Can’t get around the laws of thermodynamics and entropy and all of our personal hopes and dreams and feelings are beholden to these. Sounds a bit totalizing to me. — Joshs

But doesn't it in fact predict that humans will cook themselves to death rather than voluntarily giving up on accelerating the fossil fuel burning?

It is rather a mystery that humans could be so stupid. The writing was on the wall concerning climate change even in the 1970s. But if entropification is its own cosmic imperative, then it becomes easier to see why humanity acts as if entrained to the will of fossil carbon.

It wants its release. It doesn't care about us except as vehicles expressing that burning ambition. :grin:

So if you want personification or subjectivity, we can grant that to the dead bulk of prehistoric trees and planckton. This is there unfinished business we humans are doing here. We are completing the biomass recycling that has been frustrated by accidents of geology for so many hundreds of millions of years.

We owe it to this past, even if it greatly shortens our own future.

I dunno. I prefer to think history is reinvented every moment. But then I’ve never been very good at obeying laws, even the laws of thermodynamics. — Joshs

Sure, you want to bend your metaphysics to suit a socio-political agenda. Pluralism wins, or whatever.

But you miss the critical point in talking about obeying laws - as if Nature has that kind of Newtonian/Cartesian structure.

The point is that the laws of thermodynamics encode the most general cosmic constraints ... and so, reciprocally, also its most generic local degrees of freedom.

What isn't constrained is free to be the case. It is a possibility that can be concretely expressed.

So the cosmos isn't ruled by laws that determine every "free" action. It is ruled by constraints that - due to their limited reach - underwrite actual creative freedom.

Of course, how you exploit the absolute freedoms granted to you by the fundamental laws of the universe are up to you. That will just be judged in the long-run in terms of your ability to maintain some chosen identity as an autopoietic dynamical balance.

As an individual, the Laws of Thermodynamics don't restrict your heroin intake or love of jumping off 10 storey buildings. As a society, they don't restrict us to remain entrained to the more mindlless entropic desires of fossil carbon.

But in the long-run, the statistical outcomes rule. How an organism spends its freedoms gets judged by history. How long did it last? How far did it spread? What was the spatiotemporal span of its particular state of coherence and persistence?

So you make the usual socially-expected statement about "being a free thinking and feeling individual, not a mindless entropy dissipating machine". You shake a fist at the very notion of fundamental constraints.

Yet the bigger picture is still the fact that constraints and freedoms are reciprocally yoked together as the two poles of being which make for a cosmos in the first place. Without general limitation, there is no possibility of there being any particular reaction against those limits.

How could you personally feel free unless you also imagined there were laws to break? This would be why you need a totalising discourse as something to react against. How can you imagine living in a world of maximum social pluralism unless you have also the backdrop of a maximal social conformity to kick against?

Even if facism didn't exist, the anti-facist would have to absolutely invent it to make sense of their socially-constructed community. The threat of facism would have to be made real, to make the anti-fascism more than some kind of solipsistic and meaningless PoMo gesture.

The Proud Boys must make Antifa real, and Antifa must make the Proud Boys real. We saw this social dynamic playing out in realtime over in Trump's amerika.

Meanwhile - behind the smokescreen of civil outrage - business continued as usual for global heating. Trump's handlers pushed through all the regulatory changes needed to maintain the prevailing rate of fossil fuel burning.

Thought you might like to glance at Derrida on Peirce in Of Grammatology. — jas0n

Also, in case you've never sampled it, Kojeve's Hegel. — jas0n

Yuck. Now you are truly testing my resolve not to be so routinely dismissive of PoMo. But this is dreadful stuff. Abstract word salad. :sad:

I'll look into the difference, but if you feel like trying to summarize, I'll be glad to read it. Dyadic plays into the rest of Western philosophy, which is not necessarily good but of course familiar. — jas0n

I can't recommend a single good source on Peirce. There are the collections of his scattered works, but they leave out much of the good stuff.

But for example - given your maths background - I loved this Kauffman paper.

And Peirce was sharp on real numbers - an example of the secondary literature on that.

But on the Saussure vs Peirce difference, I should have added that Peirce was offering a completely general model of semiosis, not just a model of human language. So he went well beyond language games to a theory of modelling relations that applied to any kind of biological modelling system, and then jumped the epistemic cut to apply this systems analysis to a pansemiotically self-organising Cosmos itself.

So the difference in metaphysical ambition is simply vast.

Then on the dyadic-triadic distinction, the point of Peircean semiosis is that his triad of Thirdness incorporates both the dyadic (as Secondness) and the monistic (as Firstness).

So yes, all metaphysics finds itself grounded in the dichotomy, the dialectic, the unity of opposites. The concrete secondness of a relation that is a reaction. But the Peircean triad includes that business of symmetry breaking and follows it all the way to its stable conclusion as a realm of stably broken asymmetry, or hierarchically organised Thirdness. The Cosmos as it becomes once regulated by the fixity of its developed habits.

Again, Peirce was arguing a triadic view of causality at the cosmological level. Saussure was only talking about linguistics, and splitting the world into a simple twosome of the modeller and the modelled. So - in the over-simplified retelling - Saussurean semiotics was easy to collapse back into the dualism of Cartesian cognitive representationalism. The great historical mistake in metaphysics that Peirce was doing everything to overcome with his semiotics and pragmatism.

As I said, Saussure was not in fact such a dummy. See Becoming A Dominant Misinterpreted Source: The Case of Ferdinand De Saussure in Cultural Sociology, Dustin S. Stoltz (2019).

Cultural analysts in sociology typically cite the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to motivate a narrow theory of meaning. In so doing, sociologists incorrectly attribute to Saussure (1) the postulate that meaning is arbitrary; (2) the idea that signs gain meaning only through relations of opposition to other signs; (3) the view that there is an isomorphic correspondence between linguistic signs and all cultural units of analysis, ergo culture is fundamentally arbitrary; and finally (4) the idea that he offers a Durkheimian theory of culture (i.e. Saussure was a follower of Durkheim). Saussure’s project, rather, was specific to linguistics, and mainly one of theoretical and methodological clarification regarding phonology. Saussure never intended his analytical model of phonology to apply to the real operation of meaning in general, as done by contemporary interpreters and, furthermore, never argued that meaning is arbitrary.

This article explores the idea of a numerical order to events in space, regardless of time. It fits with the idea that mind, consciousness, a block universe, semiotics (even the quantum realm) are all composed according to perceived or calculated value/significance/potentiality - as five dimensions of relational structure. — Possibility

I didn't see where it claims 5D relations. But anyway, it doesn't sound a promising approach.

Sure. I agree that 4D spacetime is just advanced accountancy. But then that applies to the three spatial dimensions as much as the one temporal dimension. If time is reduced to a numerical sequence that represents Planck units of change, then space likewise is a numerical sequence of Planck unit of location. I don't see that leading anywhere for the usual reason - one has to include Planck energy in this picture as well.

Space is our measure of locatedness - a local lack of energetic change, or degree of energy conservation. Time is our measure of global change. It is the backdrop rate at which the cosmos cools and expands - the prevailing temperature of the cosmic microwave background - that gives us our "fixed" yardstick for the amount of change potential, or energy, that might be represented in any localised concentration of warmer mass.

So space sees energy conservation. Time sees energy expenditure, or entropy dissipation.

In the intuitive metaphysical view, spacetime is all tied to the third thing of its energy contents rather than something mathematically abstract like numerical sequences.

