Biology is not an existential discipline. It isn’t concerned with existence as lived. I could know all there is to know about you, biologically, and yet still not understand you as a person. — Wayfarer

But you were talking about biology as the general cycle of life, not about the neurobiology or sociology that might particularise me as a human individual in the modern world and not a frog or amoeba or human as part of the great mystic cycle of life …. and figuratively, spirit.

So more deflection.

We’ve discussed Stevenson’s interviews with children with past life recall many times on this forum, it is universally scorned, but I think it is meaningful data. — Wayfarer

Jesus wept. I’m out if we are now stooping to this. Anything goes as evidence as - of course - science can always be doubted. It can’t prove spirits don’t exist. Therefore … they do exist. Or how else otherwise could volumes have been written about them?

You can’t give a straight answer so only give me crooked ones.

So I do argue that the common concept of ‘mind independence’ i.e. that the bedrock of reality comprises mind-independent objects, is oxymoronic, as objects can only be known cognitively (in line with Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution in philosophy, that things conform to thoughts, not vice versa. ) That is why there are references to all those sources in that OP, and I dispute that it is either equivocal or vague. But that is really all I have time for now. — Wayfarer

And now the flop the other way. From past life recall back to the safe ground of epistemic idealism.

Nothing vague or equivocal about that at all. :roll:

:up:

Yes, I do believe that death is not the end of life. It certainly is for the individual that I am. But the causes that gave rise to this life will give rise to another (something which gives me no joy). — Wayfarer

So in what sense is that now any different from what the biologist would say? Except biology has the detail and removes the equivocation.

It is true that in traditional Buddhist lore, the animal realm was one of the six domains in which beings take birth, but there is nothing like that kind of belief. — Wayfarer

So again, what would reincarnation and nirvana mean in your modernist Buddhism? What are your ontic commitments that might allow me to distinguish it from everyday biological science?

Hence Nishijma saying that there is no such thing! — Wayfarer

The argument here is that you are always being accused of being vague, equivocal and confused on this key point. This is just more deflection from a question that has been clearly put. Once more, we are getting no proper answer.

Are you confessing finally to just being an epistemic idealist? And modern Buddhism is only that too? If so, great. Just be brave enough to come out and say it. And then be consistent in that position in your posting.

The Buddhist goal is nibbana (Nirvāṇa), liberation from the cycle of re-birth. — Wayfarer

And is that a credible belief when we examine what it would entail? It may indeed function as a key narrative to justify and transmit the Buddhist way of life with a community of that mind. But do you really expect to die a man and come back as a monkey, frog or amoeba? Start climbing the whole damn evolutionary tree all over again, with the level of mind and selfhood that goes with that level of materially embodied cognitive structure that goes with those lifeforms, until you get to be a Tibetan monk and make the magical last step?

If it were not for its pragmatic value as a social narrative organising a particular brand of social order, you would just have to think it a whole heap of silliness. Nothing something that could be asserted with a straight face.

This is why, in Buddhist iconography, in the graphic illustration of the 'wheel of life and death', the Buddha is depicted as outside all of the 'six realms', but in some representations, also inside each of them. — Wayfarer

So the theology evolved its social logic and continued to equivocate on the metaphysical details.

That's perfectly fine if we are talking about useful fictions – the epistemic idealism that is the organising Umwelt of a sociocultural level of organismic existence. It's just a parable. Get its message and don't fuss about the credibility of the world-building.

But if you want to challenge science and its narrative, you can see the problem. Yes you can say that science is just another society-constructing narrative too. It is just as much a useful fiction. And indeed – when it runs out of control in Scientistic fashion – it gives good reason to doubt that it is even useful anymore.

But it gets a bit apples and oranges as Buddhism was a way of social organising that made sense in an agrarian context that never looked like progressing to the next level of a fossil fuel based industrial revolution.

Indeed, as the Chinese experience showed, this was a step that the social order suppressed. The Chinese were great at technology but never minded to become a technological society. Instead Confucianism arose as a philosophy of bureaucratic control – a way to hold a volatile peasant state in a persistent state of agrarian order.

So yes, science is just another mindset for building a sociological level of organismic existence. It is epistemic idealism of another brand. But in realising that idealism is the epistemology and not the ontology – getting the relation with the world the right way around – science clearly released the next level of social development.

And while times may be turbulent, ancient times were turbulent too. All the greatest mass deaths were civil wars or invasions in China, our most ancient and prosperous of civilisations.

So we are rather stuck with the reality of the human condition, no matter what is its stage of development or enlightenment. Which is why we need the muscular rationality of pragmatism. A metaphysics large enough to understand why we do what we do even as we are doing it. Not flimsy creation myths and moral codes forged in pre-industrial times.

Also I would call attention to this phrase 'epistemic relation of self and world.' One point I noticed in Buddhist Studies, is the expression 'self-and-world' is frequently encountered in the Pali Buddhist texts as a kind of single unit of meaning ('self-and-world') This is understood as 'co-arising' or 'co-dependent', actually, one of the sources of the ideas in The Embodied Mind, as Franscisco Varela absorbed this from Buddhism. That is due, as noted above, to the phenomenological aspect of Buddhism, which never looses sight the relationship between experience and being — Wayfarer

Yes, fine. But again first the statement about an epistemic relation and then the equivocating leap to an ontological interpretation.

The embodied mind is our pragmatic model of the "world" is in fact a model of the "world with a self as its central fact". So the world is rendered epistemically. And so is the self. They co-arise as a dichotomisation that produces two exactly contrasting, so exactly complementary, points of view. There is the view the world has of you, and the view you have of the world, all bound up in the one model – the one model that is the embodied structure of some thermalising organism.

So this is all epistemic idealism thus far. Both world and self are products of a modelling relation embodied in the structure of an organism. The doubled viewpoints that speak to each other. A world made of matter and the self made of its ideas – its wishes, hopes, plans and fears. The two sides to a pragmatically-focused relation that can be run as the "internal" model that animates the organism.

But then once you start breaking out this "self" as some kind of ontological essence or substantial being – a spirit stuff – then you have crossed a line and now need to provide a new justification for what you have started claiming.

You can pretend to wind things back in by saying, well, when I said "spirit", I was merely speaking figuratively.

But you know that you then don't. You forget that qualification and launch off into everything that a metaphysics based on dualism, spirit-stuff, value absolutism, divine essences, cycles of reincarnation and the like, would appear to warrant.

Ontic idealism in all its glory. The self-contradicting thing of a figurative narrative now being treated as the literal truth. Equivocation being the means of jumping that shark.

Aristotle's cosmological argument. With the cosmological argument he denies the concept of "prime matter", as physically impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

I've told you different too many times to count. But these days AI can take the labour out of refuting your theological nonsense.

No, the premise that Aristotle denies "prime matter" as physically impossible is incorrect. In fact, the doctrine of prime matter is fundamental to Aristotle's cosmology and his understanding of how change occurs in the world. The claim that Aristotle rejected it might be a misunderstanding or a conflation with later arguments.

Aristotle's cosmological argument....
Aristotle's cosmological argument, centered on the existence of a "Prime Mover," is distinct from the concept of prime matter. The argument is primarily developed in his works Physics and Metaphysics and can be summarized as follows:

Observation of motion: Aristotle observed that all things in the world are in motion or change. For Aristotle, "motion" is a broader concept than just change of place; it includes any kind of change, such as a substance's potential becoming actualized.

