How is that a helpful question? If this was what folk wanted, then you are rejecting Maslow’s hierarchy. You would now have to argue that bit of your argument first.

But famines can kill millions who didn’t want to die. Suicide is a minority pastime. So that’s a false equivalence to draw.

What I'm trying to say is that the simple fact of a famine killing large parts of a nation's population doesn't automatically mean its government is failing in terms of its most important mission. For example the opposite extreme could be overconsumption or overproduction and obesity. — Average

Well both are bad. But famine is worse. In reality, no one is forcing your to over-eat, especially if you voted for a self-actualising democracy that makes it your own informed choice.

So famine is a much more basic failure. And what you would be aiming for is a political system that could maximise population health over time.

Can you tell me what that looks like. Maybe more like Japan and the Mediterranean than Anglo-sphere customs and regulations?

A shame, since the conversation was almost interesting. — Banno

:yawn:

In its loosest sense, pragmatism simply says something works. A structure or form of organisation does the job. At a minimum, it is order that has the means to persist. But you can then start building higher goals on top of that foundation.

As in Maslow's hierarchy of needs - https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html#:~:text=There%20are%20five%20levels%20in,esteem%2C%20and%20self%2Dactualization.

So any form of human social organisation starts with delivering food and shelter. It then can start to deliver belonging and esteem. Self-actualisation can then be regarded as taking things to another level. Or at least that seems to be a positive reason why liberal democracy claims to be better than what came before.

A monarchy at least could tick off the first four levels for enough of the time to be a form of political order that kept rebuilding itself. That would give it a pragmatic basis for assessing it.

You asked what makes a government legitimate. You put forward the more specific example of a kingdom. You seemed to agree that notions of morality don’t feel like a strong axiomatic basis.

Now do you really just want opinions or a rational critique of how to take this further?

I posited pragmatism as an alternative axiomatic basis. I said it is factual that monarchies persisted as historically successful forms of social organisation.

So was this because they were moral or because they were pragmatic?

Did you have some other axiomatic basis to discuss or something?

Do you have facts that would count against my pragmatic approach?

If the biologist's use of "intent' does not match the philosophers, then perhaps they are talking about something quite different — Banno

Sure. You can go off and do your own thing. But why start from a neurobiological example that speaks to natural philosophy and its ontology of the organismic?

Especially if you eventually want to found your own “philosophical” useage in biological realism rather than … whatever. An ontology of the world as a set of atomic facts or medium sized dry goods. That kind of AP world made safe for predicate logic.

That would basically be a circular definition. At least that's what I think. — Average

Give it a go then. Define a king without mentioning kingdoms. Define kingdoms without mentioning kings.

If you can do it, your approach works. But you have yet to do it.

How do you know that your understanding or interpretation of history is actually factually grounded. Even if it is why am I under any obligation to accept it as such without doing my own due diligence? Simply asserting things like this doesn't seem that persuasive. — Average

It’s your argument. And you have provided no facts to ground your position. You haven’t even defined a position properly. We don’t even know what would count as facts for or against.

That ain’t persuasive, is it? In fact it doesn’t even yet reach the threshold of attempting to persuade.

You are sat at the chess board but haven’t even made the first move yet.

I don't want to ramble too much so I apologize if some of this is tangential or seems like irrelevant nonsense. — Average

What did I say that you are now reacting against? This is how you might identify the beliefs which ground your own views here.

So I argue from a viewpoint that social structures are pragmatic. They allow communities to organise in ways that are resilient enough to last a long time.

A king-kingdom setup is functional for some good reason. History has already shown that. But now we need to sharpen our understanding in terms of why it might be sub-optimal in other eras outside where it once dominated.

I’m not sure what your paradigm of “political excellence” might involve. You would have to state your model here. But are you looking at it from the point of view of a modern democracy which is “obviously better” as who wants to have to obey some kind of absolute and hereditary autocrat?

One man's trash is another man's treasure as they say so I don't know if your method is my cup of tea but I think I can appreciate your insistence on definition. — Average

You seem interested in this as an exercise in doing philosophy. This is what critical thinking looks like.

Start by digging into what you already believe to be true so you can contrast it with alternatives to that way of understanding things.

I am asking what does it even mean to be a king except that you have a kingdom. So define kingdom and you make clear what it is you think of as a king. After that, we can compare and contrast.

Couldn't a government experience instability as a result of alternative factor such as plague and natural disasters? — Average

Sure. It would have to be resilient in the face of perturbations of all kinds. That is part of the design criteria.