That doesn't mean the Sorli, Fiscaletti, Klinar paper you linked might not offer a model of spacetime that has advantages for some purposes. It may prove a useful way of looking at things.

But as I say, it looks to be moving away from what it purports to describe, rather than towards it. What I look for as the next natural step in time modelling is nailing the connection with energy in a formal way.

Quantum mechanics already treats time and energy as complementary variables linked by the Heisenberg uncertainty relationship. The maths works. But also QM still uses a Newtonian absolute time in that maths. So the relation is heuristic rather than a formal part of the maths. Only the spatial side of QM is nailed down as a purely relational deal - a reciprocal dichotomy - that is the location~momentum uncertainty of events.

Peirce talks about a habit-taking tendency to events, and the interaction of actualising qualities into facts, after somehow transitioning from dimensionless to determined potentiality. — Possibility

So what I was highlighting in mentioning the evolving block universe approach was the way that passing time - history - removes energetic free possibility. The exponential cooling and spreading of the universe since the Big Bang fast limits local possibility. The future is steadily being shrunk to its last unspent degrees of freedom by the universe's generalised entropification.

We tend to focus on all the hot and complex action that is still possible on the surface of lump of rock orbiting a furnace radiating at 5800 degrees K. Given that the Sun pours out all this energy, and the average temperature of deep space is down to about 3 degrees K, that is a steep entropy gradient to exploit. A drop of 5797 degrees.

But the time that matters in the bigger picture is the rate at which the universe itself cools - the drop from the Planck temperature to the absolute zero of the Heat Death.

So temperature, rather that numerical sequence, is the issue.

Derrida (as you may know) destabilizes this dichotomy. Signifiers refer to still other signifiers (not a signified made of pure thought-stuff that shines for/as the ghost in the machine. — jas0n

That is already contained in Peircean semiotics.

Yes, that is another issue with PoMo. When it was structuralist, it was dyadic Saussurean semiosis it went for and not Peircean triadic semiosis.

But then a closer examination of Saussure says he was actually so much a Saussurean either. He suffered the usual over simplification. :smile:

It’s been a long while since I read any Derrida. And for me, I didn’t feel I was learning anything new at the time. The points were already familiar from social constructionism and Vygotskian psychology.

But meaning doesn't mean anything outside of a human context. As I see it, the only way there could be meaning beyond a human scale would be if there is a God. — T Clark

Rubbish. One can find meaning in Nature as a whole. Like folk always used to before Christian monotheism came along, and still do in other world religions.

There is a lot of the universe we don't know. If there is life elsewhere, and I would put my money on "yes," I can't see any reason it might not also rise to that level. — T Clark

Of course. I spent a night with an astronomer in charge of the experiment to find new earth-like planets. We found a couple of candidates as we chatted.

It is remarkable how much of the Universe we are currently surveying. The record for the most distant star was reported last week - "Earendel", some 12.9 billion light-years from Earth.

But also, around any star, we know the key constraints on the formation of intelligent life. There are reasons why it can only be carbon, not silicon, as the best atomic building block, and why oxygen must end up the redox agent, as that is the reactant with the greatest capacity to turn sunlight into useful energy.

So we have astrobiological theories that tell us much about the limits on life and mind. The theories could turn out to be short-sighted. But any discussion of the alien lifeform issue no longer starts with some empty canvas where anything seems to go.

Even water has special properties no other fluid replicates. So life can only achieve its highest level in a world where there is liquid water, carbon is the basic structural unit with four stable bonds to allow the greatest complexity, and the solar flux is being tapped by a redox reaction as the biggest possible bang for buck chemistry.

This is from your Merton quote. It seems so self-important I have a hard time knowing what to say. — T Clark

I agree. Of course - as a theistic statement - it goes too far.

But then - as a systems scientist - one has a grudging kinship with Teilhard’s willingness to at least go in that direction at all. And that was my point.

For instance, is human philosophy conceived of as something like reality's self-knowledge? — jas0n

Something like that is surely the case. But that is also too flowery language.

What does it mean for humans to ascend to a mathematical level of abstraction in semiosis? As science, it has resulted in us trying to de-subjectivise our inevitable first person point of view to recover the objective third person, or God's eye, point of view. Or better yet, following more insightful approaches like Nozick's Invariances, we seek to dissolve our highly particular view of the world in the mathematical acid of universal symmetry.

So to the degree the world is understood as physical - some blend of fundamental material accident and fundamental constraining structure - we can hold a mirror up to that. We can construct a metaphysics that sees the world in this way. And pragmatically proves itself as a correct view because it offers us control over all the physics involved.

Thus it is not about "knowledge" in some passive Cartesian representational sense. It is instead knowledge in its enactive and pragmatic sense - its modelling relation sense.

This how we get from semiosis of the actually modelled kind - the biosemiosis of life and mind - to recover some kind of semiosis as the pansemiosis by which the cosmos indeed brings itself into being.

One flaw in Peirce is he conflated the two - especially in his "transcendental" mid-phase of thought where he wrote his notorious comments about matter as effete mind, not making it clear enough whether this was pansemiotic metaphor or pansemiotic metaphysics.

It should be clear that I don't subscribe to the Cosmos as having its own model of itself in a biosemiotic encoded sense. And indeed, it is part of the very theory of biosemiosis that the very possibility of a symbolic code only gets born where physicalism reaches its own naturalistic limits.

A symbol has to be a physical mark, even if just a dot being printed, or a blank being left, on an infinite Turing tape. But the great trick of semiosis is that if you can afford to encode information in a way that seems physically costless, then you - as an organism - can escape all the strictures of the material world.

This is Pattee's epistemic cut. Life and mind arise because they can make physical marks - like a DNA codon or a new synaptic junction - which look perfectly meaningless to the physical world that they then sneakily turn out to regulate.

It costs the body as much to code for a nonsense protein as it does for some crucial enzyme. The world - as a realm of rate dependent dynamics - can't see anything different about the two molecules in terms of any material or structural physics. Both are equally lacking in meaning - and even lacking in terms of being counterfactually meaningless as well. The two molecules just don't fit any kind of signal~noise dichotomy of the kind that semiotics, as a science of meaning, would seek to apply.

But then the body does know the difference as the difference is precisely one it imposes on the physics. It says I could be producing molecular junk or molecular messages. You - the world - can't tell and so just have no say in the matter. I - the body - am thus absolutely free to throw proteins into the bubbling stew of metabolic action and see what sticks as the best evolutionary choice.

Evolution doesn't just happen to organisms. They invent the binary distinction of sense~nonsense so as to make themselves evolvable as something completely new - a structure of rate independent information - imposed on rate dependent dynamics of the merely physicalist world.

So yes, the human story has reached the point where it holds up a mirror to the physicalism of the real world. But it can only do that by adding itself as a further trick - the trick of semiotic mechanism - which the physical world does not appear to contain and which is only present because the physical world in fact has strict limits.

The physical world is capable of abolishing all entropic gradients. But it can't even see the negentropy that is the informal structure that an organism accumulates so as to have its own parasitic existence on this world.

It's a splendid irony. A form of transcendence in that a model of the world must transcend that world. And yet the books get balance as that brief escaped from entropy is then paid back to the world with interest. Life and mind earn their way in the cracks of existence by breaking down accidental barriers to maximum entropy - like the way industrialised humans are taking half a billion years worth of buried carbon, slowly concentrated into rich lodes of coal and petroleum, and burning the bulk of it in a 200 year party.