The need for a mover: Any object that is moved is moved by another. This means that for any change, there must be an external "mover" or cause that actualizes the potential for that change.
The impossibility of an infinite regress: Aristotle argued that an infinite chain of "moved movers" is impossible. He contended that such a series would have no ultimate source of motion, and therefore, no motion would occur at all.

Conclusion: the Unmoved Mover: To avoid an infinite regress, there must be a first, unmoved mover that initiates all motion without being moved itself. This unmoved mover is pure actuality, without any potentiality, and is the ultimate, uncaused source of all change in the universe.

Aristotle's concept of prime matter....
Prime matter is not something Aristotle's argument disproves; it is a core component of his philosophy.
The substratum of change: Aristotle developed his theory of matter and form to explain substantial change—the coming-to-be and passing-away of substances. When, for example, a living thing dies and decays, what is it that persists through this change? Prime matter is the answer. It is the underlying, featureless substratum that remains when one substance changes into another.

Pure potentiality: Prime matter is described as pure potentiality, meaning it has the capacity to take on any substantial form. It is never found alone, separate from form, because all physical objects are a composite of matter and form. An object's form is what gives it its specific nature and properties.

Physical reality: Far from being physically impossible, prime matter is the very thing that makes physical reality intelligible for Aristotle. Without it, change would involve something coming from nothing, which Aristotle rejected based on the work of his predecessor, Parmenides.

Medieval interpretation and clarification....
It is important to distinguish Aristotle's original ideas from how later philosophers, like Thomas Aquinas, adopted and adapted them for theological purposes.
Theology and creation: While Aristotle viewed the universe as eternal and the Prime Mover as simply sustaining an eternal motion, theologians like Aquinas used Aristotle's argument to support the idea of a creating God.

Prime matter and God: In this medieval framework, prime matter was also part of God's creation, unlike in Aristotle's original conception where the universe (and its matter) was eternal. However, even in this later tradition, prime matter is not dismissed as impossible. Instead, its existence as pure potentiality, requiring a form to be actual, highlights its complete dependency on a more fundamental cause—God—for its existence.

If the potential is truly absolute, then there is nothing actual, as anything actual would be a constraint to the possibility. But without something actual, to act as the cause, the emergence of something, anything, is impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly, potentiality is without constraint. But events demonstrate that constraints can emerge in conjunction with their degrees of freedom – the actualising step that creates now a sea of concrete possibilities.

Once you have the thing of a fluctuation – an action that also has some direction – then everything starts to get going.

No action, no direction. No direction, no action. But actions in a direction? A whole flood of them. Complexity can start evolving.

How could time emerge? Isn't emergence a temporal concept, something which happens over time? It seems self-contradicting to talk about time getting started as changes happen. — Metaphysician Undercover

Time would evolve as cosmology tells us. It develops complex structure through the growth of topological order. As the Big Bang expands and cools, it undergoes a rapid sequence of thermal changes.

In the beginning, all the fluctuations are stuck at the speed of light. They experience maximum time dilation and length contraction – or rather, this relativistic dichotomy can't even apply yet.

Then you get the Higgs mechanism breaking this relativistic symmetry. Now suddenly it is meaningful to talk about objects at rest. Particles that move slower than c. Mass that lags behind the radiation setting the pace. A new topological phase where time has gained a whole new complex structure.

Time changes character quite radically. And it passes through other topological stages too with inflation, or when it is a quark-gluon plasma that may have Higgs mass and yet is still effectively relativistic.

So what is time when you step right back from the physics? It is a duration. A beat that lasts the distance of a cycle. A Planck-scale rotation in its Planck-scale expanse. The fundamental unit of ħ or the quantum unit of action. The spinning on the Poincare invariant spot that defines the gauge fundamental particle. The first moment defined in terms of the symmetry breaking of rotation from translation and thus the birth of concrete dimensionality itself.

So yes, time is emergent. But physics likes to keep thing simple. Unless you are asking cosmological-level questions, you don't need to worry about all the messy topological details I've just mentioned. They were pretty much done and dusted in the first billionth of a second anyway. After the first few minutes, all the kinks were well and truly vanishing in the rear view mirror.

Your first principle, absolute potential, the symmetry which is the foundation for symmetry-breaking, is nothing but an ideal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well firstness is actually vagueness in Peirce’s logic-based approach. That to which the PNC does not apply. And therefore where the symmetry breaking of a dichotomy can start.

So unformed potential and unactualised form would “exist” together in the less than nothing that would be a logical vagueness. The absolute potential is the potential for the emergence of a hylomorphic order in a co-arising fashion. The metaphysics is more subtle than you appreciate.

This implies that time is another fundamental concept in ontology. You have provided no argument to demonstrate that "state of affairs" is more fundamental than "time". — Metaphysician Undercover

Likewise, change can start to become definite only to the degree that stability starts to become definite. So to ground that as a metalogic of existence, you need to start of in some state of radical indeterminacy such as an Apeiron or Vagueness.

An everythingness that is a nothingness and so is prior to any somethingness in that it defines what needs to start happening to get anything going. The Apeiron must begin to separate out or symmetric break in the counter directions that are the forming of stabilising constraints and dynamical degrees of freedom. Time can get going as changes can be made that are also constructing a collective history.

An engine is a system that converts energy into work. — Pieter R van Wyk

Correct. So it is a thermodynamic system, a mechanical system and an intentional system. Or at least part of a social and economic system that values free energy as “work”.

So somehow it is both a part and a whole. It exists in a world that is a multiplicity of systems and yet also a system in itself. Each its own little world of maths and quantification for the engineer.

All this seems quite normal and sensible. One doesn’t demand that there be one Margaret Mead level of definition that would suit a small and impatient child.

So which one is the correct one or are they all correct or perhaps only a particular sublist of this list? — Pieter R van Wyk

I would say that you are looking for a quantifiable definition, so one that is mathematically framed. One that is a geometry of relations. And a geometry that includes the tricky thing of quantifying the notion of what a system is even for. A theory of systems has to account for finality or purpose in some useful way.

Another tricky thing is that a theory of systems has to capture its ability to develop and self-organise. To grow and to scale.

So a systems scientist understands that they are seeking to mathematise and quantify this Aristotelean package. There are then quite an array of such models. And it is a work very much in progress.

We had a burst of activity in the 1980s with chaos theory, complexity theory, dissipative structure theory, fractals, scalefree networks, and so forth. Category theory added an angle that set theory couldn’t provide. And things continue. Topological order for example.

So it is curious that all this has been happening to advance systems science and yet you seem not to even know what the field is up to.

But, in my humble opinion, a complementary view that renders the complexity of systems more comprehensible, is neither a definition nor a fundamental understanding. — Pieter R van Wyk

Opinions are worth shit. Make the argument if you can.

Your whole schtick about “give me a fundamental definition” is crackpot talk. Systems science is a large and varied field of study. It would be like asking you as an engineer to give me one fundamental definition of an engine. One that unifies all the types of engineers that there are.

The objective sciences deal with quantitative measurement, whereas values are qualitative judgements. — Wayfarer

I don’t agree but it’s not an issue. You are talking here about epistemic idealism and that’s near enough pragmatism. We are modellers of reality and so always on the side of subjectivity in that sense. No problem there.

