It may be that burning fossil fuels to get us to a new energy source and scrubbing technology is more intelligent than just limiting CO2 emissions. — Tate

First, this has nothing to do with the fact humans have always had some impact on the planet. What a population of 300 million humans could do 2000 years ago is rather irrelevant compared to 8 billion now.

Second, we have no choice but to burn fossil fuels while making a transition. So that is another bad faith debating point here.

No one’s plan involves “just limiting carbon”. The issue is just to start limiting carbon and just to start making a transition.

Why would you be pushing things that aren’t in contention except to make it all seem a little more complicated and uncertain then it actually is?

What point do you want to make?

Sure human agriculture and firing of the landscape could have had an effect. So could the still earlier hominid culling of the planet’s megafauna up to 40,000 years ago - although whether this added to net cooling or net heating depends on whether the hit on methane - the loss of megafauna farts - or the loss of snow albedo from increase tree growth made a bigger difference - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1502540113

But who cares about ancient history. We know the climate is a balancing act of many factors. The issue here is that it doesn’t matter if nature has some underlying trend going on - unless it is abrupt and imminent. And it doesn’t matter if humans were “guilty” of impacting the world in small ways before the Industrial Age and fossil fuels.

So what exactly is your point? Why are you another one arguing this kind of “whataboutism” designed to suggest that somehow these other things somehow make a difference to the need to react urgently to the current human-caused global heating crisis.

The narrative you quoted says we've been affecting the climate for 2000 years. — Tate

What are you on about. The paper is talking about natural cooling due to orbiting distance to the Sun. I pointed your confusion out and yet you still don’t get it.

The general pattern of high-latitude cooling in both hemispheres opposed by warming at low lat- itudes is consistent with local mean annual insolation forcing associated with decreasing orbital obliquity since 9000 years ago (Fig. 2C). The especially pro- nounced cooling of the Northern Hemisphere ex- tratropics, however, suggests an important role for summer insolation in this region, perhaps through snow-ice albedo and vegetation feedbacks.

https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/5184523/mod_folder/content/0/A-reconstruction-of-regional-and-global-temperature-for-the-past-11300-yearsScience.pdf?forcedownload=1

I want to point out that this is not the narrative most people are familiar with. Most people think human contributions to climate started 200 years ago, not 2000. — Tate

What are you on about? In which narrative could humans be considered responsible for pushing the Earth father from the Sun these past 2000 years?

This is one of the many ways the narrative is in flux. I think we should welcome challenges to the official view. In that spirit we have the resilience to live with changing narratives. When we become rigid and treat the science in a religious way, science stands to lose credibility. — Tate

Jeez, not another climate denier who can’t read or think straight.

The problem isn’t with those who have a religious faith in the scientific consensus, it is with idiots who can’t even parse the evidence being presented.

Are we expecting the two oppsing forces (natural cooling effect due to earth's orbital characteristics vs. global warming) to cancel each other out? Net effect = normal climate. — Agent Smith

If only life were so simple. To start with, the human heating will happen in decades and the natural cooling in millennia. So if you don’t mind first being cooked and then waiting….

But then the cooking is going to be so extreme that it pushes the Earth into some new setting anyway. Do stuff like melt the poles and you might have to wait hundreds of millions of years for ice to start to creep back.

Meanwhile, facts….

In 2013, research published in the journal Science analyzed even earlier temperatures, dating back 11,000 years. The conclusion was the same: our planet has warmed faster in the past century than at any time since the end of the last ice age.

The study also revealed that for the last 2,000 years Earth has actually been in a natural cooling period in terms of its position relative to the sun.

But this natural cooling has gone unregistered due to unprecedented warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, the paper explains.

https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-global-warming-merely-a-natural-cycle/a-57831350

My logic has not said anything how to mitigate the changes. — god must be atheist

That’s only because your logic doesn’t follow itself to its own conclusions. But keep raving.

Global warming is happening. Climate change is happening. These changes are not entirely due to human-created causes. — god must be atheist

Maybe I missed this but do you have a science-backed view about whether the background natural trend is in the warming or cooling direction?

No climate scientist disputes there is natural variation. Back in the 1960s, the most likely scenario was taken as that we were overdue for a return to a glacial, for instance.

But again I return to the logic of a position in which natural causes indeed contribute added change in one or other direction.

It is either the case that nature is warming, and therefore we humans need to cut our own climate contribution even more sharply as nature isn’t going to help us out here.

Or nature is cooling, and thus the fact we are already seeing such a sharp increase in warming means our human contribution is even more potent than we think - and so again we have to cut back harder.

Give us the benefit of your mighty Mensa brain and tell us how these conclusions might be in error?

You are being unnatural. I am not a climate denier. I am just saying that the climate change is not entirely due to human activity. — god must be atheist

Your incapacity with logic is alarming. Here you agree humans DO have an impact. You just want to question how much.