So the answer to your question is that there is further recursion in the physicalist tale as it now has to add the new thing that is life and mind. The mirror we hold up would show the Comos the self that is also now the one with us in it - the informational degrees of freedom that its laws of thermodynamics could never forbid, but which also didn't in any immediately obvious way seem to require.

It is only because entropification must be achieved in any way possible - and life and mind were the one further way possible - that we can be considered part of the natural order.

Is reality made of signs that are neither mental nor physical ? For this distinction is itself a cut of the sign ? — jas0n

This is the epistemic cut issue. As I previously said, the central trick of semiosis is that a sign is really - as Pattee makes clear - a switch. And it is then easy to see the connection as well as the cut. A mechanical switch is both a logical thing and a physical thing. It has a foot on both sides of the divide.

So that fact puts a halt to the homuncular regress. The two worlds - of entropy and information - are bridged semiotically at the scale of your smallest possible physical switches.

And that is what the biophysics of the past decade has confirmed. All life and mind is based on the ability of proteins - molecular structure - to ratchet the quasi-classical nanoscale of organic chemistry.

The nanoscale is the tipping point where all the key physical forces converge to have the same scale. It is the "edge of chaos" or zone of criticality. In material terms, it exhibits the maximum thermal instability.

And in being peak material instability - halfway between the quantum and the classical - it is also the most tippable state. Biological information can get in there and tilt the entropic odds in its own favour.

But all this is extremely new science. Even in biophysics, the fact is still sinking in.

Have you looked into Derrida's différance? — jas0n

Yep. But only doing due diligence. :grin:

Generally post-modernism is the backlash against its own structuralist past. It wants to kill the part of itself that was valuable. It got tangled up in Romanticism, Plurality and Idealism in likewise wanting to distinguish itself from Enlightenment rationalism and the hierarchical views of Natural Philosophy.

As philosophy, it is a self-parodying mess. Yet of course, take any text in isolation and it often says something that could be seen as reasonable and obvious.

So between AP and Continentalism, I stick to Pragmatism as the middle path that offers the most coherence.

I'm intrigued by the triadic systems approach — jas0n

Hegel was certainly trying to express the triadic logic of systems theory. Peirce did it best, but even he comes at it from at an angle that largely misses the hierarchy theory story.

Once you raise your metaphysical dimensionality from monistic and dualistic to triadic, you are dealing with structuralism at a level that is like trying to to imagine a four dimensional object. If you try to make any part of the whole your stabilising viewpoint, you have already lost the holism you hoped to model.

But then if you combine the many views - Aristotle, Hegel, Peirce, systems science - you get a feel for the way it all connects as an emergent structure of relations.

I relate to this, and I connect it with the difficulty of philosophy. Tie a knot over here and another knot comes undone over there. Or it's blanket too small for the bed. — jas0n

Good analogies. And that is why hierarchy theory seems central to me. It is the basic structure of recursion itself. It is about the self-organisation or emergence of "fit" in any holistic sense.

As I wrote in one of those posts, you are palling around with Thomas Merton and his hippie noosphere cohort. — T Clark

That prompted me to check out Merton. It is interesting where he notes that Teilhard’s noosphere is such a bold assertion of structuralism - the constraints based view of cosmic order - that scientists (or at least systems scientists and the Darwin dissidents in theoretical biology) really dig it.

And it is quite true that science has a bad habit of viewing humanity as merely some insignificant material accident - a meaningless blip in a vast cosmos - when humanity would be at the same time, from another equally scientific vantage point, be regarded as the most developed state of a Platonically-necessary "world structure".

No lump of matter in the known universe is more complexly structured that the nervous system of the average human. Even a Trump is some kind of Copernican apogee of cosmic evolution.

The Universe spans 90 magnitudes of time in its great arc from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. Humanity arises in roughly the middle of that (showing up at about the 56 mag mark). Likewise the Universe spans 60 magnitudes of space in terms of the distance from the Planck length scale to the diameter of the visible universe, and we sit about halfway, or around the 33 mag mark.

So in terms of representing the height of evolutionary creation, we do indeed sit pretty much at the cosmic centre.

The hippie nonsense would be that the Singularity comes next, as we are on a rocketing technology ride that will mutate biological consciousness into a vast cybermind that will colonise all of the Cosmos with its rationalising structure. We don't need to go that far.

But science can see both how humans are completely insignificant and also completely special - and why these two things are not incompatible but just two slants on the one, four causes and Aristotelean, story.

Anyway, here is Merton on Teilhard's structuralism and how it mitigates the more usual materialist view of evolution and the issue of whether the cosmos also contains some kind of Platonic arc of progress.

The whole structure of Teilhard’s “religious thought,” ... is based on this contention that evolution has made man once again the center of the universe, not spatially, not metaphysically, but in Teilhard’s word, “structurally.”

“Man is the hub of the universe,” “the structural key to the universe.”

Hence for Teilhard it is not only religion but science itself which declares that “man is the key and not an anomaly” in the world of evolution. For “man is the greatest telluric and biological event on our planet,” and “the supreme achievement of the organizing power of the cosmos.”

Consequently man is “the key to the whole science of nature” and the “solution of everything that we can know.”

This is the principal challenge of Teilhard to the thought of his time, and it is a challenge which, implemented by a cosmic and incarnational mystique, is directed against scientific positivism more than against the traditional theology of the Church.

Indeed, one would have expected the scientists to dismiss Teilhard’s thesis as reactionary even more emphatically than the theologians who fought it as revolutionary. But scientists were on the whole more friendly to Teilhard than theologians.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/teilhard%E2%80%99s-gamble

Folks either want to stuff the world into consciousness or flatten consciousness into the brain. — jas0n

Good way of putting it.

Are we different humans with different minds in the same world? And does this same world need some kind of an elusive substrate that we can carve into in order to communicate? — jas0n

As I've just outlined, the biosemiotic view would be that humans embody four quite distinct levels of world-making. But everyday folk philosophy carries on oblivious to this complexity in being "a subject" in "the objective world".

So the biological basis to being a conscious creature - a combo of genetic evolution and neurobiological development - is a well-integrated affair. A billion years of life with a multicellular complexity would tend to produce something suitably polished.

But we humans only tacked on symbolic and grammatically structured thought - the modern linguistic self - about 40,000 years ago. That is plain to see in the abrupt rise of symbolic art. That produced a new level or organismic existence where we became subjects not only to the world as seen by our inherited genes, or the world as it needs to be understood neuro-developmental as a body navigating confusing spaces, but as a subject within a linguistic community. Suddenly we were living in tribal spaces, freighted with symbols, taboos, customs - a new shared state of mind that our biological being had to become fully immersed in so as to survive.

So we can distinguish two distinct levels of personhood there. Nature and nurture. We are subjects in the world that our bodies must construct, and also subjects in the world our social organisation must construct. The two worlds have to be functionally aligned to feel like they are the one integrated "state of mind". But it's only been 40,000 years.

For the first 30,000 years, we were hunter-gatherers and so living as close as we could get to the entraining rhythms of nature. Then came one of those climate fluctuations - the ending of a cycle of ice ages, the loss of the big easy game harvested by excitable bands armed with spears, the start of agricultural and pastoralism. The domestication of the natural world by the imposition of a new communal understanding of nature as something to be socially parented rather than rudely hunted and gathered.

Even the socio-linguistic self can evolve its world model in radical ways. Or that socio-linguistic self starts to take over the neurobiological self as the centre of gravity when it comes to the business end of entropy production and the maintenance of a way of life, or the structure of the dissipation.