It’s how you slide into ontic idealism which I question. I appreciate that you do make an effort to bat for idealism. But the pattern seems to be that one minute we are talking about cognition as a useful way of constructing “the world” - an embodied model of the world as it is from a point of view that includes an “us” as its centre - and the next you assume that an ontological argument has been made. That this “us” is more than just a figment or avatar of that world modelling activity. Suddenly something that was an agreed part of the epistemic process has broken free and exists in its own unplaced realm outside the pragmatic modelling relation an organism has with it’s environment.

I sought to elaborate on that, in respect of the claim that life and mind can be completely understood in thermodynamic terms. — Wayfarer

But that’s not what I say. What I say is that life and mind are so grounded in the task of navigating entropic flows that it would be hard to escape this most basic reasons for evolving a body and a mind.

Humans - as social organisms - could perhaps have the complexity to rise above the world in some way. Yet look close at human history and one doesn’t see that. There is a lot of talk about high flying ideals, yet all the social activity cashes out in creating a machinery of exponential growth.

it can be supported with reference to sources, hence the mention of Nishijima, who was no ‘idealist absolutist — Wayfarer

So where does value come from in this telling? Is it on the side of the epistemic relation between an organism and its world, or is it something more - an ontological level break between the realm of matter and the realm of ideas?

So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

Exactly. Walk me through it.

We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word spirit is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively. — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

Your source equivocates. That is what I pointed out. Is the qualification that spirit is only used figuratively meant to walk us back from the ontic to the epistemic? We talk as if value and meaning are separate from material being and yet share the same Universe, but that separateness is then just a figure of speech?

Are we walking idealism all the way back to semiosis - which indeed says physical systems share the world with organismic systems? Entropy can be regulated by information. Clearly I would be happy with that and only want to claim that semiosis is the well worked out scientific theory that now makes good this epistemic version of idealism.

But you appear to want to defend some version of ontic idealism. And your sources likewise equivocate at the crucial point.

So, according to this AI summary, a system is: two models, one a compositional hierarchy the other a subsumption hierarchy. Do you agree with my understanding? — Pieter R van Wyk

Two models as two perspectives on the same thing. One offers the synchronic view and the other the diachronic. So one focuses on how a hierarchical systems is, the other on how it developed. One speaks to structure and the other to process.

You get the drift. Complementary views that help make the complexity of a system comprehensible.

What, about the passage you quoted, suggests either? — Wayfarer

Its...

Matter alone has no value. — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

In logic, the corollary of that is that value alone has no matter. And that is absolutist talk, matey!

As a relativist or dichotomist, I would says "matter" might be regarded as a state of minimal value, and "value" as a state of minimal matter. This phrasing makes clear my ontic commitment. I am speaking of matter and value as now the connected limits of a dynamical balance. Reality is to be found in between these limiting ideas. Reality is always some hylomorphic mix of matter and value – if that is the terminology you insist on using.

It sort of works from a systems point of view as value does speak to purpose or telos. But form is also important as purposes have to be embodied as causal structures – structures of constraint. When you call something good, or beautiful, or divine, or whatever, the question becomes, well what is the shape of that? What does that look like in practice?

Even Plato's realm of ideas had this hierarchical structure. The universal notion of the Good anchoring the Universe of mathematical forms that gave structure to the concept of the ultimately optimal. The sub-realm of triangles gets to know what its best – most beautiful and regular – shape is. Then all the triangles that are increasingly ugly and mishappen in some way. Down to the truly crappy triangles being scratched out with a twig in the sand.

Absolutist talk sounds important and impressive. But it equivocates.

If you parse this phrase carefully, what function is "alone" serving? Does matter have no value after it has been emptied of value, and so some value had to have been there all along? Just as little as possible. Matter becomes defined as a state of infinitesimal value, and then that seeming so close to zero, we can forget to ask how matter might enjoy both some kind of value and also no kind of value in the same breath.

Idealism can shrink its inconsistencies very small with coy wording. Yet always the equivocation lurks.

Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose. — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

This runs into a problem when science tells us matter is shaped by a thermodynamic purpose. The Big Bang could happen as it was a grand carving out of the very Heat Sink it was throwing itself headlong into. The Universe expands so it can cool, and cools so it can expand. Some material crud forms in the midst of all that once the temperature has dropped to a few degrees from absolute zero and distance has grown so that planets are only moderately warmed by the dying fusion embers that is their local star.

Then civilisation and culture can rise up out of the biofilm that starts to coat a rocky planet with a convenient temperature. You get little critters and then clever apes. A narrative game starts up that leads to a technological one. You get a lot of talk about values as the way to coordinate a bunch of people using an easily sharable social algorithms. Little aphorisms like the Golden Mean and "do unto others". It helps bind the people to the authority of a value system if they believe it is not just pragmatically optional but absolute and damnable by hell fire. Or perhaps instead penalised by coming back in the next life to try over from the level of a bug or mushroom.

Hey, when faced with the strained metaphysics used to bolster ontic idealism, I do start to see the advantages of nihilism.

If civilisation and culture want values and meaning, do they really have to commit to idealism and its absolutism? Can't a sorry old pragmatist like me not have values and meaning without all the claptrap? Just living a productive life and enjoying it?

I think there are other, better ways of seeing things. I've tried to lay that out in this thread. — T Clark

But all you keep doing is collapsing causality to the notion of efficient cause and then talking about the other thing of "context".

There are always other models of causality. You have something like you are describing in proximal and distal causes in medicine. Or proximal and ultimate causes as defined by Ernst Mayr. In quantum physics, contextuality is invoked as the better way to explain non-locality.

My approach is based on Aristoteleanism as that aims to make a proper logical dichotomy of causation. It divides it into the two complementary halves of some set of top-down constraints and some set of resulting bottom-up degrees of freedom.

Each half accounts for the other half. And so you have a model of causality that sums to 1. Nothing is missing. But also you have the thing you are really wanting – two directions in which causation as a whole is interacting. A holistic relationship between downward or globalised constraint and upward or localised construction.

Perhaps Aristotle's four causes are too complicated. But I already said that. You only really need formal and material cause. But then it is also useful to make the further division that is causes in general and causes in particular.

My claim is that in many cases, focusing on cause makes it harder to account for context. — T Clark

And this is so until you learn to expect causality to be dichotomised in the systematic fashion I just described.

If you start out not just expecting causality to break down into a tale of actions in a context, but for this to be a mathematical-strength reciprocal relation, then focusing clearly on the local degrees of freedom will automatically sharpen whatever you might mean by the global context – the global constraints that form these exact freedoms you complain about as being vision-obscuring.

For example, to have atoms, you must have the reciprocal thing of a void. The two go together in a necessary way. For a mass to have a shape and a motion as the kind of things it does, it has to have the matching thing of a context for this to be so. A large and empty space in which the mass can have a shaped boundary where it suddenly stops, and a sufficient vastness so it can rattle around until it collides with some other atom that has a shape and a motion.

So even for our most cartoon picture of nature, causality is based on a reciprocal pairing of local freedoms and global constraints. If we form a mental image of what the degrees of freedom look like – a wee atom – then this brings with it an equally definite image of the kind of context in which such dof would exist. In this case the kind of absolute Euclidean emptiness that is a context rendered as a-causal and ignorable as possible. And yet as a spatial expanse, it does contain this atomistic content. It does play some residual causal role.

The salt marsh I described is out there in the world doing the kinds of things salt marshes do. What's causing that? It's dozens of different factors interacting with each in a complex pattern. What does the idea of cause provide in that kind of situation. — T Clark

Again, complexity can be modelled. And that is done by hierarchy theory.