But if there is a natural cause of warming as well, then that simply says humans would have to do even more to mitigate climate change by now cutting back even harder on carbon.

Use that Mensa brain of yours. It isn’t difficult to figure out. The more the natural background warning, the more we then have to do ourselves.

“I believe consciousness is simply what it feels like to have a neocortex.” — praxis

Neuroreductionism.

The better answer is that consciousness is simply what it is like to be a self living in its world.

So the neocortex, and the rest of the brain, are all a necessary part of the hardware equation. But being "a mind" is how the neocortex, rest of the brain, and even the entire body - and with humans, the whole damn sociocultural edifice – get to pay for their biological existence.

Consciousness is the modelling relation an organism has with its environment. An engorged neocortex is what you can afford if it adds that much of a benefit in terms of a nutrition and survival dividend.

Brains burn through energy like working muscle, even when idling. So this is something we have to consider when it comes to AI. An artificial mind would also be one that is paying close attention to its own organismic existence. It would have to be smart in the sense of earning its entropic keep.

Of course, here in the real world, humans build machines to amplify their own power to exist. They are an investment meant to serve our entropic existence. We want AI in the form of extensions to our reach, not as some rival class of organisms, living in the same world, equipped with the minds - or modelling relation - which might allow them that level of mental independence.

If we build actual AI, then we are just proving ourselves stupid.

Animals have consciousness but not reasoning like we do. — Gregory

Animals have reason. They have genetic and neural level models of the world they live in that work because they are "reasonable" in the pragmatic sense.

So what humans have got is the extra semiotic modelling capacity that comes with having developed speech and maths - codes based on words and numbers, layered on top of the codes based on genes and neurons.

Words allow humans to organise in a properly organismic fashion - as one shared mind - at the scale of the social organism.

Then maths/logic became the even more abstracted and universalised symbol system that led to a civilised and technological version of this social order - one that amplified its entropic reach through machinery like steam engines and Turing computation.

So "consciousness" is an unhelpful term here. It presumes that the mind is some kind of special Cartesian substance which has properties like "an introspective glow of awareness".

Neuroscientists avoid using it. Computer scientists are not so bashful, but even they started to limit themselves to artificial "intelligence" once they were asked to put up or shut up.

Neuroscience has now got quite used to understanding consciousness and reasoning in terms of embodied semiosis – the enactive turn and Bayesian brain. So it ain't about having a neocortex. It is about there being some level of reality modelling that an organism can pragmatically afford.

Humans stumbled into language and technology - fire, spears, shelters, baskets - as a new sociocultural way of life. They could then afford a much bigger brain because this new level of semiosis filled their bellies with a much more calorie dense diet.

Reason for me is the ability to grasp an idea with the necessary means of consciousness. ... If AI can do complex thoughts it's possible it does so by another means then by way of consciousness. — Gregory

You are describing how one level of semiosis gets stacked on another.

So the brain does the neurosemiosos. It gives you an animal level of intelligence, insight, habit learning, recognition memory, etc.

Then language and logic are further levels of world modelling where we humans learn to stand outside our animal or biological level of ideation to now take an objective – or rather, social and technical - view of the deal.

We learn the habit of thinking about what we are doing from first the point of a society, which is looking at our rather animistic desires and reactions and passing some kind of more rational collective judgement.

And then we up it even more by living in a society that has learnt to stand back even from the embodied social point of view to consider the problems of existence from the point of view of a world ruled by the abstractions of numbers and logic. We become part of a civilisation that wants society to run itself in a technocratic and enlightened fashion.

Again, where does AI fit into this natural arc of mental development? In what way does it pave the path to some even higher level of semiotic intelligence?

Even for a computer scientist, this is the kind of question that needs to be answered.

IBM might self-advertise by cranking out gadgets that can win at chess, or even go and bridge. But chucking lumps of circuitry – even biologically-inspired circuitry like neural nets – at the public is a big fake.

Replicating what brains do is just rehashing neurosemiosis. Where is AI's sociosemiosis, or technosemiosis? What social world would make sense of these neural machines?

Anyone can talk about making conscious machines as some kind of sci-fi engineering project. But actual AI ain't even a thing until we see the social engineering - the blueprint of the world in which this hardware even makes sense, pragmatically speaking.

But that isn’t enough of an answer as life is negentropic structure that self-organises on an entropic gradient. So life on earth lives (mostly) off the steady energy flow of the Sun. Thus there is no requirement that life dies due to an accumulation of entropy within its own material body. With efficient material recycling, the transacting of the solar flux could continue as long as the Sun lasts. The same body could be rebuilt endlessly.

Death had to be evolved as a planned life stage as it became too important just to leave to random environmental accident. Negentropy can only persist if it has the semiotic machinery to keep separating signal from noise. Or in other words, ensure a species remains evolvable because the entropy of DNA corruption gets fixed, the cancers get suppressed.