And it has been barely 500 years since we shifted into our new state of mind - the technocratic view of the world.

So the world - as it is understood to physical science - is the world as we are now constructing it. It emphasises technology - the desire for the mechanisation of all things that thus rewards a mindset which see its world in terms of mechanistic possibility. If we can look at the world as just an arrangement of efficient causality, then that looks like the world that we technological creatures could absolutely flourish in.

Only a few centuries earlier, we would have been looking at the same world through the eyes of the gardener or herder. We would see nature as a wilderness in need of domestication.

Wind back to the last set of ice ages and the world we saw was one with mysterious natural rhythms - the changing seasons, the wandering beasts, the dangerous boundaries demarcating different language communities, different tribal bodies. Nature was a flux. People clung together, bonded by a state of mind that was a narrative of ancestry and hard-earnt survival craft.

So it is true that there is some kind of substrate reality that grounds our idealistic fantasies. But where is the final point of view that sees this in a totalising way?

I've made it clear that for me, it ain't a mechanistic view of the substrate. That is reductionist and one-sided. It divides reality in a broken fashion that leaves the idealistic fantasies as its matchingly monistic "other".

The only view that sees through the muddle is the one that can both divide and unite. The good old logic of the dialectic, the dichotomy, the unity of opposites. This steps out of monism and leads us to the triadic systems view of reality - the holism that is an organic causality.

And the true final step is when the holism describes not just the substrate "out there" but captures the holism of the modelling relation, the semiosis, which is about an "us in here" as well.

Biosemiotics reveals all nature's clever tricks. It shows us how we - as human subjects - have this complex psychology that results from stacking up four levels of an ever enlarging "consciousness", or Umwelt.

The levels aren't even that well integrated. The techno-semiotic level in particular is still a half-baked view of reality ... as it needs to be seen in order for us to flourish in the world we are so busily trying to construct.

And yet, we can also see enough to that one grounding imperative shines through as the evolutionary trend. Learn how to be a dissipative structure - an autopoietic material being sustained by a bountiful entropic flow. Learn how to see a reality that looks just like that, as the reality that a subject prehends is the reality they intend, by their own existence, to bring into being.

To know is to change the object of one’s knowledge. Through intersubjective discourse and culture each of us contributes to the evolution of the world. — Joshs

This doesn't adequately deal with the holism of nature and thus our position as modellers of nature.

The world as a whole is entrained to the dynamics of the laws of thermodynamics. Life and mind arise in turn as mechanism to further that univocal cosmic project. We feel the hot breath of the thermodynamic imperative at every turn. It is what our modelling relation with the world is fundamentally about. We exist both by and for our evolved ability to break down barriers to entropy production.

The imperative was the same - univocally - for the major transitions in out socio-cultural ways of life: the shifts from hunter-gatherers, to agriculturalists and pastoralists, to eventually the miners of the buried bonanza of fossil fuels.

So to understand the human situation, we must be able to place ourselves correctly in nature. We must start with the core or fundamental imperative that drives us, and thus shapes our sociocultural mindset, our generalised and collective view of the world.

Thus yes, humans only see the model of the world that they construct for themselves. But this model isn't fundamentally diverse, or plural, or something each of us contributes to except in the form of reinforcing the general direction being taken in the furtherance of the universalising goal.

Every poet and artist contributes to the current exponential rise in fossil fuel consumption just as much as anyone else. And do as little to change the situation, even if they might feel they want to. Same goes for the informed scientist. Neither cultural influence, nor technical influence, have had any influence, if you are tracking the human curve of entropy production - as Vaclav Smil has done.

So yes, we humans model the world - but in the univocal fashion that is appropriate to gaining control over nature and its resources so as to sustain our existence as dissipative structures, or organised beings who flourish by becoming ever smarter at being entropy degraders.

It is only when you get down to this level of science-informed modelling that you can clearly diagnose where things have gone wrong for us.

Organisms need to combine their entropy production with the ability to recycle their structural materials. They need to be an open path for the transaction of entropy - the flow from some source to some sink - while being closed for the matter that constructs that open path.

This is what nature does over all its organismic scales. Nature is indeed Gaian as when bacteria first evolved CO2 consuming photosynthesis, they just about poisoned the planet with the waste product - oxygen. But then the ability to consume oxygen in respiration - and make the waste product of CO2 - closed the cycle at a planetary level. A new self-balancing and autopoietic level of material recycling/solar flux harvesting was created that was capable of regulating the atmosphere and climate itself.

Everything worked smoothly until we came along as disruptors. We lived within the old system - the one entrained to the solar flux and its coupled photosynthesis~respiration balance. But then we stumbled upon a form of semiosis that went beyond social language - the techno-semiosis of mathematically structured thinking. And at the same time, we stumbled across a vast buried resource of unconsumed energy - the buried carbon quietly accumulated in sedimentary rocks over half a billion years of rotting vegetation and rotting plankton.

The scientific and industrial revolution were the result, a new stage of the human adventure that was predicated on the exponential rise of fossil fuel burning, coupled to a flagrant unconcern for the normal need to ensure a system of dissipation that was also closed for materiality. We built the entropy generating path - the one piping the stores in the ground to the heat sink of outer space. But didn't include recycling in the economic budget. We just filled our environment with material waste as if that too was a normal, natural, thing to do.

Then of course we found that getting rid of all the heat of the burning was also a problem. The atmosphere - the Gaian blanket of gas so lovingly gardened by nature for the past billion years with its marvellous photosynthetic~respiratory balance - acts as a barrier to the disposal of heat into the black unconcern of outer space. The heat exchange capacity of the atmosphere, and the planetary climate stability which was so carefully and biosemiotically constructed, has become a frustration to our entropic desires. Houston, we have a snafu.

So it is quite possible to step back from the human condition and see the whole story laid out.

Nature is dissipative structure based on biosemiotic modelling. To persist as biosemiotic dissipative structure requires being an organism - closed for materiality, open for entropy. It says that in the label. To be a structure is to recycle your matter in a way that achieves a dynamical stability. And to dissipate is to degrade some energy source, importing the good stuff at one end, exporting the waste heat to some bottomless sink outside yourself.

Life and mind arose doing just this. It evolved through four major grades of semiotic world modelling to get to us modern humans - the coding steps of genes, neurons, words and numbers. The three earlier levels of world modelling managed to make themselves closed for material, open for energy transaction. But the fourth level of modelling - the one based on numbers that wants to treat nature as a machine - isn't doing so well. Or it has over-performed on the entropy production, under-performed on the material recycling.

So for the scientist who understands the reality of organismic being, the inadequacies of the machine model, all this as plain as the nose on your face.

But the current paradigm - the economic juggernaut that has entrained both the typical scientist and the typical poet to its world model - has grown so mindlessly powerful that nothing is even slowing it in meaningful fashion. Only crashing off the road could bring it to a halt.

Philosophy used to be a discourse that seemed very important to pointing the way ahead. But that was when the dominant world model was linguistic and aimed at fine-tuning a way of life still lived within the constraints of the daily solar flux.

We now live by a world model that is techno-semiotic. And if philosophy was up to date, it would be presenting fine arguments about what it really means to be an organism - at the noosphere scale.

Instead, we have this stale nonsense - this warmed over Romanticism - about the human individual and the pluralistic struggle against totalising discourse. Or alternatively, the "commonsense realism" of Enlightenment thought that addressed the pragmatic concerns of the human way of life of yesteryear, then failed spectacularly to address the new world that its logical atomism, and other mechanistic tropes, were engendering.