Once you get used to understanding causality as the division into constraints and degrees of freedom, you can then start stacking things up into hierarchies. A network of networks ordered by their scale.

You have the salt marsh ecology – itself a hierarchy of organisms – interacting with its environment, the sea and the weather, over minutes, days, months, seasons, centuries and millenia. The tide goes in and out twice a day. The global climate changes rather more dramatically every 100,000 years.

So start with the general principle of how causality works – some functional balance between a stabilising set of constraints and the degrees of freedom keeping the show dynamic – and then start adding all the possible spatiotemporal scales that this balancing act must play out over.

In hierarchy theory, you call it a set of cogent moments or cogent scale. It defines how much context you need to take in to account for the degrees of freedom you are interested in. Its all explained in papers like this.

I wonder how much of our disagreement comes from a difference of understanding of what metaphysics is and how it applies. — T Clark

Yep. I don't see metaphysics as just people making shit up in random ways that take their fancy. It is about extracting the deep principles. The presuppositions that can be deemed absolute as their emergence as the eventual horizon on inquiry is inevitable.

Metaphysics was solved almost immediately in Greek philosophy. The unity of opposites. Hylomorphism.

But then the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution fired up. The Church had taken over metaphysics for its own social purposes. The Industrial Revolution happened and the world fell in love with a causality based on switches and levers. Metaphysics got broken into engineering and spiritualism.

How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence — Pieter R van Wyk

Ah. You have a self-published theory to push. And you don't seem to have any interest in placing it within the 2500 year old tradition of systems thinking. Explains a lot.

"If and when we consider things, contemplate things and try to understand things, we can consider anything. In doing this we must convert some anything into something. And there are only two ways we can do this: First we could designate some name (perceive some possible purpose) to some collection of anything and then contemplate some valid description of this specific collection. If we can agree on the unique things in this collection we have named, we could have a meaningful conversation about something. This is then the notion of a system, how we understand all physical things, even those physical things that give us a perception and an understanding of abstract things. Let us name this Systems-thinking, for future reference.

If it is not possible to name something and agree on its constituent parts - we could consider some anything in terms of something else. If we could agree on such a relationship, a meaningful conversation could also ensue. This is how we form an understanding of all conceptual things. And this we could name Relation-thinking for future reference. — Pieter R van Wyk

So far, this is rather rudimentary. But it does lean towards the kind of distinction that a contemporary systems thinker like Stanley Salthe makes. The difference between compositional hierarchies based on the relation: "Is-a-part-of" versus subsumption hierarchies where the relation is: "Is-a-kind-of".

I'll let AI generate an instant summary for you....

Stanley Salthe distinguishes compositional (or scalar) hierarchies, which are based on spatiotemporal scale, from subsumption (or specification) hierarchies, which are based on developmental history or logical relationships. The two models help to analyze complex systems from different perspectives.

Compositional (or scalar) hierarchies
This hierarchy is based on nested parts of a whole, defined by differences in magnitude, size, and rate of activity. It provides a snapshot of a system at a given moment in space and time.

Relationship: "Is-a-part-of".

Structure: Portrayed as boxes within boxes, or levels within a system. For example, a population contains organisms, which contain cells, which contain macromolecules.

Dynamic relationships: Lower-level components are constrained by the next higher level. Importantly, downward regulation is not transitive across the entire hierarchy but must be converted at each level.

Way of knowing: Understanding a system involves subdividing it into its constituent parts (a reductionist approach).

Subsumption (or specification) hierarchies
This hierarchy is based on logical or historical sequence, where earlier, more general conditions are subsumed by later, more specific ones. It describes how a system develops over time or how different fields of knowledge build upon one another.

Relationship: "Is-a-kind-of" or "develops-from".

Structure: Portrayed as nested brackets, with more specific classifications contained within more general ones. For example, the biological world is a special type of the material world, which is itself a part of the physical world: {physical world {material world {biological world}}}.

Dynamic relationships: Control or influence from a higher, more specific level (e.g., biological forms) can extend down through all lower levels (e.g., physical forces), as the higher levels impose new informational constraints on the lower ones.

Way of knowing: Understanding a system requires looking at its history or ancestral conditions.

Nihilism. — Wayfarer

A silly retort. My semiotic approach starts with accepting that life and mind exist by being in a modelling relation with the world. So that can be considered a variety of epistemic idealism. Peirce of course used Kant as a launch point.

So life and mind are fully part of Nature and entrained to its thermodynamic constraints. Genes and neurons are the obvious physical basis of a relation based on codes, information, symbols – habits of interpretance. Biology and neurobiology can tell us all about the way ideas can shape the world.

Biophysics provided the last missing piece when it showed that there is a convergence zone at the semi-classical nanoscale of chemistry where biological information can switch the physical flows of entropy at "no cost". Or at least the flicking of the switch has a single standard small cost – the cost of an ATP molecule or two – to cause some organic chemical change picked freely from an almost infinite library of such reactions. Any organic molecule you want, we can make it. All same price. You pay $1 please.

So as a variety of epistemic idealism, semiosis is different as it fully cashes out in a rational account of what is taking place at the point where ideas interact with the world. There is no longer any explanatory gap that ontic idealism can exploit. Not even the tiniest one.

And rather than being a species of Nihilism, this biological and neurobiological level semiosis paves the way for the more interesting and complex case that is the linguistic and mathematical semiosis on which human social and cultural order is based. Semiosis based on publicly sourced and shared code in the form of words and numbers.

So say you are concerned with some philosophical notion like "values". You want to know how values as an idea can exist somewhere in an uncaring and Darwinian world. You want to argue that because Scientism leaves no clear place for them, therefore – any real argument being omitted here – ontic idealism applies. Values are somehow part of the great Platonic absolute. Its own realm of the good, the true, the beautiful, the perfect, the divine, the right. A collection of things of that kind which are the shiny objects in the eternal kingdom of pure ideas.

Well actually you don't want to be so specific about what ontology you mean to commit to at this point. Best to keep it vague otherwise it all starts to fall apart under critical analysis. The important thing is that "values" supports the notion that to the degree science bangs on about the material basis of Being, it is missing "what matters most".

But semiosis happily puts human values back in the actual world. Humans have formed a sociocultural level of organismic being. We exist by modelling the world in terms of our collective narrative and technological habits. We can mine nature to build civilisations. These world narratives or Umwelts could be deemed useful fictions – epistemic idealism – but they work. They set up a feedback loop that results in a compounding growth in human civilisation.

And the more rational and scientific we become, the more we accelerate that production of human richness and variety. The better we get at harnessing the resources of nature and building whatever idea of paradise we might have in mind.

Of course, "values" then become a problem if we start changing the world so fast that we haven't had enough time to update that way of looking at the world in a way that remains pragmatically useful. Like if we still saddle ourselves with Platonic or Cartesian forms of ontic idealism and value absolutism.

But hey. The science on semiosis is in. The grounds for pragmatism are secured. One can move on and join the modern world – engage with it from a vantage point that has the right ideas about it and about us.

Do you still dismiss that as Nihilism?

What stood out to me is that biosemiotics is not a monolithic discipline. — Wayfarer

No discipline involving inquiry could be monolithic. It has to be riven at every scale by its dichotomies - its dialectical factions.

So by the time you can name the first dozen such factions of a discipline, then you are probably starting to explore it properly.