So life arose as negentropy feeding off entropy flux. To do that, it had to first avoid just being entropified by that energetic environment. And having mastered its negentropic existence by building up the elaborate mechanisms necessary, it started to face the new problem of needing planned obsolescence. It had to add to add back death as another level of negentropic regulatory feedback.

It's a very good question why this period of high productivity doesn't last longer (for most people). At age 50 I was past my peak in creativity. Intellectually, I might be reaching my peak at age 75. Time will tell. — Bitter Crank

There is a natural arc of development that shows its logic at all levels of biology from ecology to neurobiology. Life logically follows the three stages of immaturity, maturity and senescence.

To be alive is to become well adapted to living in your environment.

A new born has a lot to learn. But also it is fast growing and so can recover fast from making mistakes. It is set up to learn by trial and error and so throws itself into things in a reckless “immature” way.

Then comes quite logically the next stage of having learnt a fair bit about how to succeed in the world. If you have survived 30 years, you can call on that much personal experience in dealing with the kind of challenges your environment is likely to chuck at you. You will be “mature” in having a more optimised balance when making risk/reward decisions. You can still afford mistakes as you still have the ability to recover - repair body damage - but also you are positioned to gain more by investing effort in what you already know works.

What must follow that is senescence, where the balance changes again. After you have lived a long time, you get so smart and well adapted that coping with the everyday becomes an overlearnt routine. You are now wise. You can act out of efficient habit.

But there is a cost to being super adapted. Your recovery powers wane - if you are super adapted, there is no need to change your ways. But that means you are becoming brittle. Live long enough and the unexpected is eventually going to trip you up. Something breaks and it is time for you to be recycled.

So it is all the simple logic of a developmental trajectory where you swap youthful reckless freedom for the unthinking mastery of old age.

Ecologies follow this path of succession as the steps from weeds to scrubland to ancient forest. Brains do it from fast learning infancy to smart maturity to wise old age.

If any species didn't have these line of cells to counter -effect the aging process, they would immediately die out in a generation or too. Because of this I think it is safe to say that all organic beings have some means to create a similar kind of redundancy — dclements

It isn’t a back up mechanism. Life started off immortal. Bacteria don’t have a programmed death. They just keep dividing until accident overtakes them.

But death was evolved as a way to sharpen up the evolutionary process once life became multicellular. There was a division of the body into its immortal germline - the genetic information being transmitted generation to generation - and the mortal disposable soma.

Every generation then becomes a clean test of the genetic fitness. You don’t have all these ancient remnants hanging around with their out of date DNA.

Bacteria don’t even have proper sex but just share DNA fragments so can pick up the latest useful bits of genetic kit at any time.

But life has evolved to be ever more digital, or counterfactual, in how it likes to expose single individuals to the competition of life.

Complex organisms are a complex package of interacting gene programs. Nature had to make sharper judgements at the level of a whole body. Hence the immortal germline got tucked away safely in the gonads and the body was made disposable - built to have an expiry date and so make the ticking over of generations a thing.

Given death is a designed in feature of complex biology, this likely makes dreams of bio hacking immortality a more difficult task than folk realise.

Haven't had a chance to go over it though. — jorndoe

It’s a list of names of self-appointed climate deniers. Useful for a future class action perhaps?

Isn't that how we ended up with Trump? — Tom Storm

I like to think that Trump is all about showing that society’s losers can be its winners. The rational social order can be inverted so that all those annoying eggheads with their complicated syntax can be revealed as society’s true fools.

This was also the pragmatist game. Commonsense should win out over fanciful abstractions. Rationality shut by itself in a room does seem to wind up speaking elaborate and unworldly nonsense. Think logical atomism. So there is a target to be had.

But Trumpism swings past the pragmatic correction to put the power in the hands of sophistry. It employs reason as a way to justify whatever needs justifying. It is rational discourse makes the pragmatic evidence fit a conspiracy theory.

So it says it is fine to undermine any proper standards of pragmatic discourse - that always delicate balance of theory and test. You don’t have to win that game. You can lose and yet claim to have won.

Losers outweigh winners anyway. So losing is now winning. Any lie can be believed, or claim to be believed, as it pragmatically achieves its social/economic/political purpose.

Can we blame PoMo for eroding the pragmatic standards of philosophical discourse. Damn tooting!

It replaced “all interpretations are allowable as abductive hypotheses” with “all interpretations are legitimate as actual theories.”

At least conspiracy theories attempt to claim strong evidence standards. For PoMo, subjective feels are all that are required.

(This is of course a caricature. When actual PoMo texts aspire to rational discourse, the standard socialised mistake they make is to discover the dialectic at the centre of every metaphysical debate and huff, well if two opposites can both be true, then nothing can actually be considered the stable truth.

AP and PoMo both can’t deal with the dialectical unity of opposites. One is repulsed by the acceptance of a contradiction and rejects it as being rational. The other turns it into the free play of paradox. Contradiction becomes embraced so warmly as to be unversalised as multiplicity.)