So much time being wasted pissing about on antique concerns. :up:

I like what I know of Pierce, and I'm fairly familiar w/ pragmatism (James, Rorty) — jas0n

Step 1: bin James and Rorty. Dewey is OK though. :wink:

Even though Popper only came across Peirce late in his own career, he shared so much with Peirce down to a shared view that probability ought to be understood as propensity.

I'd add that Popper is also including the social element of technique and communication. — jas0n

Yep. But this is a rather secondary issue. Scientific method is well aware of these kind of commonsense problems and so pays a lot of attention to instilling a suitable level of experimental discipline and replicability.

But it should at least look bad when it fails at prediction. It has to be specific enough to fail. — jas0n

This is the more subtle issue. The idea that one exception could break the rule itself assumes a particular metaphysics. It says a theory can describe "how the world works" in some kind of totally constrained and exceptionless fashion - reality as a mechanism.

But the Peircean view follows the organicist tradition where the material ground of being is instead probabilistic - a sea of fluctuations or uncertain impulse. What Peirce dubbed a Vagueness, or Tychism.

And then a structure of constraints evolves to give firm shape to all the fluctuation. The possibilities are reigned in, narrowed in scope. In the limit - as Bateson put it - you still have plenty of fluctuation, but they are differences that no longer make a difference. Like an ideal gas at equilibrium, all the busy microphysics no longer makes a difference to the global macrostate.

And this is the world that science in fact describes. One that is probabilistic at base and thus always capable of exceptions that break the rule. And yet the rule is only in fact a constraint that limits exceptions to some long-run statistical profile.

So you have this conflict. There is the popular belief that the scientific method ought to be tuned to producing exceptionless law. Yet reality itself only has long-run habits.

Science is starting to realise this truth. Thermodynamics is starting to assert itself as the most fundamental model of the Cosmos.

So as far as framing laws goes, being so constraining as to be exceptionless would be to accept the idea that the Cosmos is an actual machine.

Peirce's pragmatism already understood this point. Which is why he stressed that universal laws were only really highly developed Cosmic habits. A propensity based view of probability itself follows.

And so what I'm saying is that this is also the manifestation or appearance of mind, or "the subject", albeit in rudimentary form. And that the subject can't be accounted for in physical terms, it doesn't emerge from the physical and is not constituted by it. — Wayfarer

Sure. But from the pansemiotic view, both matter and mind - realism and idealism - are each just as much a construct of modelling as each other. And the trick is to turn that Cartesian duality into the reciprocality of a modelling dichotomy.

Hence Peirce being objective + idealist. That expresses the idea that all these familiar dualities - such as objective and subjective, real and ideal, etc - are the reciprocal limits of the one larger ontic relation.

So when a physicist talks about particles or the dimension of time, that is just as much a "pragmatic fiction" as when others talk about minds, intentions, feelings, subjectivity, selves.

But at least physicists more or less understand this is the game they are playing.

So what pansemiosis has to account for is neither the physical reality, nor the mental reality, but instead, the deeper reason why this has emerged as the opposing extremes of the general discourse about reality.

Reality makes the most sense when we divide this way - the Cartesian split.

And yet then that doesn't make any sense if your metaphysics doesn't also show how the two sides to reality are in fact complementary halves of the one larger story.

That is what is missing from your account. And that is what I say semiosis was designed to fix.

Thoughts? — jas0n

I see no mention of Peirce. Did I miss something?

If we think of basic statements as facts and theories as interpretations, then facts turn out to be more 'complex' than interpretations (or to be a different kind of interpretation.) — jas0n

The tricky bit here is that measurements are where the facts - as theoretical entities - must interface with the physical reality they puport to measure. So there is the further thing of an epistemic cut.

Logically, a measurement is constructed to be a binary switch. What number should I attach to some modelled aspect of the world? And then a measurement is made by plunging the mechanical switch into the boiling flux of world. The switch is tripped and you pull your measuring implement out to read off the appropriate numerals.

So the mystery is all about the epistemic cut - the ability to make measurements that depends on being able to produce mechanical switches that interface between the logically/mathematically organised theory and the unbroken physical flow of the world - the thing in itself - that can trip the switch in a suitable fashion, giving some account of itself in terms of digits to be read off dials.

A measuring stick doesn’t seem immediately like a switch, but it is. You can only read off some definite number and write it down in your log when you decide the analog continuity of the reality looks close enough - for all practical purposes - to one digit and not some other digit.

The epistemic cut is a further refinement developed by Howard Pattee and Robert Rosen in the 1960s, if you are looking for a formal understanding of the pragmatism that grounds the scientific method - and indeed, life and mind as reality-modelling systems in general.

nevertheless the awareness of the temporal duration between events seems always to be brought to the picture by the observing mind, because it requires memory and expectation, which can only be provided by the mind — Wayfarer

The alternative to Panpsychism is pansemiosis. So all we really require for time to have temporal structure is that physical reality boils down to a Peircean story of constraints on possibilities.

The past is the Cosmos’s memory in being everything that has definitely happened and so a history of all the possibilities eliminated. That is very mind-like - for any neuroscientist - in that it accounts for the past as an accumulation of behavioural habits.

Then the future, by definition, is all the possibilities that remain. The future is the continuously updated space of the possible - what can happen next given all that has happened already.

This is George Ellis’s evolving block universe theory, for example.

It is mind-like in a general pansemiotic way, but - like a biosemiotic view of consciousness - doesn’t then dive headlong into Cartesian substance dualism and all the confusion that results from doing that.

As others have noted, a thing can be described in terms of everything that it is not. Difference/distinction plays a central role. — jas0n

Yep. That is the definition of a constraint. It does not specify the exact nature of some action. It instead narrows the scope of the possible by eliminating every other alternative.

It sounded to me as if you changed your mind, but no matter. — bert1

I was talking about the folk who pedantically demand dictionary definitions in - for example - philosophical discussions. Those who have to deal with words professionally, like lexicographers, would understand that definitions can only be guides and not actually definite.

Absolutely it's an art. And it's a descriptive rough snapshot, and doesn't pretend (or shouldn't) to offer prescriptive certainties. — bert1

Would you now expect a lexicographer to agree with your re-statement? Did you suddenly change your mind? :up:

I very much doubt a lexicographer would agree with you on that. — bert1

A pedant would surely disagree with me. But amusingly ... "Lexicographers define words but still lack a clear and unambiguous understanding of the word lexicographer."

And in case you haven't considered the art involved....

...the traditional dictionary definition, although it bears all the trappings of authority, is in fact a highly stylized, overly compressed and often tentative stab at capturing the consensus on what a particular word “means.” A good dictionary derives its reputation from careful analysis of examples of words in use, in the form of sentences, also called citations. The lexicographer looks at as many citations for each word as she can find (or, more likely, can review in the time allotted) and then creates what is, in effect, a dense abstract, collapsing into a few general statements all the ways in which the word behaves. A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.

:smile:

Lewis Carroll nailed it in Alice Through the Looking Glass..

‘ Humpty Dumpty begins by asking Alice her name and her business:

‘My name is Alice, but––‘

‘It’s a stupid name enough!’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.

‘Of course it must,’ Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: ‘my name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.’

....

[Humpty Dumpty}…and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents––‘

‘Certainly,’ said Alice.

‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’

‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.