That opens a space where physicalism doesn’t have the last word, and where the epistemic/ontological split really matters. — Wayfarer

Well yes. But you omit the faction that unites information and entropy under dissipative structure theory. Folk like Pattee who directly tackle the symbol grounding issue and show how biology works.

Biosemiosis is a theory of life and mind. If you haven’t solved biology, you are not really ready for the neurobiology or sociocultural levels of biosemiosis.

All of that kind of thinking can be understood as naturalist without necessarily being physicalist. — Wayfarer

Well actually you would want to drill down to the level of biophysics now that science has got the tools to explore that. That is what really made biosemiosis - of the dissipative structure stripe - credible.

That is the province of enactivism or embodied cognition, which I'm sure you're familiar with, — Wayfarer

Wrote books on it. But once again, don’t confuse the epistemic lessons of enactivism with the ontological tradition that is idealism.

Of course we neurobiologically and socioculturally construct our worlds. But the world is still out there and deserves its own best scientific account. The best such account that can then include us in that general physicalist explanation is biosemiosis. The story of how epistemic creatures could arise as Nature’s way of accelerating its entropy flow.

This surprises me. I think of you as intellectually committed to a holistic approach. As I see it, reductionism and causality go hand-in-hand. — T Clark

But isn't my argument here that holism means all four of Aristotle's four causes. And reductionism just means material and efficient cause. Or even in very reduced renderings, just efficient cause. Closed patterns of logical entailment. The stuff of logical atomism.

So that is why I don't understand why you would seem to say you would rather let go completely of causality – and in return for what exactly – while I instead make causality my preoccupation. I can't really see what else there is except the question of why we exist in a Cosmos with a rational order. Causality is the primary metaphysical fact. It is the basis of any explanation or narrative we might have.

Unless we are instead doing ... what?

Over my career I’ve seen how disruptive that kind of approach can be—applying rational methods that ignore environmental and social context. — T Clark

I started out in ecology so was already beginning from there. :up:

This is the kind of thinking that leads to climate change. — T Clark

Well yes. It indeed explains it in causal terms.

Why are we humans cooking the planet? Well fossil fuel hydrocarbons weren't properly entropified back at the time they should have been.

First, bacteria and fungi couldn't decompose the lignin that plants had just invented so as to compete with each other in the new terrestrial race to grow the highest and reach the most sunlight. So someone had to come along eventually to recycle that fossilised polymer. We humans showed up with our steam engines and turbines. We have been scaling up the burning at an exponential rate as there was no obvious reason not to do so. Then by the time a reason showed, we have created a whole culture around exponentialising the breakdown of the stored energy of that buried lignin.

Oil and gas are another such historical accident. The ancient warm and shallow seas went through an explosive era of planktonic growth. But when this died and fell to the depths, the oxygen depleted bottom water couldn't support the aerobic bacteria needed to decompose it. So that got covered over in sediment layers and again became a dense deposit of fossil hydrocarbon in want of a species with the kind of digestive juices that could stomach it. Or at least the machines that would madly burn it at a compounding rate of growth while being protected and maintained by the kind of human society that couldn't imagine any better form of existence.

So – with my ecology hat on – the causal explanation for climate change is as plain as the nose on your face. Nothing would even have gone wrong if the damn planet had the atmospheric physics which would have released the heat all this industrial burning was producing rather than trapping it with the greenhouse gases the burning also created.

It is just a case of bad engineering at the geophysical level. The combustion chamber lacked sufficient heat exchange in its design.

And bad luck that biology didn't keep up with the biomass it was producing from the late Paleozoic era through much of the Mesozoic, so creating an entropy gradient so steep that quite outrageous versions of biological order had to be evolved to get it moving again through a planetary scale dissipative structure.

It understands mind as fundamental to existence, not as a material constituent but as the faculty through which and by which whatever we are to know is disclosed. — Wayfarer

As always, you confuse epistemology with ontology. There is what is and then how we could know.

Putting the two together is pragmatism/semiosis. Pulling them apart into a realm of ideas and a realm of materials is dualism.

And you keep leaning on semiotics and believing it is leading you to idealism. You see it as a sword to smite materialism.

But no. It is the sword to smite Cartesian dualism. So time to learn how to grasp its handle rather than grab it by the blade.

That’s why the supposed fact–value dichotomy is broken: there are no 'brute facts' apart from a horizon of meaning in which they matter. — Wayfarer

As a pragmatist, I can speak to epistemic method. And as a semiotician, I can then speak to the way that cashes out as my ontic commitments. They become related as two sides of the one coin.

You don’t seem to get the neat logic of what Peirce was actually up to here. He fixed the confusion that you keep reverting to.

You’re setting up 'pragmatism vs. idealism' as if they were exclusive alternatives, — Wayfarer

Clearly I’m not. At least I am certainly clear and you are not as yet. You are confusing pragmatism for materialism as idealism demands that as its perfect enemy. Pragmatism did the other thing of subsuming both camps into its broader holism.

Maybe I should have called this thread "Against Efficient Cause." — T Clark

Well there is nothing wrong with efficient cause in itself. It is part of the Aristotelean package. And clearly it is the notion of cause that we humans have in front of mind. We are always looking for the switches to switch and the levers to pull. Where we fit into nature, into the flow of the world, is where we can insert a choice - a difference that makes a difference.

So there is no surprise that folk would see efficient cause as what matters most. That is what the game of life is all about for us. Making things happen that otherwise wouldn't have just happened by themself. If they happen by themself, then we either have to learn to live with it or find ways to prevent. If it rains, we put roofs on our houses. It still rains, but now we don't get so wet. The roof is the switch and lever – the effective cause of water being diverted suddenly sideways.

When you say "context" I think you are saying something similar to what I meant when I wrote "What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. — T Clark

Context would be the facts about what constrains the possibilities as the other kind of facts. So not merely a matter of convention. But we are then free to call on both kinds of fact as it appears to suit us. So in the causal narrative we create, conventions can form in what we tend to stress and what we don't.

If I want to teach you to throw a basketball, I wouldn't bother starting with a physics class. But I might draw attention to the mechanics – how you set up your hands and your joints as the right kind of initial conditions for your body as an evolved system of switches and levers ready to fire.

Sure, when we're talking about asteroids or artillery rounds, but what about when we're talking about complex systems like the salt marsh I discussed. — T Clark

Sure. Things get interesting when we jump from complicated systems to complex systems. One where life and mind are intruding on the physics to help organise nature.

But haven't I bored you to death about that already? Physics only has the broadest notions of finality. It has its global constraints that boil down to thermodynamics and dissipative structure. Its only ruling tendency is to increase entropy. And it will spend a little negentropy to get there. A vortex develops as a structure to drain your bath as that way it starts to drain a lot quicker. Air and water can change places far faster and the job of equilibration gets done much sooner.

Then life and mind come along and note that this is the causality of physics. You are allowed to exist under the scope of becoming an informationally-complex dissipative structure. If you can add efficient cause – some system of levers and switches that unblock pent-up entropy flows – then physics will pay for you for that small service. Become the blades of vegetation intercepting the sun, become the little critters with legs, mouths and arses. Get focused on imposing a causal mechanics on the world and you can have a job for life, even if you accelerate the entropification of nature just a tiny bit.

A human runs with the power consumption of a 100 watt bulb. At least they did until they upskilled from being just foragers scratching around salt marshes for whatever they could jam in their gob.

I have no problem with this, but I think sometimes, often, it doesn't make sense to consider causality at all. — T Clark

That is an idea completely baffling to me. How can you even think if not causally? What would that even look like?