I think it is a bit unorthodox for someone to automatically conclude that the only explanation for failure and malfunction in a social system is some form of obsolescence. — Average

Theories of self-organising systems would point out that this is a coin with two sides. The better adapted an organism is to its niche, the more brittle it becomes if the world changes in ways that weren’t anticipated.

So obsolescence can be revealed - as when an asteroid hits the planet and makes it suddenly too cold to be a dinosaur anymore. But up until that moment, the dinosaurs were wonderfully fine tuned to their circumstances.

The things you mentioned may indeed be correlated with regnal power but may not be causally connected in the sense that they are what gives a king his essence. — Average

It’s your argument. So you would have to define what is essential, what is accidental, to being a king.

I’m just pointing out where I would start. Which is defining what counts as his “kingdom”.

If so, then the pragmatic usefulness of the dishbrain’s behaviors is driven by its ‘striving ‘ to maintain a patterned self-consistency. — Joshs

But what purpose does this coupling serve? Is it a striving to avoid the white noise as an aversive stimulus or negative reinforcer?

Where did such a preference come from? It can only be a relic from the genetic bauplan of what makes a neuron useful in an actual embodied relation with its world.

If we are to dissect “intent”, then we must remain sensitive to its proper semiotic definition.

The idea that kings and queens must've been a "suitable" part of some social structures at some stage in history relies on some standardized conception of "suitability" that we mutually endorse and adopt as a part of our own universally applicable philosophical and linguistic categories. — Average

What is a king if he has no court, no lords and ladies, no knights or servants? There has to be some kind of hierarchy in place otherwise a king lacks all the usual distinctions that would make him any different.

So scale does matter. To be a king you would at least need a population where all the average folk know who the king is by name, but the king probably doesn't know many of his subjects by name.

This kind of information asymmetry is essential to there being the kind of tight hierarchical order we would be talking about.

And monarchies would work in the sense that they are effective and last. As a way to distribute power in a society, they would allow a kingdom to coherently regulate itself while also coherently reacting against other kingdoms, or groupings of less social order.

We would expect likewise that the monarchies would start to fail when having to deal with new and more effective varieties of social organisation. So there would be a time when they stop working as something better has come along.

I'm not convinced that a thermostat intends to keep the temperature stable. Nor that a virus intends to reproduce. — Banno

You sound a little vague and uncertain about borderline cases. And the fact that you can't simply deny intent is support for my position.

My suspicion is that for some act to count as intentional, the organism might in some sense have done otherwise. — Banno

Yep. It's all about the growth of reasonableness. Intent is the development of counterfactuality.

It can start off simple. A bacterium swims purposefully down a chemical gradient in pursuit of a food concentration by twirling its flagella in one direction so that they entangle and propel it in a straight line. But when they lose the scent, they instead flip the switch to spin them the other way. The flagella untangle and the bacterium tumbles randomly, until a new chemical gradient is discovered.

Consider Anscombe's two lists, both of the very same items, but one a receipt printed by the register after your purchases, the other the list you brought with you to remind yourself of what you wanted to purchase. Which is intentional? — Banno

Let's not waste time with irrelevancies if the subject is what "intent" means to the biologist or neurobiologist.

Biosemiosis recognises grades of intent such that we have teleomaty, or material tendencies; teleonomy, or biological functions; and teleology, or organismic purposes.

Again, what is key is that any notion of intent is clearly tied to its pragmatic utility. Choices get made that change the world to organismic advantage.

And the beauty of the free energy framing of the issues is that it places this counterfactuality in the context of homeostasis.

The fulfilled or unfilled intent is not the primary thing. The first task is to strike the dynamical balance where no specific intent is felt because all typical desires are being smoothly met. Sources of dissatisfaction can then be felt as problems with that smooth homeostatic flow.

So in leaping to Anscombe, you would be just importing a bunch of unexamined thought habits into this neurobiological discussion.

Although that might serve to restore your own sense of homeostatic rightness about the world.

How could you answer sensibly without defining the size and sophistication of the "kingdom" to be run?

Is it a group of 100 or a billion? Is it stone age, nomadic, agrarian, age of empires, or a modern technocratic state?

Monarchies must have arisen as a suitable social structure at some stage in history. Why did they work in that context, and what context are we now discussing them in?