Getting back to Trump, isn’t his genius that he doesn’t even make an effort to fill in the blanks of his sophist arguments. He just puts the idea that needs justification out into the public sphere and demands folk find the justification.

That’s a true CEO for you. Put out the bullshit vision statement and let the eager underlings fall all over themselves getting it to stack up.

(I guess I’m saying that is how I feel about having to make sense of any PoMo text too. Some kind of hazy but grandiose vision statement gets made, on no particular evidence or well constructed basis. You just have a lot of verbiage about how this can also be inverted to become its diametric opposite, and so … well you fill in the blanks for me, dear reader. How is thesis and antithesis resolved to synthesis here. Find your own sense of what I could have meant.)

Nice. Even Nietzsche’s rant against rationality suffers from it being encoded as an authored text. A demand for a singular univocal reading. So irrationality must erase even that.

After PoMo and its multiplicity we can presumably move on to the complete liberation of primal screaming. :up:

The basic problem is there are are just too many of us, all aspiring to the high life now. — Janus

Of course. The greenie calculation was that the carrying capacity of an ecologically pristine Earth was a max of around half a billion - living on permaculture and PV panels.

But what is the politics of selling that equation to the masses?

Doesn’t it become rational to say instead what the fuck, let’s jam the foot to the floor and just blast the rig through this shit, honey, in best Hollywood style.

If you just looked at the tech, it was always possible to believe we could outrun fate.

Remember the green revolution after the discovery that petroleum was good for fertiliser as well as plastic consumer crap. History showed we could feed the world and so heading for a 15b population was really just a logistics issue. If you ran a nation, it was way down your list of existential concerns.

I’m looking for moments in history when politicians really had no excuse not to barrel on. Every problem seemed to have a tech solution given a “Manhattan project” scale social and political effort.

The delusion still persists. I mentioned Musk and geoengineering. That is only going to be a scaled up version of the private enterprise escapade where a fishing boat dumped iron sulphate in the cod fishing grounds off Canada - an ecological “win-win” in increasing plankton growth and carbon capture.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering

This means that politicians won't tell people that if we want to ameliorate what seems likely to be the catastrophic effects of human induced global warming, then the best solution would be to use as little energy as possible, and consumes as little as possible. — Janus

The problem is only really that the heat can’t escape if we wrap the planet in a carbon blanket. So official thinking is not anti-growth. It is about how to maximise growth rates given this physical constraint.

So even rational politics wants the freedom to use as much of this cheap and handy fossil fuel as possible. And in itself, that is a balanced social setting.

The irrationality lies in politics allowing big oil to kill off its future renewable competition with market manipulation.

As you know, renewables were going to be big with the Arab oil crisis of the 1970s. The US pumped real money into researching alternatives. A bit of geopolitical price fixing followed - the price of a barrel was stabilised with a deal that played the Saudis against the Iranians - and that wave of starts up was forgotten history. The conditions for a benign period of endless neoliberal “growth” was constructed.

Greenies were all fighting against the spoiling of natural ecosystems at the time anyway. And Smil tells us just how badly they lost that battle too.

Again you will know that most folk actually want a domesticated landscape not virgin forest and grassland. Nature too has to pay its way if it is to share this planet with our anthropomass. :grin:

Sorry, don't know why but I thought you were a PoMo spear carrier. — Tom Storm

:lol:

I'm following Smil and what seems plausible given the immense size and complexity of the fossil fueled energy infrastructure. — Janus

Yep. If we treat big oil in particular as an organism, just think how much resilience it has had to develop to sustain itself during a century of geopolitical turmoil. It understands the institutions of power intimately. It astounded everyone - in greenie circles - by chugging straight through peak oil by new tricks like fracking. It’s existential threat is instead the arrival of peak demand.

Blue hydrogen - a way to cling on to its investment in pipes and forecourts - is evidence of its deep resourcefulness and knowledge of how the world works.

And up against big oil is what? Hippies with their flimsy PV panels and wind turbines. No viable infrastructure to back up the generation.

Big hydro and big nuclear are also in the corporate game. But small and scattered compared to big oil in terms of being the social organism with the experience of perpetuating its way of life against all the odds.

It would be easier to engineer an artificial virus than an artificial mind. So fear the nanobot pandemic first.

Your bluff has been called. Time to deliver.

Why would I bother? — Tate

The question is what are you afraid of?

Or not give a shit - this is always an option, surely? The situation is hopeless, we must take the next step (Casals), We are free to forge our own (perhaps limited) values and narratives in as much as this is possible (notwithstanding some inherited frameworks untheorized howlers). — Tom Storm

I agree that is hard to decide what to do with one's life given a clear-eyed view of its reality.

But personally, I reasoned that I just happen to have been born at what must be the very hinge of human history. We have the science to have a pretty damn comprehensive understanding of why anything even exists. And if you hang around to 2050, one can also see how the whole human adventure does, or doesn't, end.