This question points to the problem that arises when dichotomies are taken to be features of your worldview—as if they disclose the very structure of reality and the limits of what can be known.

One of the most prominent is the fact-value split—and it leads to what William Desmond called “default atheism.” — Wayfarer

Well dichotomies do disclose the limits of what can be the case. And fact-value is not a well-formed dichotomy. It is just a broken dualism.

Idealism is fatuous as it imagines the world made perfect under a set of guiding values like good, truth, beauty, the divine. But what kind of plan is that? How can monotonic personal values be turned into real world facts? What social or ecological structure – what natural structure – could implement this hope?

Sure, you can speak of the aspiration. But where is the delivery, the execution? If you listen to idealists, their idea of a plan is to either wait until you die and get transported up to Heaven, or else undergo some form of ego-death down here on Earth. Everyone stop everything you are doing and cease being a striving individual engaged with the daily business of living. Meditate to medicate.

In practice, only pragmatism works at all. Steering some balance between complementary limits. Formulate a system of values that is dichotomistically framed. One judged by the facts that are its outcomes. The facts that you then either want to leave alone or the facts you want to think about how to change.

Idealism points the mind off into the never-never. Placeless notions of perfection. Pragmatism is what lives down here on the surface of the Earth. Focus on the dichotomies we need to negotiate and we can come up with plans based on reason and evidence.

If it is true that the movement of the stars does not explain why the ball fell to the ground from the fifth floor, it follows that there is a kind of causal disconnection. — JuanZu

Exactly. From our human point of view, we want to know about our causal freedoms. We want a notion of causality that puts us in the centre of the Cosmos, large and in charge, the maker of purpose and the decider of form. This just what is natural to being an organism that lives by exploiting the possibilities of its environment. We come at nature with our cunning causal plans.

We throw a ball at exactly the angle where nature takes over the rest of the chore of hitting some desired spot. And it is important to know that far off stars can't affect that in being too distant in spacetime. Otherwise we would have to factor them into our mental calculus too.

And indeed, our causal narratives used to take celestial influences quite seriously. Conjunctions of constellations needed their horoscopic interpretations if we were to make wise decision down here on Earth.

So causality is the narrative we tell, the map of how to get to where we want. But then philosophy came along and started injecting a little more metaphysical rigour into this exercise. What was causality as a narrative at the level of the Cosmos itself?

From what I’ve read, ontic structural realism is the attempt to rescue scientism from the wreckage of materialism. It has no interest in the nature and plights of existence as lived, but only in the abstract representation of physical forces. It’s like the Vienna Circle 2.0. — Wayfarer

I'm well aware of how you read things. Science is always scientism. Nature must include the supernatural. Plug in the algorithm and print out the conclusion without further thought.

If I throw a ball from the fifth floor, I know that the cause of the ball falling is because I threw it. — JuanZu

But did you mean to throw it down by throwing it out? Your own action only imparted a thrust that should have seen it travel on forever along that straight line. It is only because the ball encountered both friction and a gravitational field that it was caused to instead curve.

Though of course you could have factored those effects into your throw and thus know that the cause of it landing where it did was down to an artfully arranged mix of your freedom to launch a ball in a direction and the inevitability of what would happen thereafter due to contextual constraints.

If your intent was to simply state disagreement, consider it duly noted. — Relativist

Don't be so touchy. I simply pointed out that physics does deal in "abstract objects and physical objects" and so physicalists – as those committed to a metaphysics of natural causes – mostly only deny the existence of "supernatural objects".

I then explained myself as to what I meant. Where you are speaking about objects, I would instead talk about causes. Or even better, the modal distinction between chance and necessity.

So physics combines the absolute abstract necessity of the laws of symmetry with a notion of materiality that is as reduced as much as possible to pure contingency. And this is the approach that has worked out spectacularly.

Physicalism is not materialism as such. It is the deflation of materialism that Aristotle first proposed – as a metaphysical-level argument – in his hylomorphic theory of substantial being.

Talk of "abstract objects and physical objects" is misleading as any kind of object is based on the idea of the substantial being that physicalism – as a naturalistic account – is meant to be deflating. If you call yourself a materialist, you are already losing. If you want to make sense of being a physicalist, you do this by showing you accept the reality of mathematical structure in combination with the matching reality of the degrees of freedom that a global state of contraint leaves contingent or undefined.

Hence why quantum physicists joke about operating under the Totalitarian Principle. "Everything not forbidden is compulsory". This gets at the structural realism that has become the basic ontological commitment of the physicist.

For instance, if special relativity constrains all quantum action under Poincare invariance, then a great deal is forbidden in terms of vacuum fluctuations. And yet also, contrariwise, absolute freedom is then granted to the gauge symmetries available within that global state of SR constraint. Under quantum field theory, you can have SO(3) symmetry broken down into SU(2). And if reality can break in that fashion, it must do. Which is lucky for us as we can exist. There can be quantum fields organised by SU(2) that start spitting out fluctuations which become the kind of fundamental matter described by the Standard Model.

I mention Ontic Structural Realism as now the fact of metaphysics catching up with the physics and excitedly explaining the modal distinction of chance and necessity on which this physicalism stands.

Folk may have the impression that physics exists to cash in the metaphysics of Greek atomism. And to be fair, that is what really inspired Newton and his mates.

But this was just a stepping stone. Now physics is firmly based on the hylomorphism of symmetry and fluctuation. Structures of constraint and the degrees of freedom they also have no choice but to form. Or the physics of relativity coupled to the physics of the quantum.

A coupling that seems the new mystery. But then again, only if you make the metaphysical mistake of expecting ancient atomism to apply to the description of gravity and not step back to think about the Planck scale in properly hylomorphic terms.

When I go back to what I wrote about the chain of causality, one thing that jumps out to me is that constraints—events that prevent future events—have a bigger effect on what happens in the world then causes—events that result in future events. — T Clark

This is certainly right. And it is why Aristotle identified four “becauses”. So your constraints are formal and final cause. But you also need your degrees of freedom, or efficient and material causes.

Causality as efficient cause is not wrong. It just is always shaped by some prevailing context.

Constraint removes possible futures, but normally still leaves many possibilities open. Accidents can happen. Asteroids could be on paths that just miss the Earth as there was no constraint on that fact.

So constraints determine events, but mostly in only the most general fashion. Rocks normally fall down rather than up. But they could just as well land there as land here.

Accidents are then the opposite of this determination in being the freedom for particular things to have happened within the space of free possibilities. We can tell tales of efficient cause where something might have happened, and then there was a difference because it either did or didn’t.

The asteroid could have been a lucky narrow escape or a historical extinction event. Either way it was determined by the laws of physics. And which thing happened was left as an accident of history.

Of course mechanics would say the asteroid was fated in it trajectory by setting off in some state of initial conditions. But then that would require the arrangement of that very particular set of circumstances for some good reason. An extremely careful choice of starting point in a world that now - looking at things from this complementary point of view - appears not offer any constraint on that being what got chosen. By someone with an interest in the whole affair. Wanting to show how what happened was inevitable from the start.

So causal accounts are flexible like this. We learn to make good choices about how much events are to be explained by contextual circumstances and how much by accidents or free choices.

Which then gets us into what we mean by finality. Rocks have tendencies to fall. Humans can want not to.