‘Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’

‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”, Alice objected.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things – that’s all.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all’

You knowingly misrepresent Darwin's positions for cheap rhetorical effect and so you can feel like a smarty pants. There is nothing serious about your post and you know it. — T Clark

:lol:

I have noticed lately that words (given the way we use language) must exist before their definitions, and concepts must exist before their words. — Brad Thompson

I would say the difference results from the fact that we use words to constrain meanings (or interpretations) in a holistic sense, rather than to define meanings in an atomistic sense.

So dictionary definitions are always awkward and frustrating as they treat language like a game of construction. A word carries some definite content in terms of its semantics. It starts with some complete certainty about the unit of information it represents.

But that is backwards when it comes to how language actually works as a semiotic code.

Instead what is fundamental to interpretation is that a vocal grunt could mean ... anything. It is a unit of radical uncertainty rather than one of absolute, unambiguous, certainty. But within a system of language practice, words come to exert constraints over some state of interpretation.

They are used in ways to limit the confusion between what I have in mind, and you have in mind. Or even when used as the self-adressed speech of our inner voices - our thinking - they are employed to narrow uncertainty about what it is that we actually "have in mind".

So take an example: I saw it again today. That "it" might tell you everything you need to know or pretty much nothing, depending on the degree of experiential context - semantics - we happen to share.

To define it, we could play 20 questions. We could hierarchically constrain the possibility of being uncertain as to what "it" means.

Is it animal, vegetable or mineral? Is it a large or small animal? Is it a domestic or wild large animal? Is it a herbivore or carnivore wild large animal.

Eventually we narrow "it" down to an elephant. But even then there is uncertainty in the word as much as certainty. Is the elephant african or asian? Regular or pygmy? Dead or alive? In the local zoo or running wild in the streets?

So the meaning of any word is potentially inexhaustible as any one word must always retain a fruitful degree of interpretive uncertainty. If a word in fact fitted all exemplar cases too closely, speech would cease to have its creative edge, its flexibility of being able to encompass any number of one off, or particular, locutions.

That is why dictionary definitions are rather hateful. They are language treated as something dead and robotic, rather than lively and endlessly creative.

We can always give a definition if we must. But we are also always aware of how much the idea of absolutely pinning down a word meaning goes against the whole spirit of effective communication.

Would you promote Trump to grade 5 enlightened if he wasn’t so pro-vax? :rofl:

This just reinforces my understanding that you and I mean different things when we say "causality." — T Clark

I've said that all along. You take it to mean just efficient cause. I take it to include all four Aristotlean causes.

Likewise, you take it to mean chains of events in an a-causal or unentangled spacetime backdrop. I see a need to make the container part of the holistic causal story along with its contents.

You identify causality with determinism. I set things up so that the determined and the random, the necessary and the contingent, are reciprocally defined as the global constraints vs the local degrees of freedom.

So at each turn, you want to reduce causality to some kind of ultimate simple - a monism. And I say no. Causality is irreducibly triadic in its structure. It is hierarchical in its holism. You have to have the three things of thesis, antithesis and their synthesis, to get a complete picture of a systematic relation.

If I understand you correctly, you think I've focused in on a small part of what's included and not taken a holistic view. That's because my whole beef is with the way causality is usually understood, not the broader context you are describing. — T Clark

But just because efficient causality is a quarter of the whole, that doesn't make it wrong. It just makes it incomplete. And it also makes life simpler to the degree you can get away using that as your sole modelling tool.

So yes, it is too simple. But also, simple can be good when your purposes are matchingly limited - as when you merely want to build machines, and not organisms.

How is causality different from determinism? They seem like the same thing to me, just looked out from a different direction. Can you have one without the other? — T Clark

A constraint doesn’t determine an outcome, it just limits the probabilities. It places concrete bounds on the degrees of freedom or sources of indeterminism.

Of course, in the extreme, constraints become mechanical - that is, they can leave so little wiggle-room that the outcome is as good as determined.

Causation as a criteria for demarcating science from non-science. That's something I hadn't come across before. — Banno

I was talking about demarcating sense from nonsense. Surely you have heard of that?

So now you tell me how you rule out astrology, homeopathy and crackpottery in general. Then maybe I’ll tell you about how this played out in psi research as an interesting case study.

A clue. What defines a theory that is not even wrong apart from a failure to generate a testable counterfactual. Some causal hypothesis where the result is different depending whether the modelled cause is present or absent.

We might all grant the success of the modelling, without the addition of "...in causal terms". — Banno

How do we rule out astrology, homeopathy, miracles, fate, and anything else that might rely on the appeal to lucky coincidence in our cynical old eyes then?

Patterns must have generators. Or else the world just doesn't make sense and we should all give up and go home.

I meant we hold the concept as an assumption and get on with things. We presuppose it works (pragmatically). — Tom Storm

We would treat it as a counterfactual hypothesis. We are saying there are two choices here, either things have a cause or they don't. The job then is to define what the observable difference might be.

So is the decay of the atom caused or uncaused? Is it determined or is it random? Is it local or contextual? Does it in the larger analysis satisfy the principle of sufficient reason or fail it?

It is true that it does tend to get elevated to the exalted level of a key scientific principle - sufficient reason, or the principle of universal causation. It is just too hard to honestly doubt given the success of modelling the world in causal terms.

Yet still, that is what Aristotle's four cause analysis and other efforts to break down the general motherhood statement - every effect has a cause - is about.

Science has to refine its questions of nature as it works its way through mysteries like the apparent violations of causal order in special relativity, or the nonlocalism and indeterminacy of quantum interactions.

Taking causality seriously as a work in progress is how we can say, well classical Newtonianism remains a workable model within a small range of physical velocities and temperatures, but then that particular notion of causality must somehow be enlarged to keep adding these apparent counterfactuals into the scheme.

The pragmatic approach is that induction works, so don't ask, — Banno

Pragmatism just means burying the mouldering corpse of logical atomism and moving right along in a commonsense fashion.

The view Russell is I think rightly critiquing is that of causation as "event A is caused by event B, which in turn is cause by event C, and so on" - cause as a regularity. — Banno

Yep. If you use logical atomism as your attack on logical holism, you wind up with nothing. Hence AP's rapid implosion.

Causality can't make sense unless the model includes both the holism and the atoms, or the global constraints and the local degrees of freedom.

Newtonian reversibility leads to the First Law of Thermodynamics - the conservation of energy. The collision on the billiard table seem to have no causal direction as you can run the film in reverse and it all looks perfectly good from the point of view of the Laws of Motion.

This is life from the point of view of the atomistic interactions where every action is symmetrically a reaction.

But then it only takes the smallest degree of finality - a statistical arrow of time that connects an energy source to an entropy sink - and you have the holism of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Suddenly all that blind and aimless reversibility discovers it shares an inevitable common future - the slippery slope that ends in an equilibrium.

You might notice even in this thread that folk's view on causation tends to follow their metaphysical prejudices rather than the physics. Physics, and the other sciences, just get on with it without having first to settle the many problems of causation. — Banno

I notice that to be a view which shows little familiarity with how physics, and the other sciences, in fact have been getting on with things ever since Newton made it a properly mathematical question - one based on the inductive evidence of quantified measurement rather than just a lot of anti-metaphysical verbiage.

It would be absurd to disregard 'causality' even if it hangs on custom or habit. — Tom Storm

:up:

Sounds good to me.