In contrast, contemporary dynamical systems and autopoietic approaches assume that equilibration is not driven toward static balance but a dynamical tension characterized by incessant activity and change. That is, equilibration tends in the direction of an increasingly active, increasingly organized organism, rather than a drive toward mechanical equilibrium ( the death drive). — Joshs

:up:

So is it legitimate to describe dishbrain as having intended to move the paddle to deflect the ball? — Banno

What's missing is the intent to make some actual change in the world.

A biosemiotic view of Dishbrain, and predictive coding in general, is that it is meaningless unless it is driving some pragamatically useful result for the organism.

The wee beastie has to be rewarded by being fed and sustained, not simply by being assaulted by "a nicely organized" burst of electrical activity, rather than "a chaotic stream of white noise", if it "got it right".

So biological realism would involve the 800k cell Hebbian network being in control of its environment in some self-sustaining and homeostatically-bounded fashion.

It's intent would be to live. It would be modelling the world for a reason.

The consensus seems to be that, whatever the philosophical project is, it ranges from informed speculation on the nature of external reality to the cultivated awareness of the nature of consciousness, and the communication (and communicability) of the information thereof. — Pantagruel

If you really want to boil it down, I would say that it ingrains the habit of counterfactual thinking. It forces us to arrive at truth by way of discounting all other possible alternatives.

Greek rhetoric and forensic speech pioneered this as social habit. You had the four steps of the prologue to set out a claim, the narration to provide the atomic facts, the proof which weighed the claim against all other alternative interpretation of these facts, then the epilogue to show the claim now stood substantiated.

So this was how you argued in a democratic and legalistic civic setting. Opinion was replaced by forensic argument. The facts of the matter were broken down into the simplest atomic certainties. The theory that made holistic sense of a set of named facts was then shown to beat out rival interpretations.

The same structure of thought was applied to mathematical proof, scientific method, logical argument. It boiled down to the certainty of being able to say "this, because not that".

This is going well.

Rather than philosophy being thought of as only speculation on the nature of reality or the logic of being, it could also be something else. — Moliere

Do you mean philosophy or metaphysics?

So what’s your point? What’s at stake?

I was answering what is at stake. Speculative physcis isn't. RIght? — Moliere

What? Not even one of the things at stake under the umbrella definition of metaphysics? Is this now your claim?

And what do you mean by speculative physics exactly? Examples?

Couldn't that be civics? — Moliere

So metaphysics is civics? Is that what you want to argue? Be my guest.

Civics rather than metaphysics looks to be what you describe in lauding an Ivy League education for the US elite.

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

I think you are mixing up Greek metaphysics with Roman civics here.

When a contemporary metaphysician asks what there is, they are more likely to be asking about things like the nature of numbers, or relations, or individuals, than of quarks or energy or information. — Banno

Nice go at boundary policing. But ontic structural realism?

So the question as to whether metaphysics subsumes ethics or ethics subsumes metaphysics is just another example of the interchangeability of those "above and below" perspectives, and the tension of the hierarchical problem of the aspirational "higher" that so bedevils and illuminates human life. — Janus

Well either humans are shaped by living within the constraints of nature, of they are becoming gods who switch places to be the global constraints on that the expression of natural potential.

So yes. Semiosis does enable life and mind to switch places. And with maths and technology, humans really get to fantasise about a complete switch. We can dream about simulating reality, uploading minds to a metaverse, creating new Big Bangs in colliders. All kinds of horseshit.

Formal and final cause can be shifted from nature in general to sit in the minds of humans in particular. It can seem that roles are reversed.

But then … the second law of thermodynamics. Pull back the curtain and once more we see who is boss. :smile:

On the whole I take the Aristotelian meta-philosophy, as I understand you to be pursuing, to be indicative of modern institutional philosophy: the quest for the ultimate answers about existence is a question for those informed of the sciences, trained by the institutions of knowledge -- themselves politically aligned to the elite of the world, training the future leaders of tomorrow. It very much fits along the lines of the Ivy League model of philosophy. And, internationally, a state college provides opportunities (hence why people travel internationally to attend them). — Moliere

I’d like to see a list of all the global elite who trained in metaphysics rather than law, accountancy, engineering, etc.

If metaphysics is the tech of the elite as you claim, then the evidence will be easy to find.

I'm specifically referring to late antiquity — Moliere

OK. I thought you were replying to my point that metaphysics speaks to a particular logic of being rather than being some kind of unmoored, pluralistic, history of free speculation.

The phase you are calling “metaphysics as ethics” is just the application of this style of transcending inquiry to the practical job of forging a new technology of self. Ideas about justice, virtue, balance, etc, were the new universals by which society could start to organise itself and so scale a rational view of being.