The actual science is independent of all the metaphysical claims you made. — Relativist

Utter bollocks. But go ahead and back your assertion up with the argument that might sustain it. :up:

One more thing: you imply that there's some consensus on some particular metaphysical model (among physicists? Among philosophers?) I sincerely doubt that. I know it's not true of philosophers — Relativist

You are not sounding sufficiently familiar with either the metaphysics or the physics. But prove me wrong if you like.

You just get angrier as the years go past.

Again, just check out what I already told you seven years ago. Long before AI was around to deal with one's more mundane intellectual chores.

Inspired by the twists and turns of modern physics with its foundations in permutation symmetries, structural realism has become a big thing in metaphysics. The slogan is “relations without relata”. Reality exists by conjuring itself up out of a pure holism of relations.

It's controversial because of course there must be something concrete, individual and material to be related, right?....

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4383/of-relata-and-relations-grounding-structural-realism/p1

Since you asked so nicely I’ll let AI bring you up to date with how current metaphysics views current physics.

Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) asserts the world's fundamental reality is its objective modal structure, which includes relationships and the natural necessity and possibility governing them. The "chance" in OSR relates to the concept of probability and potentiality as aspects of this fundamental structure, alongside necessity. OSR suggests that objects are derivative of this structure, not vice versa, and that the world's fundamental features are not the intrinsic properties of objects but the relational networks they form, which possess modal features like necessity and probability

And I already told you all this seven years ago now.

Are you suggesting that the metaphysician ought to be instead a physicist, and that being a physicist instead of a metaphysician would make the metaphysician a better metaphysician? — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. I’m suggesting that if you want to talk sense about something, you need to start by understanding something about what it is.

Would you take much notice of a virgin telling you what sex is all about?

It's more than a 'dualist complaint', it was an inevitable consequence of the Cartesian/Galilean division. — Wayfarer

So two guys who ran the risks of heresy charges and book bans unless they made a show of still being good Catholics. Their moves towards materialist explanations had to be publicly renounced. And then a little later, it was the Church on the back foot. Science was rolling and so all the things that materialism could never explain had to become the dualist defence. Science then kept on rolling and dualism has been pushed right out of the show.

Who mentioned God? — Wayfarer

Who didn’t when Descartes and Galileo were outraging the public by beginning to inject some mathematical and observational rigour into matters ontological?

By contrast, pansemiotic or process views (including Whitehead’s) retain the sense in which form, meaning, or constraint is not reducible to the physical but is constitutive of reality itself. — Wayfarer

Wasn’t Whitehead panpsychic? You are free to define pansemiotic how you like, but I place it firmly on the side of physicalism. Even if it is a physicalism designed to be a suitable ground for the biosemiotic view that accounts for life and mind.

Hence the 'six numbers' of Martin Rees. The mother of all a priori's. Why? They were undeniably prior in the sense that they pre-condition everything that subsequently developed. — Wayfarer

The triadic relation between the three Planck constants is more fundamental. And as a pure “Unit 1” relation, it doesn’t even need to come with some arbitrary number. Its number is simply the symmetry of the identity number - which is 1.

it needn’t import God into the picture, only the recognition that constraint precedes contingency. — Wayfarer

But why does one thing always have to come before the next thing? That is the causal logic that is the root of so much ontological confusion. I am arguing - after Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce - that constraints and contingency co-arise. Each is the other’s “other”. Or Paticcasamuppada as your Buddhist mates would say.

So how anyone portrays the ontology of modern physics is just a matter of personal preference. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it does help to at least know the physics, wouldn’t you agree?

the result is less a rigorous ontology than a posture of allegiance: a declaration that, whatever reality ultimately turns out to be, it will count as “physical” by definition. — Wayfarer

Personally, I make sense of it by considering proper subsets of the sorts of things commonly treated as existing: spiritual/supernatural objects (e.g. angels), abstract objects, and physical objects. Physicalists deny the existence of the first two. — Relativist

In fact physics has got more rigorous in the sense of shifting the ontological burden from merely a materialist account to one that is instead fully structuralist. So abstract objects are now included. Physics speaks to both material and formal cause.

The old fashion dualistic notion of material being opposed to spiritual being has been upgraded. Matter has been dematerialised in physics. It is now raw potential. Pure possibility. A gradient of change.

The dualist complaint about physics was that it only spoke to inanimate matter – lumps of stuff – and that made it a story of pure contingency. Billiard balls clattering about mindlessly. The materialist view of nature was patently soul-less.

But physics was already riding mathematics to Platonia. Galileo, Descartes and Newton were significant precisely because they were identifying the fundamental symmetries that are the structures organising nature. The structures that turned the raw material potency into some globally necessary state of lawful order. The abstract objects shaping the material objects.

So the birth of materialism was really the birth of mathematical structuralism and the start of the dematerialising of the materialism which is in fact the lay-view of the "real world". The substantial and object-oriented view that is the way we see tables and chairs, billiard balls and falling feathers. The view that understands the world as lumps of stuff all the way down ... until one encounters atoms as the littlest lumps that can't be chopped any finer.

It is this lay-view of matter that got dissolved in conjunction with the maths of symmetry getting beefed up to provide a proper language for talking about the constraints of structure. Science progressed rapidly once it got this trick – reducing matter to pure contingency and reducing form to the absolute logical necessity expressed by mathematical structure.

So the ontology of modern physics is pretty straightforward. It speaks of pure chance in interaction with absolute necessity. And this is the rigorous framework. And one that clearly encompasses everything causal that needs to be said as it spans the metaphysical gamut from chance to necessity.

Who needs a creating god when mathematical logic already enforces its absolute constraints on material possibility. And who needs a creating god when what could possibly deny the existence of chance and contingency?

How can possibility be made impossible except by some constraining hand. It doesn't need creation to exist. It needs limitation to clarify in what precise manner it exists. And mathematical constraint – the natural logic of symmetry – can do that job. Science has spent the last 500 years showing this.

So physicalism is the world as physics would see it. Materialism is an old hat term. Physicalism now clearly sees the world in hylomorphic fashion as an interaction between naked contingency and rigid constraint.

It all starts with a fluctuation. An action with a direction. The most naked material contingency already organised by the most fundamental dimensional constraint. A possibility actualised and revealing the wider structure necessary to its being. Causality tied up in a neat little package. Nothing further needed to account for what is going on.

Why would that be the best i can argue? — punos

What would you be arguing over? The mathematical notion of subsets? That the set of two things is a subset of the set of four things?

And yes, i understand that systems science, and others, may or may not distinguish between a system and a machine, but i do not (for a reason, not out of ignorance), — punos

So what is this reason?

but i prefer to use my own energy-information framework to work these things out. — punos

Did you mean entropy-information? Kind of like holography, dissipative structure theory, and other examples of physics turning to explicit use of systems metaphysics?

Each of the four Aristotelian causes is fundamentally an energy-information system, or the product of a one. Each one is some mixture of formative information and causal energy. — punos

Uh huh. So Aristotlean hylomorphism as the way his four causes cash out as a hierarchical systems view of substantial being?

Except probably not as hylomorphism arranges things into form/finality as top-down constraint and material/efficient causality as the bottom-up constructing degrees of freedom.

So what you describe is the division into the global structure that constrains and the local potential that gets thus shaped up. The whole produces the parts that are of the right type to (re)construct the whole. But then in contradiction, both the whole and parts are mixes of constraints and potentials themselves?

Perhaps you can explain what you would mean by formal and final cause, and material and efficient causes, being mixtures as you describe. Like what are the proportions in each case and how does that explain the differences between the four causes?