It is the biggest show on earth, and maybe the cosmos. So there's a rather obvious project. Organise your life so as not to miss any part of this ultimate story.

Can you, in simple dot points, articulate why such a revolution (do you mean transformation?) will help? — Tom Storm

I meant the opposite. It is the compounding of the confusion dressed up as continental cleverness.

Between AP and PoMo, I choose pragmatism. :wink:

I know you don't. — Tate

But you still haven't done anything but assert you are right. You have failed to show me that you are right.

I agree I just by-pass Schopenhauer on the whole. Life is too short not to focus on the best ideas.

But your gloating is premature. You have done nothing to rebut my analysis.

Yeah. But what I am saying flips this on its head.

The physical world is already organic in that it is based on self-organising structure that develops by Darwinian selection. This is what was discovered via chaos theory and far from equilibrium dynamics. Physics and chemistry are already organic in the sense of being instability stabilised by emergent informational structure – some evolved set of global constraints.

And then life and mind become the mechanical addition to this base layer of "pure organicism". You get actual encoded information as a machinery of control. Life and mind are a set of switches that get dropped over the top of the natural physico-chemical fluxes, directing them towards the purposes that the biological has in mind.

This is all OK in the end as life and mind are still part of the world in which they must live. They can only exist as the intelligence that breaks down barriers to entropification. They get to exist as the extra little trick which gets the Cosmos over bumps in the road on its way to its Second Law destination.

So the traditional categories are inverted. That is what really does people's heads in.

But I reject him as being somewhat right about the premise and quite wrong about the conclusion.

He falls into the silliness of treating the mind as something substantively fundamental rather than a semiotic modelling relation.

Peirce fixes this ... by making even the substantive being of the cosmos a "pansemiotic" modelling relation. A dissipative structure in other words.

Don't waste your life on second raters. Go straight to the head honcho of modern metaphysics.

It is always possible to say "no" without understanding. It is quite tough to say "no" and also provide your workings-out.

Check out some actual cosmology, like Charlie Lineweaver or Tamara Davis, and how they view the entropy story of the Big Bang.

The expansion of the universe may redshift its radiation contents, but it also adds to the quantity of dark energy stored in its spatial fabric. The creation and destruction of entropy - measured appropriately - comes out to be fortunately about exactly equal. And therefore the universe exists. Or persists. It has the remarkable thing of a critical balance.

At the end of time, our visible universe will arrive at the de Sitter condition of being empty of all content and stuck at the limit of its expansion. All that will remain will be the "holographic sizzle" of the black body radiation of the cosmic event horizon itself – photons with wavelengths of 36 billion lightyears and a temperature of 10^-30 degrees K.

See for example this paper on their dissipative structure approach.

Schopenhauer was one of the first of the irrationalist philosophers. This is a separate issue from his pessimism. — Tate

If you say so. You are free to elaborate of course.

The two seem connected to me. Reality is the inescapability of dissipative structure – the dialectical combo of entropy production and the negentropic structure needed to actually produce it. From the Big Bang down, the Cosmos is a tumble into a self-making heat sink. And life and mind – humanity - is "enslaved" into this same unhappy project. The only escape is death. And yet even then, there is just a recycling, a rebirth, as the job of dissipating is not quite complete. The Cosmos is still a couple of degrees from its destination of absolute zero.

So some folk – like that bastard Hegel, and later Peirce – celebrate rationality as the triumph over entropy. But Schop knows better. Rationality is the slave to entropy, not its master. We are being sucked along in ways we have no control over. A pretty pessimistic conclusion where the only alternative is to be ... a poet and philosopher. Roll on the PoMo revolution.

The problem with relying on the larger scale narrative is that we don't know what happens on the other side of the Big Bang. Time might be going backwards there. — Tate

Believe what you like. I'll get on with my study of the subject. Not all narratives are equal. But you need to have done the work to properly compare them.

So you're favoring one particular perspective drawn from physics, not from your own living experience. — Tate

I speak from the systems science point of view that unifies all forms of emergent structure, from universes to societies. Physics is part of that empire of thought.

If your understanding of entropy has got as far as the ergodic principle, then hey I remember the hot excitement of first hearing about that some 45 years ago. But treat it like one of Zeno's paradoxes. A line in the sand for where the real thinking has to start.

Yeah, the industrial revolution was in England. Schopenhauer was German. — Tate

During the early stages of the industrial revolution, Schopenhauer initiated a tradition of radical critique of Enlightenment notions of historical progress, rationalism, and autonomous human agency.

Schopenhauer argued that the intellect or reason so hypostatized by much Enlightenment thought was actually in bondage to the practical motives of the will to live, a will concentrated in the sexual act, in the unconscious and irrational desire to perpetuate life. Schopenhauer viewed Will as the unique noumenal reality in a Kantian sense, a force which operated (a) largely unconsciously, (b) often repressively, and (c) in intimate conjunction with memory and sexuality.