But what then is the epistemic upshot? If we can't have absolute belief that reality is causal, then we can still - inductively - constrain our scope for reasonable doubt.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, let's get on with treating it as a duck until something fails.

It is a matter of historical record that both special relativity and quantum mechanics eventually gave us good reason to want to update the Newtonian model of causality.

And the step to unite the quantum and relativistic views - quantum gravity - has led to a lot of folk, like the loop theory guys, treating causality as a fundamental ingredient when it comes to weaving a spacetime metric.

It all starts with an action that has a direction - the 1D quantum fluctuation that is a first cause, but without yet the world where it could also be producing some effect.

The Planck scale defines a causal grain - the point where the vagueness of uncertainty starts to become the counterfactual definiteness of a spacetime metric populated by thermal events.

So it is silly to say that science doesn't believe in causality. The whole set-up of science is pragmatic rather than logicist.

Truths aren't deducted. Models are deducted. And then their predictions are subject to inductive confirmation. The results are accepted as believable to the degree they aren't doubtable.

And then all along, right from Aristotle, the search has been for causal explanations. A scientific theory is a formal model of some causal system.

Finally, as I say, causality has continued to be a lively central topic. Why is special relativity so strange and quantum theory so weird if they didn't point to a drastic need to place Newtonian mechanics in its larger relativistic, quantum, and eventually quantum gravitational, causal context?

Your hierarchy of self-actualisation looks to make Donald Trump the most evolved dude on the planet then. Or any other autocrat and cult leader.

Is personal authenticity actually the highest good? Or do we need something else to measure the apex human by?

My in-process paper on anger, blame and moral values sketches moral universalist and moral relativist interpretations — Joshs

Is there the third thing of moral pragmatist interpretations?

My position is that there is neither some Platonic absolute, nor that there is utter contingency. Moral codes would always be entrained to the usual forces of development and evolution - the practical need to be rationally organised in a way that underwrites the persistence of the system in question.

If I believe in free will and desert-based conceptions of blame, then depending on the severity of the perceived offense, my anger may include the desire for retribution, payback and revenge(P.F.Strawson). If I eschew a free will perspective in favor of a deterministic moral universalism ( Nussbaum), my anger will not include the desire for retribution but instead will seek to coax the wrongdoer to conform to the universal norm. — Prinz

So for me, this is just debating a false dichotomy. These two options may oppose each other in the usual way - necessity vs contingency. But the whole point of my pragmatic metaphysics is that such dichotomies must be understood as the limits - the contrasts - that make intelligible organisation even possible. You need both contingency and necessity - as complementary, not rival, poles - to frame a rich spectrum of actual options.

That then sets up a model of the world with the internal variety to be able to intelligently match itself to the facts of the world.

Anger, for example, is neurologically opposed to fear - the fight or flight response. The brain is wired to be decisive - when faced with radical uncertainty about threat and harm. It must quickly decide which of two emergency states to "be in". The worst thing would be to act with indecision and risk neither extreme response to what seems like an extreme situation.

Well, in fact neurobiology adds the third option of freezing. Grafted on top - when faced with absolute indecision as the situation offers neither retreat or attack - an animal can just try the other plan of immobility. Playing dead, stopping still, hoping not to be noticed and confusing its threat.

So the ordinary naturalistic explanation - the one based on the pragmatism of an organism that embodies the desire to survive - works fine here.

And nothing really changes even when we regard humans as linguistic creatures constructing a larger sociocultural level of organismic organisation.

Once we become part of some system, with its own natural desire have persistent existence, then the biological imperatives have to framed within the larger context of the social imperatives. Fear and aggression must be culturally modified in ways that fit the fact that individuals are now the cells of the one collective body.

Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions. — Joshs

Sure. Woke and redneck communities could both agree on the fact that the woman who won the swim meet by a mile has a penis. Yet draw the different moral conclusions that best fit their community-sustaining way of life.

To take a postmodern view is to argue that such apparent agreement on empirical facts is an appearance that results from a superficial over generalization of the two parties’ interpretations of the facts of the matter. — Joshs

Sure. It is also a fact that all facticity is a semiotic construction. Our worlds are Umwelts. Umwelts are how we even exist as the selves that are these selves that exist in the world.

In embodied and social constructionist postmodern accounts, no ultimate moral or empirical telos is assumed to constrain individual motivation and valuative choices. — Joshs

Well in my embodied and social constructionist pragmatic accounts - following the structuralism of the likes of Vygotsky and Luria - neither absolute necessity nor absolute contingency is the issue. It is all about balancing the two tendencies in a way that leads to cybernetic reciprocality. The system must be autopoietic. It has to be able to steer a course by not getting stuck in one or other register.

So on the whole, we try to follow the social rule. And then the creative exceptions are what make that workable. The system needs us to be doing both things. And always decisively as much as we can. It wants us to be obviously either following rules or breaking rules, as that is what gives the larger social organism the requisite variety it can then winnow in terms of its Darwinian success or failure.

Constraints impose themselves in the form of pragmatic and contingent reciprocally causal bodily-social practices.I don’t blame in the name of a divine, free-will based moral order, or in the name of an empirical objective order of truth. I blame in the name of temporary discursive practices, which by their changing nature hold all of us guilty. — Joshs

Are you arguing towards my pragmatic position then?

The moral constraints are the long-term habits of a society - a society which by definition proves them as the correct habits because it has survived so far by applying them.

But a society that never produces moral variety is soon going to wind up in a dead end as it is not generating the variance with which to continue to adapt to changing circumstance.

So I would see blaming and shaming as discourse aimed at asserting social norms - calling on established collective habit, speaking up for the familiar social order that has stood the test. Call-out culture in practice.

But then tolerance, empathy, forgiveness, etc are the other side of the coin. Functional societies are also pragmatically easy-going about individual foibles and eccentricities. They don't call them out but simply pretend not to notice, or laugh them off.

It’s downward acting constraints and upwards constructing degrees of freedom. So it is a model of Aristotelean causality where the constraints are the global context that shapes the action, and the degrees of freedom are the local efficient/material causes that give the constraints some action to shape.

So it is a full four causes model as described by the maths of hierarchy theory.

You can’t claim that a hierarchy - or a “basic triadic structure”, as Stan Salthe defined it - represents the universal self-organising causality of nature, and yet also we can then just get shot of the idea of causality.

The deep structure of causality has been the only thing under discussion. :grin:

I simply wanted to know which of these 4 causes (one/a combination) is being referred to in the Cosmological Argument (first cause) for God's existence. — Agent Smith

Good question. First cause seems to conflate both efficient and final cause. Ask a theist for more clarity I guess. :wink:

Can't you observe a particle decay without affecting it just by detecting the decay product? — T Clark

A quantum jump between two states is meant to have nothing connecting them in the spacetime between those jumps. No story of efficient causes laying the unbroken causal trail.

Thus the quantum Zeno effect follows as nature only lets you see the before and after, not the during. If you continually watch the particle, this prevents its "causeless" leap from ever happening. If instead you tell the particle to let me know when its all over, then it is free to jump ... whenever ... because the freedom to be random.

But as I say, that is as much a description of the holistic extreme as it would be to invoke some locally concealed cause like "hidden variables".

And you can make weak measurements to get mixed states. You can sort of slow down the quantum jump to a jerky succesion of film frames.

So between the two limits, you also get the quasi-classical - or quasi-quantum - realm as the intermediate state ... which is hardly talked about.

It's rather like learning to be bilingual. You need to become fluent in both reductionism and holism to see how they are in fact the two poles of the one larger epistemic dichotomy.