I'd say that metaphysics -- especially post-Aristotle -- is more about justifying ethics than it is about truth, — Moliere

Metaphysics seeks the structure of being in its most general sense. Ethics seeks the structure of human well-being.

One is cosmic in scope. A totalising inquiry into nature. The other is about dispositions within human social relations.

It is clear enough which is genus and which is species.

But metaphysics certainly changed for many folk after Aristotle laid down his hierarchical systems model of how to account for being in general. It went dualistic and reductionist. It became a broken and confused business - bent out of shape by the conflicting ontologies of Christianity and Newtonian mechanics.

The hemispheres are dichotomised – or lateralised – but in a way that is designed to go synergistically together.

Right hemisphere emphasises global contextuality while left emphasises local focus.

If you want to concentrate, that shifts the weight left. Attention is narrowed to follow a plan. If you need to search widely because you don't know where the significant event may come from, that shifts you to the right so that you are attending in an open-minded vigilant fashion.

In most tasks, both kinds of processing style work in sink. In language, left side follows the narrow thread of meaning, right side takes in the general manner and context surrounding the way things are being said.

This is why intelligence and creativity get assigned to opposite hemispheres. All intelligence involves creativity. But you can see how there is a contrast in attentional style between focus and fringe. In one mode you want to follow a narrow path and so the right brain would help by suppressing fringe associations. In the other you don't have a known direction, so you need the right brain to take the brakes off the bubble of fringe associations.

It is just logical for neurobiology to split the load – divide the world into figure and ground. It needs to create the high contrast that allows it then to put back together the high information picture.

The result is we can shift styles at will. Even moving the eyes to one side or the other helps switch us from focused recall to creative search.

The effects are subtle because the two sides are designed for integrated action. But we all know what it is like to switch from trying to concentrate despite distractions vs trying to still our minds so as to catch the most elusive threads of thought or faint sensory events.

We can have this spectrum of attentional settings because we do have a division of labour – a contrast in processing styles in a brain with also the massive connections to then integrate what has been separated.

You speak often of systems theory, and in math that begins with dz/dot=f(z,t) in the complex plane. Here the levels of vagueness are low, and chaos may grow out of these scenarios. — jgill

Chaos can grow if divergence ain’t constrained. The real world problem is the maths may have formal exactness, but measurement is informal and thus inherently vague. Change a decimal place and you are on some different computed trajectory. And in practice, all actual computers introduce round up error at every iterative step - Lorenz’s famous realisation.

So maths is infected by vagueness. But further constraints get tacked on - like the shadowing lemma - to limit its impact..

Your mention of scheme theory was useful. It triggered memory of the connection between Mobius transformations and complex number magic. The Mobius ring seems a great way to visualise complex quantum spin as a trapped internal degree of freedom in fermions. :up:

On GMP vs DST, the fact that motor control theory is hung up on this dialectic - is movement variety to be considered error in top down intentionality or plasticity in bottom up motor plan development - surely goes to my systems metaphysics? The answer is that the hierarchy of control relies on both in interaction. Intention is meant to constrain dynamical instability. But without that instability, there would be nothing to constrain.

You’ve stumbled on to another example of science dividing a field into two warring camps because the thesis and antithesis both seem equally true. And also, a balanced stand off between two camps is what allows many papers to be written. It is a good career move that suits both sides.

I last studied motor control in the 1990s. This kind of split already felt anachronistic then.

Sorry if you’re bored. :roll:

but it leaves lower level intricacies inaccessible - particularly in real and complex analysis, the latter being very important in QT. — jgill

In what sense inaccessible? Do you mean that generalisation actually ends up cutting its connection to the particular?

That shouldn’t happen if it is being done right. This would be a reason why I say that the systems view - which is based on the living relation between the general and the particular - is the proper logic of metaphysical inquiry.

Vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies. They are the triad on which metaphysics was originally founded. Anaximander’s Apeiron was already there with that.

But then of course the value of atomism as an opposing metaphysics took over. Maths, logic and science shifted to an ontology of bottom up construction and “othered” the metaphysics of holism with its talk of downward acting formal and final constraints.

Nature became understood to be a machine. An engineered cosmic device.

No wonder the atomistic view of metaphysics felt so broke that it’s adherents felt the need to reject metaphysics in its entirety. Metaphysics of the original holistic kind was made the unspeakable.