The Enlightenment notions attacked by Schopenhauer, such as the scientific progress of civilisation and the perfectibility of individual and state through refinement of the faculty of reason, reached a climax in the philosophy of Hegel which represents the most articulate attempt to present a coherent bourgeois view of the world, incorporating elements from Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism as well as from Romanticism.

The “heterological” tradition opened up by Schopenhauer was continued by figures such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, thinkers who challenged the very discipline of philosophy and its claims to arrive at truth through reason. They emphasised instead the role of emotion, the body, the unconscious, as well as of pragmatic interests.

Schopenhauer offered an incisive critique of the bourgeois world: its vision of the present as alone real, its exaltation of a rationality answering merely to pragmatic needs and, underlying these, its self-abasement before the “crass materialism” of science.

Schopenhauer was especially contemptuous of attempts to historicise and rationalise the evils of the bourgeois world as part of an ordered teleogical plan; he dismissed Hegel’s “philosophy of absolute nonsense” as comprised of “three-quarters cash and one-quarter crazy notions…” He himself utterly rejected the notion that history exhibited any unity beyond eternal recurrence of the same miserable patterns of events.

https://habib.camden.rutgers.edu/talks/schopenhauer-and-freud/

Sounds like what I said, no?

So what’s the question? I’ve already seen the video. It’s an excellent channel. But what’s the point?

As a general opener, I would stress that that entropy only makes sense in an already closed and isolated Cosmos. Conservation doesn't apply otherwise.

So the big question is not where the initial low entropy state of the Big Bang came from, it is how the closure to produce some definite state of entropy could have been achieved.

In that view, time gets born with that same closure. So there is no backward time direction or mirror universes.

Peircean semiosis helps here. It adds the further intellectual resource of a logic of vagueness. That makes all the difference to all our metaphysics. It grounds the dialectic in a pure Apeiron, Ungrund or Firstness of vague possibility. A state of being that is neither one thing, nor another. So it is neither open nor closed in the entropic sense. That is the opposition which must arise as its effective structure.

In physics, they would call this vagueness the sub-Plankian quantum foam. The Wheeler-de Witt equation would give the sum-over-histories view of the spacetime dissipative structure that would have to arise from its naked possibilities in a Princple of Least Action way.

This is the cosmology of loop quantum gravity, causal sets, etc.

So there is a lot of popular science that is based on entropy theory as it was many years ago. But you only have half the story if you do the usual thing of only counting a system’s degrees of freedoms and haven’t got a theory of how the constraints that closed this system came about themselves.

Dissipative structure theory follows on from Prigogine’s far from equilibrium dynamics. What was once treated as something thermodynamically exceptional - self-organising entropic structure - is now being recognised as in fact the more generic case. Openness must come before the closure that is the familiar “entropy equals a blind run down to disorder” metaphysics.

So in short, any popular account of entropy in a cosmological setting will have been the outdated pre-Prigogine version. And it is still fringe to apply the new understanding outside biological and complexity science circles. Although you have had folk like Layzer talking about this for some time. And it is implicitly the metaphysics of many current quantum gravity approaches.

Consciousness requires unanswered questions, unresolved drama, in short, evil in order to stay awake. — Tate

But that is just more bad psychology. The view from a world being swept up in the industrial revolution. Folk wondering why coal seemed to have the power to drive humans into a crazy new life of factories and slums, mechanised war, forced education, the slavery of capitalism, etc.

The Enlightenment had its Romantic reaction.

From nature’s point of view, consciousness is really suppose to be about unconscious flow. The flow state of skilled habitual action. The life of the happy villager in tune with the rhythms of the harvest, or the savage on the tropical island - in the romantic telling.

So with fossil fuels as a limitless entropy source becoming coupled to engineering and machinery, suddenly the world to which society had become habituated was being shaken up in ways no one seemed to be able to control or predict. Coal was demanding what it was demanding. Electricity and oil, then even nuclear, all followed.

Psychology aims for flow states. Neither boring nor exciting. Just accomplished and valued. Yet now here was this fossil fuel erupted out of the ground demanding we find ways to fulfil the thermodynamic imperative and burn it in some system of machine-based consumption. We had to have exponential population growth and a mechanically structured civilisation to scale ourselves up to the task nature had apparently just dumped in our lap.

So of course, we get this line of pessimistic and bewildered philosophy that continues through PoMo even today. We get the Romantic reaction that sets itself up against the Enlightenment rational view - because the Enlightenment was the enabler in terms of being the intellectual key that disturbed the black beast that had laid dormant in the Earth crust for half a billion years, slowly cooking into forms ever more explosively energy dense.

It is all very familiar and deeply confused. I give guys like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche the big go round because there is not a lot of point trying to straighten them out. They sort of both get it and really don’t.

At least with Hegel and Peirce, perhaps Schelling, even Kant, you have an attempt to see it in a general systems perspective - a neutral view which is not about good vs evil and stuff like that, but about a dialectic or unity of opposites.