So first comes the reductionist conviction - the standard model idea of efficient cause, or chains of cause and effect.

Then comes the holist backlash - the rejection of the mechanical model and the discovery of other "logics" like Aristotle's four causes.

Finally, after thesis and antithesis, comes the resolution. Colliding billiard balls sit at one extreme pole of our conception of causality, the random decay of a particle sits at the other.

Get up close and the two billiard balls in fact never touch. The space between gets filled by virtual photon exchanges - or some kind of story that is all about quantum holism.

And stand back to watch a particle decay carefully, you will discover that it then never does. Your continuous observation keeps resetting its decay clock - the quantum Zeno effect - and prevents it behaving in its usual "a-causal" fashion.

So there are opposing limits that bound causality. And limits are precisely the bounds that can never be reached, only approached with arbitrary precision.

It all makes sense in the end. Or at least we can see how this is the project on which scientific theories of everything are now deeply engaged.

... despite the foolish AP tropes of old Oxbridge fuddie-duddies.

And yet I do think there is a remnant of that Cartesianism lurking in the treatment of affectivity ... All that’s left of the old inner subject is somatic sensation , the bare registry of positive and negative valence within the body. — Joshs

Only in the sense that sociosemiosis stands back to look at biosemiosis "from the outside".

Our bodies make up their own minds - as organisms organised by genetic and neural information. Then human cultural practice - semiotic at the level of language and even maths - takes its own self-interested and organismic view of what might go in terms of all these affect-driven behaviours.

Humans shift up a gear by having to make socially-constructed sense of what they are feeling. Is Will Smith being courageous or shameful when he gives into his aggressive impulses. What is our social judgement and therefore what do we think he should be feeling about his feelings.

So there might seem an element of Cartesian transcendence or homuncular regress. But nothing more exciting going on here than further - more abstracted - levels of semiosis.

...yet there remains what for me is an unsatisfying immanence or intrinsicality associated with feeling , as much as it has been embedded within irreducible webs of somatic-cognitive-environmental interactions. — Joshs

Well that's what you get for being a post-structuralist rather than a structuralist. :smile:

Or, alternatively, that there is a bigger picture, but it doesn't make sense to call it "causality" anymore. — T Clark

What? After Newton narrowed the definition, it becomes forbidden to continue to follow physics and tack back towards Aristotle's larger definition?

To say that something is caused when we can't be certain of, or even close to knowing, what causes what, which is generally the case, is meaningless. What we call "causality" is an un-disentanglable tangle. — T Clark

Yet you seem to believe in pragmatism and its inductive confirmation. And you seem to believe that relativity and quantum theory say something pragmatically valid about reality.

Surely the truth here is just that disentangling the strands of metaphysics' central endeavour is ... a lot of hard intellectual graft?

I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but to call it "causality" no longer makes sense. — T Clark

It still makes the same counterfactual sense it always made. If you take away the causes, does the same thing still happen?

If it does, then yes, maybe causality is just some dastardly illusion with no rhyme or reason, or some hidden divine puppeteer driving the show.

Or alternatively, you can stick with philosophical naturalism and instead conclude you haven't quite understood the complex nature of causality. More work needed.

Newton was the guy who invented the modern model of causality that in general opinion replaced the old Aristotelean one.

So if that ain't explicit enough, is this a "first rule of fight club..." kind of deal? :razz:

What Newton did was make it clear that a mechanical description of nature could be produced by dividing it into what needed an external cause - an impressed force, or vis impressa - to produce a change, and what instead could be considered the uncaused, even it did seem to be changing.

So space and time were broken out as a backdrop - an a-causal void. And material things were given the new local property of vis insita - inertia, or a matching resistance to having their state changed.

It was all about constructing a story of causality that made use of the maths of symmetry.

A flat and infinite Euclidean backdrop of space and time put them outside the causal story as being simply the Atomists' void. This fixed stage underwrote the Galilean symmetries that made local change now "a point of view".

And then the atoms were given this primal property of inertial mass. The materiality was also abstracted away in fashion that put it outside the system of explanation being developed by making it one of the axioms.

So masses no longer needed a causal reason not to move (as energy-conserving inertial translations and rotations). They only needed a causal reason - a vis impressa - to decelerate or accelerate.

Thus what Newton achieved was a very careful dissection of causality that reduced it to the parts that were definitely causal, and the parts that definitely weren't - so far as the new mechanical model of causality was concerned.

The success of this mechanical conception of causality is the stuff of legend. As is the fact that physics has been having to backfill it with Aristotelean metaphysics ever since - the holism of general relativity and quantum field theory, maybe even one day a final theory of quantum gravity.

So yeah, nah. The Principia is all about a model of causality that strips the reasons for the states of the world down to a bare-bones, mathematical account. It explicitly makes effective cause the measurable "difference that makes a difference" against a backcloth world that is a host of differences not making a difference. Or a set of mathematical symmetries.

AP went off on its own weird slant on this issue, like it did with a lot of stuff. But don't fall for the slogans.

Consciousness seems to be able to employ un/sub/conscious automation of bodily actions whilst 'focussing' on the 'day-dreaming' state you describe in your example above but is this not in fact 'a lesser attentive' brain state compared to a non-daydreaming state and full focus on the driving. — universeness

Why do you feel the need to add "consciousness" as some further reified being that sits above and beyond the brain processes of attending and habit-emitting?

Why do you say that consciousness "employs" various habits and automaticisms, while it goes off to "focus" on the day-dreaming and not on the road?

What extra work does invoking some further spooky and homuncular Cartesian regress – the "display that is also being watched" - do here?

I prefer a naturalistic account where consciousness just is the sum of everything involved in responding intelligently to the world.

There is always some balance of focus and fringe, attention and habit, noting and ignoring, differentiation and integration. And thus it is this very fact of a dichotomous organisation that is the whole of story.

Consciousness - defined in this sense - becomes as much about how much we can afford to ignore, neglect, fail to remember, etc, as that which all that on which we are focused, noting, carrying forward as working memory, etc.

So you are doing the usual thing of treating consciousness as the central spotlight of attention - the ideal witness who sees all and notes everything. And this becomes something mysterious to the degree one has to admit there is also this whole other side to mental processes - to functioning as a "mind" - that is sub-conscious, automatic, reflexive, and generally just a bunch of dumb physiology or neural information crunching.

But my definition of consciousness includes all that which is ignored, forgotten, emitted without further thought. In fact - as neurological theory, the Bayesian Brain story - it is based on that. The brain is set up to habituate its responses, learn from experience. It sets out to not have to attend ... as then that means attention is saved for the small element of novelty or importance that demands some extra processing effort.

So consciousness has this structure, this dynamic, of attention~habit. And each explains the other. To the degree you can ignore, you don't have to attend. To the degree you can't ignore, you then must attend.

And now we have a proper connection between the phenomenological experience of being a mind in the world, and a neuroscientific account in terms of the necessary structure of any useful world-model.

Consciousness as a Cartesian substance - a mysterious extra glow that attaches itself to all the physical processes - fails so spectacularly to connect with any neuroscientific account that it is no surprise that folk want to chase it all the way down to "quantum information" or "psychic atoms".

But starting the story with a dichotomous structure of attention and and habits, differentiation and integration - the logic of the processing that would be needed so to act as a self in a world - can halt this slithering down the slope of the physicalist fallacy.

We can see how panpsychism isn't even the right kind of thing before we start debating what might be its best theory.