally bounding order that imposes its statistical constraints on the free possibilities of chaos.

Thermodynamics speaks to the limits on randomness imposed by a globally closed system. If you are pulling lottery numbers out of a bag, the numbers may be random, but they are all in the same bag. Statistical regularity is thus enforced.

Then life has genes and neurons to fix its organismic purposes. We would call this being constrained by function.

And mind has words and numbers to fix its personal purposes. We would call this being constrained by desires and reasons.

Do you know of any resources that give a great overall intro ? I love bigpicture first then zoom in. — plaque flag

Maybe: https://complexsystems.org/publications/into-the-cool/

Yep, this the claim that meaning arises from the growth of constraints on interpretation. The central idea of semiosis.

Is the second law basically mathematical ? Something like the law of large numbers ? Is it basically the fact that there are more states that we call disordered than there are ordered states --- so that any change of state is likely to be toward disorder ? — plaque flag

The metaphysics gets more complicated here. Boltzmann was thinking in terms of particles, Jaynes then turned it into statistics, Shannon showed how the maths dragged in information. And then the Second Law was shown to be a special case of the more general thing of dissipative structure - at least in my view.

That happened with Prigoine’s “far from equilibrium” thermodynamics - seen as a special case of the Second Law. But the Second Law describes gone to equilibrium systems. And that doesn’t describe a Big Bang universe that is instead eternally cooling and spreading.

So exactly how to understand entropy and dissipation is an open conversation. Biologists have been calling for a Fourth Law for dissipative structure. And a Peircean view would support the idea that this would be the more generic story.

Any thoughts on Stuart Kauffman ? He seemed legit in a couple of video lectures. — plaque flag

Yeah, he’s solid. He’s one of those calling for “beyond the standard model of thermodynamics” theories.

If it fits in at all, where does consciousness fit in ? Does it play a crucial role ? Perhaps you've already said it and I didn't understand. — plaque flag

Consciousness is loaded jargon. It speaks to a Cartesian substance. And that is exactly what I am arguing against in saying it “reduces” to the generality of the notion of the semiotic modelling relation.

So the claim is that what brains do is model their environment. And likewise, bodies and societies and technologies all also are examples of the generic structure that is a pragmatic modelling relation.

Karl Friston calls it Bayesian mechanics. He had developed a full mathematical model that can again be seen as part of the effort to move past the old Second Law to a deeper level of description - one that is intrinsically self-organising and “alive” like vortices, and not “dead” like a gone to equilibrium heat death conception of thermodynamics.

o you think Dawkins gets how this happened right ? — plaque flag

I haven’t read a word of Dawkins for 40 years. But even then it was clear that in pushing the blind evolutionary algorithm for everything, he was missing the other half of the biological story that is self-organising development. Dissipative structure just wants to be. Evolvability evolved as a consequence of that telos.

Is our chemistry special ? I can imagine other planets having different kinds of life. — plaque flag

Nick Lane’s The Vital Question argues otherwise. Only carbon works. Redox metabolism has to be universal as it provides the greatest chemical entropy gradient. So while the Dawkins argue evolution can lead to many solutions, the developmentalists and structuralists argue that life is tightly constrained as to the form it must take. Solutions converge on the metabolism that extracts the most in dissipative terms.

Again read my biophysics post. Life exists because there is something special in terms of the physics of the nanoscale quasi-classical “convergence zone” where semiotics can take root.

s something like consciousness fundamental in your view ? I can't tell. I might be stuck in reductionist goggles, but I'm trying to bend the spoon by bending my mind. — plaque flag

Nothing is fundamental in the kind of monistic sense you mean. What is “fundamental” is the whole triadic shebang of the Peircean system. Holism says self organisation supplies it own ground of being.

What do you think Hegel was trying to argue?

Should governments introduce more rigorous legislation to ensure compliance to such recycling? — invicta

A carbon tax builds it into the fabric of the economy. We are already set up to be properly governed in this fashion.

The problem is big oil can corrupt governments and maintain subsidies for fossil fuel burning rather than allow carbon to be taxed.

In general, the full lifecycle cost of any entropic activity ought to be fairly priced into the goods and services. It is pretty simple.

I meant to add that Peirce defined vagueness logically as that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply (and then generality as that to which the law of the excluded middle fails to apply).

So what that says is vagueness is the residue left when you have a dichotomous or bivalent frame - the question of whether something is A or not-A - and can only declare there is no evidence one way of the other to decide the matter. Uncertainty is maximal as neither thesis, nor antithesis, can be positively claimed.

This grounds metaphysics in differences that don’t make a difference. You can have an Apeiron - unbounded fluctuation - which is neither a presence nor an absence. It is an everythingness in terms of potential and a nothingness in terms of actuality.

Being requires counterfactual definiteness, and so vagueness is the ground of that bivalent becoming. Distinctions can arise when distinctions clearly wind up standing against each other.

Peirce constructed his whole metaphysics around this further logical manoeuvre - recognising vagueness or Firstness as the absence of positive contradiction to be found in noisy and restless spontaneity. The nothingness that is an everythingness before it gains its dichotomised logical structure to become a definite somethingness - a realm where the PNC and LEM could concretely apply.