Like thermodynamics and dissipative structure theory. The science of flow states. The unity of entropy and negentropy. Or as Peirce eventually crystallised it, semiotics. What evolutionary theorists would now call infodynamics.

The word Schopenhauer used for it is "will.". As phenomenology, it works, though it may seem strange if you're not familiar with S. — Tate

He was right that nature has a universal “striving” - the thermodynamic imperative. Existence is a dissipative structure, a Big Bang tumbling into a heat sink Heat Death of,its own making.

But he then projected the notion that this was suffering, a pessimistic burden, on to what is a neutral fact.

I prefer the optimistic reading of Peirce who characterises the same striving as the Comos evolving through the growth of universal reasonableness. Which is sort of Hegelian also, but Peirce had a proper model of natural structure and so really nailed the best version of the story.

I think the will he's referring to is Schopenhauerian. It's not a personal will. It's the animating force of the universe. — Tate

Power was always the wrong term for the universal thermodynamic imperative. The Cosmos is about the will to entropify.

The dialectic is then that it must have negentropic structure to achieve that. So power becomes the ability to do that work - construct the engines of dissipation.

Or at least that is how ecology and systems science now understands the general situation.

This thread is not going well. — Banno

Time for the wombat shuffle. Turn back to the dark and block the tunnel with your arse. :lol:

Sounds like communism to many and will be resisted bitterly, even if it means a collective suicide. — Tom Storm

You could argue that the left shows its instinct for autocracy in a crisis. And so mutates into an autocratic regime engineering permanent crisis (as Orwell diagnosed). Then the right understands that crisis is the opportunity for wealth transfers. So it is always sniffing around waiting for a crisis to milk.

Climate change is a little too big for either cynical ploy. But here in NZ, we did have bitter experience of a textbook neoliberal response to carbon reduction.

Rather than an honest carbon tax, we created a tradeable carbon market - open to the world. We said let folk buy carbon credits so that those who could easily decarbonise could profit, and those who would struggle to decarbonise could pay an appropriate tax that would eventually force the required change.

It sounded textbook market logic. A model of equality where each would contribute according to their needs for the benefits of all.

But of course, secretly, it was a local rort that became swept up into a global rort. Disaster capitalism at its finest.

The NZ government effectively socialised the nation’s forestry. It just so happened that the mid-1990s saw high log prices and there was a gold rush to plant pines. This created a “wall of wood” that would have to be harvested in 25 years time. But right at that moment when the Emissions Trading Scheme was being set up, the government could bank all the plantation as a carbon credit profit.

This meant NZ could get away doing nothing substantive - and in fact increase its carbon production through a period of fast growth - while also being about the greenest nation in the world … according to the shonky accounting of thr Kyoto Protocol emission trading deal that it helped sell to the world.

The people involved the best of intentions. I’ve met most of them. Decent chaps committed to green politics.

But they hoped for the best with the wall of wood dodge. That was only meant to be an up front sweetener to get it past the voters. Eventually the screws were meant to be tightened.

But then along comes the rest of the world, pulling off the even bigger rort of fake carbon forest with their fake carbon credits that could extract big Euros from the EU version of the ETS. Their bad credits then washed into the NZ system and NZ polluters could arbitrage those to generate a domestic profit. They could bank the NZ credits, which were at least real forest, and pay their debts with the fake Polish and Russian ones.

Our worst polluting industries - the ones the whole scheme was meant to be pressuring - were actually having to report embarrassing annual profit figures. They were being paid a free dividend on their climate offences.

This would have been a huge political scandal - if the public could have understood what was going on.

So a bit of a diversion from the OP. But it illustrates that we do know how to design moral systems.

NZ is in fact world class - another Singapore or Finland - when it comes to effective public policy to deal with health, education, pandemics, trade, whatever. But climate change is another order of magnitude entirely when it comes to the scope of the problem in question.

Dig into the “morality” of the current responses - left or right - and it is all a mess ripe for cynical exploitation.

Don’t get me started on blue hydrogen or the other new rorts becoming the latest policy responses.

[Oh yeah, I meant to add the NZ greens have morphed into our hard left political party now. More focused on social justice and intent on removing its leader - our climate change minister - as he lacks wokeness and is too much a technocrat trying to fix things as we shift to some actual carbon tax, and force our farmers finally to take their hit on methane … and even find some way to stop foreign carbon farmers from turning all our productive land into a fresh round of international carbon credit rorting - the next step where NZ doesn’t even get to claim the profits!]

As soon as we think of ourselves natural elements of the environment, we're no longer limited by morality, but just by whatever constraints are in the system. — Tate

I think what you are getting at here is that determinism is understood as being told what to do, while constraint is the obverse of being told what not to do.

So a constraints-based morality is inherently permissive. What ain’t forbidden is free to happen, and indeed expected to happen with exactly that freedom. But an authoritarian morality would have to tell you exactly what to do at all times, forever. And so there could be no meaningful local agency. God is watching and judging your every tiniest sin. Hellfire awaits.