A scientist or mathematician would seem to need no training in holistic reasoning. What would be the point if it made them uncomfortable about their mechanistic worldview that paid the bills?

With category theory, you do have that effort to return mathematics to some kind of holistic metaphysical foundation. Hegel and Peirce get dragged in as systems exponents.

But I just don’t find category theory a success. I think it lacks the third essential ingredient of a logic of vagueness.

The same applies to quantum theory - at least in the discomfort folk have with its interpretation. The maths itself is all about the inability to have literally a nothingness. There is always an indeterminate potential. Or in other words, there is an everythingness that is a nothingness and so the deeper thing of a foundational vagueness. An Apeiron.

So every conversation must circle back to this schism in metaphysics. Holism produced its antithesis of Atomism. And instead of that then demonstrating the triadic or systematic integrity of the full holistic model, it became the argument for simply rejecting downwards causation, and building a world as understood in terms of upwards construction - a world of nothing but material and efficient cause.

That is how we ended up as Homo technologicalus - living mechanised lives in a mechanised world … bemoaning the loss of something that was forever hard to put our finger on. Something organic, authentic, “spiritual”, in the way it spoke to the ontological reality of formal and final cause.

Holism is a theory of how top down constraints shape bottom up degrees of freedom as a virtuous - or at least self-creating and self-maintaining - closed cycle of activity. A cybernetic system. A dynamical balancing act.

In sharpening our epistemic models of the bottom-up construction part, that should have led to a sharper view of the top-down constraints. But the new mechanical view simply shoved all that metaphysics out of sight. Global constraints became laws that floated off to some place transcendent like mathematical Platonia or science’s “mind of God”.

Hence the metaphysical conversation stalled. One room got renovated and vastly enlarged. The other became some kind of attic full of forgotten relics. The basement - the grounding notion of vagueness or pure potentiality - was forgotten even to exist and became unvisited.

This sounds pretty pessimistic. But the realm of human discourse is also vast. The systems view does exist in every field. There is always plenty being said if your ears are attuned to it. It isn’t the mainstream, but it quietly flourishes.

There are all kinds of "philosophies": a "philosophy" of reading and a "philosophy" of cooking….

…Metaphysics, which you mentioned, is only one of the subdisciplines, so they cannot all "accrue to metaphysical questions". — Alkis Piskas

What would a philosophy of reading or cooking look like? I would suggest that it would take something everyday and seek to place it within a more abstracted view of being.

In general, it would be the meta-view.

So that for me is the meaning of metaphysics. The move from the particular to the universal. From the concrete to the abstract. From that which is true of some things to that which is true of all things.

It would be by being able to cover all possible subjects using the same univocal approach that you would indeed demonstrate you have got somewhere with this goal of completely generalising discourse.

If you could turn even cooking and reading into a philosophy under your metaphysics, then that would be a feature and not a bug. By its own claims, metaphysics lacks subject limits as it is meant to be the universalising highest level view of any subject.

It is the umbrella discipline under which everything else more specific shelters. Metaphysics just speaks to the universalising tendency in rationally structured thought.

You are being ridiculously sensitive, taking criticism of your position as criticism of yourself. Besides, what I actually said was…

You might wish that humanity was somehow different from what it is. The first step would be to start by accepting it as it is with an accurate assessment. — apokrisis

:roll:

Maybe the problem is I'm not a possibilist (i.e. actualism as well as an probabilist (ergo fallibilism)) and do not "believe" "possibilities" (abstraction entities) are "caused". — 180 Proof

You would have to unpack that. Any sources that do that for you?

And I want it to be noted that it was you who started with insults, not me. — Xtrix

Insults?

It's not unlike the haunted universe statements in the Watkins article mentioned the other day; — Banno

Another fan of Peirce.

But deciding what is useful presupposes other stuff. — Banno

A finality?

I think, rather, a context limits what is probable. — 180 Proof

As a Peircean, I would even want to talk in terms of propensities. But let's not scare folk too much.

This makes about as much sense as saying the living room floor I'm standing on "causes" me not to be standing on the living floor below. — 180 Proof

If you have shaved your head bald, then that excludes all sorts of fancy coiffures you might have entertained as being actual possibilities.

So maybe the problem here is that you believe in frequentist ensembles and other products of modal realism? This is the reductionist image fixed in your mind?

As I say, I prefer Peircean/Popperian propensity for a reason. Potentiality has to be given structure to generate some range of possible outcomes. Contextuality is built in to how the actualisation of probabilities can even work.