So morality also evolved. We don't have any choice about that either? — Tate

No. All our choices shaped it.

Enough bad choices and you collectively go extinct. Next batter up. :grin:

How do constraints give rise to freedom? * probably need the dummed down version. — Tate

Again, apophatically. Constraints tell you what not to do. And in doing so, they clearly define your freedom to do whatever.

The lines on the tennis court define the limits of the game. Within that, I can try any kind of game strategy I like. The asphalt of the highway defines the limits of where I can drive my car. Within that, I now have the freedom to drive any route I can find.

Our human world is engineered according this basic systems logic of global order that gives scope to local creative freedom. Infrastructure is how we distribute the power of personal choice.

Communism failed as it is a top-down command structure. Market places and social democracies are what work because they follow the ideal of a constraints-based evolutionary system.

You both enforce a collective order, and yet let it be the lightest form of order possible. You allow people to make “moral” mistakes. A degree of error is essential to the evolutionary process of learning how to do better.

The issue of determinism enters. What are your thoughts on that? — Tate

How does determinism come into it from your point of view?

From my point of view - the holistic systems perspective of natural philosophy - the whole that is our environment/society imposes “deterministic” constraints on us. But what ain’t forbidden is then what is freely permitted to happen and becomes the system’s matching degrees of freedom.

So constraints create freedoms, in the systems view. Determinism produces the indeterminism that is necessary to keep it youthful, creative and evolving.

Morality only arises in human history as part of taking that basic system principle to its next level of hierarchical complexity.

We have to be given more agency as “selves” to be a part of a sociocultural level of self-organisation.

It can be a bit of a rough fit of course, as humans are primarily still biological organisms and only through language capable of becoming a collective sociocultural organism.

Well chimps too are social and smart enough to make choices about the value of competing vs cooperating. But language - as the genes for culture - put Homo sap into a whole new realm.

But we can feel the step-up, especially as the gap becomes large enough where we might have some romantic or catholic choice between acting like ethereal angels, yet being weighed down by our animal needs.

Much silliness follows when your “moral philosophy” is allowed to get that much out of kilter.

Another similar degree of moral stupidity arises in neoliberalism where we are all meant to be self-making entrepreneurs acting in a free market … but that “angelic” aspect of our human nature is still anchored in the unfortunate material fact of only having the one planetary ecology to despoil. We still have to share the one commons.

So maybe your complaint is against patent moral imbalances - which are plentiful in the world right now. :razz:

Is morality opposed to self actualization? — Tate

Self-actualisation is usually understood in pro-social terms. Otherwise it makes no sense.

We are the products of our environments - both biological and social. So we need to tend to the health of both those environments, using our best endeavours.

The “moral” opposition between self and other then arises out of that. We need to be able to act in both competitive and cooperative fashion - as a intelligent choice - to do the best for ourselves, in our environments.

It is thus “moral” to be competively selfish - as that creates the free variety that any evolving system requires. And also “moral” to be selflessly cooperative or altruistic, as that ensures the overall cohesion and harmony the world we are taking a part in co-creating.

Morality is a win-win to the degree we are self-actualising in the sense of being able to step up to this critical kind of choice.

When to mix in, when to stand apart.

It is not about grabbing all the available power as some kind of bloated reserve. It is about being the intelligent switch that directs the available flow of power to best effect, from moment to moment.

I guess no one's done studies/conducted research on how plants have responded (genetically/physiologically) to increasing CO2 level in the atmosphere. — Agent Smith

Of course this is researched. For example….

CO2 sensing and CO2 regulation of stomatal conductance: advances and open questions

Higher than ambient CO2 concentrations mediate a closure of stomatal pores in plants and conversely, low CO2 concentrations trigger opening of stomatal pores. Respiration in plant leaves in the night (dark) causes a rapid rise in the intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) in leaves and measurements indicate that CO2 levels can exceed 600 ppm (Figure 1A) CO2 [1]. Moreover intercellular CO2 concentrations ([CO2]) can rapidly drop to below 200 ppm in the light [165±58 ppm] [1].

In parallel to the diurnal oscillation in Ci, global CO2 levels have risen exponentially [2, 3] since the advent of the industrial revolution (Figure 1B). April 2014 was the first month in recorded history to have consistently had CO2 levels above 400 ppm. This increase in atmospheric CO2 causes a rise in leaf Ci.

Stomatal pore apertures respond to these changes in Ci [4, 5]. A longer term effect of the continuing [CO2] rise is the down-regulation of stomatal development in the leaf epidermis [6]. This developmental response was first discovered almost 3 decades ago [6], and has been subsequently confirmed with evidence in the fossil record [7, 8]. While a preponderance of species exhibit this response, some species show either an opposite effect or are unresponsive to elevated CO2 concentrations

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4707055/