I mean one does want to be able to see how the four causes become the dichotomy of material and formal cause in the hylomorphic formulation. But that doesn’t appear too hard to explain in terms of the local-global distinction being paired with a particular-general distinction.

Finality as the long-run general goal and formal causal as the immediate and particular structure achieving that goal. Then materiality as the long-run general potential and efficient cause as the immediate particular action that results from that general material possibility.

So four gets “reduced” to two x two. You get a global vs local division. But now also a particular vs general division that cuts across that.

This could be what you are angling at. Each of the four causes is itself a mix of the two directions in which the pie can be sliced. Local-global in scale and particular-general in terms of, well, scale.

Material cause would become the raw global potency that is also the sharply individuated possibility.

Efficient cause becomes the sharply particular action which is itself a general long-run feature of the causal order.

Likewise finality is the generality of a purpose that is then also being narrowed to a specific aim, while form is the specific structure that could in fact be a generic class on answers. You can any kind of drainage pattern to empty your bath or organise your thunderstorm, but actually it has to be vortical.

So yes, even duality looks to require duality to complete its duality. What gets broken one way must in return break that which could have broken it, thus returning everything to a unifying whole.

Kind of just like the BIg Bang universe as the double inversion of that which starts out ultimately hot and small in scale to become the ultimately cold and large. The story of a constant doubling in spacetime extent that produces the constant halving of its energy density content.

So hot=>cold because small=>large. And in the end, nothing has changed even though everything has indeed changed. You have inversions of scale in two different directions - extent and content - but each also cancels out the other. Least extent and maximum content become maximum extent and least content.

I’m just pointing out that this kind of doubled inversion is both really complicated to imagine when it is an unfamiliar idea but also that systems logic is how we are now finding our universe to actually be.

It might be where your own metaphysics was headed. That might be why the four causes seem also to have their own further internal structure. As indeed I agree that they do. Each is defined by its positioning within a pair of reciprocal contrasts. The local-global and the particular-general. The kind of complex matrix multiplication that modern physics does need to employ to keep track of the symmetry breaking that is fundamental to the story of the Big Bang cosmos.

For me, a system is a kind of machine, and a machine is a kind of system, so i don’t really make a distinction between the two terms. — punos

Well exactly. But system science does.

So at best you can argue that there are mechanical systems that exist as a subset of the more general metaphysical notion of a system, which is the Aristotelean four causes one.

You personally might not make this distinction. And indeed it is quite common for folk to fail to make this distinction. Yet it is a distinction that exists in philosophy and was about Aristotle's most important contribution to the history of ideas.

The cog is to the watch as the watch is to the system of time keeping. — punos

As I also have said, systems can form nested hierarchies of systems. Aristotle's four causes describes the basic structure of a hierarchy – a system that marries top-down formal and final constraint to its bottom-up material and efficient freedom. Then within this cosmic-level structure, you can have any number of systems within systems. Galaxies, stars and solar systems. Plate tectonics, landscapes, the paddocks of a farm.

So a cog is to the watch as the watch is to time-keeping. Except the watch as a system is caught between the clockwork that is its material and efficient causes, and the world of watch-wearers with their keen interest in keeping an accurate count of the passing of the hours, minutes, and even sometimes the seconds.

So yes, the watch has to be made of something – its cogs as toothed disks of brass that can be locked into patterns of efficient cause. And it also has to do something in a functional sense. It exists in the final analysis as there is this top-down constraint in the form of a society of creatures who have the burning need to make a count of the passing of time.

Why does a watch exist? We can't answer that question fully without following Aristotle's four cause approach. The hierarchical logic that defines the holism of a system – even if it is a sub-system within the system that is Cosmos as a whole.

It seems to me that there exists a minimal construct that represents the simplest form of a particular kind of system. Subtracting any part from this minimal system will destroy it, while adding parts may or may not destroy it, depending of course on the compatibility of the new part with the existing system structure. This essentially allows a system to either evolve or go extinct. — punos

But this is just dumbing down the idea of a system to make it fit our idea of a machine as the canonical system.

The metaphysical definition of a system dates back to Aristotle's view of causality which said the natural world is formed of its four causes – efficient and material cause coupled to formal and final cause. So a system has all four causes, and thus functionality is part of its essence. But a machine is merely, in itself, just a "system" of material and efficient cause. It is a severely reduced system in that half its reason for being has gone missing in the larger story that metaphysics would want to tell.

So consider this. Is a watch part of a system for telling the time?

And then is a cog also part of a system for telling the time? Or perhaps only a part of a system for the more general task of constructing clockworks and other systems where control over gearing ratios is off prime functional concern?

So a watch can be part of a time telling system. Humans can have this need to measure out the day as if time were itself a mechanical process. And then quite naturally, mechanisms that can do that job will start to emerge in the world. The desire is realised as a form that becomes imposed on material being as some precisely engineered arrangement of efficient cause.

The word "system" properly applies to the four cause level of analysis. The whole of what is going on. The systems view is what closes some set of interactions so that they exhibit emergence and self-organisation.

Humans want to tell the time. They might start by dividing the passing of the day using a sun-dial. Then clockwork might do the job better. Eventually a digital circuit can use the vibrations of a crystal to count out time beats with incredible precision.

But these devices just tell the time. That is, there is someone for whom the information matters. The someone that closes the system of causes by having a goal and determining its form.

If the watch on your wrist breaks – say a cog snaps off – then do you wait forever to see if the watch starts to heal itself, evolve its way back to functionality? Or do you take advantage of there being shops that fix watches, and shops that can sell you better watches – in short, a general human system for time-telling that is self-organising in ways that come together to serve that general purpose.

So then a General Systems Theory would extend that very human-centric view of causality to Nature at its most generic level. The minimal system in that "whole of nature" regard.

We would get back to Aristotle's four causes, but now equipped with what modern science and maths has to say about self-organising complexity and dissipative structure.

How do you determine what is part of the system and what is not? — Pieter R van Wyk

If you subtract a part from the system, does it cease to act as a system?

So one could remove any cog in a watch and it would stop telling the time. But if you got a bucket and tried to scoop out every whorl in a turbulent stream, whorls would just keep reappearing until you changed the whole system. Like cutting off the water flow or cooling it until it changed state and became a frozen block of ice.

You will note this is an easy way to tell mechanical systems and natural systems apart. And so why a mechanical view of nature is felt not to be enough by many philosophers.

Is it possible for a system to contain a system? — Pieter R van Wyk

Topological order tells you that systems form within systems to create a nested hierarchy of order. One kind of thing can become the ground for the next kind of thing. But now your maths and physics has to start getting sophisticated to handle that.

However a simple example might be that if a stream freezes, you can now walk across it. Constraints imposed at the level of H2O molecules become freedoms created at the level of some new system that can construct itself upon them.

If yes, what exactly is a system of all systems? — Pieter R van Wyk

The Greeks called it a Cosmos. We call it the Universe. Metaphysics would try to understand it as the metalogic of existence. A General Systems Theory such as you have already dismissed. :up:

It's a dialectical synthesis, not a reduction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There’s a difference between two becoming one and and a dichotomy becoming stabilised as a pair of complementary actions - the asymmetry that can become fixed as it is moved apart in scale to become a structure of relations sandwiched by its local and global horizons.

It would be a strange answer to say that Socrates deserves to be killed because justice is just the will of the many, as expressed as a system of outputs, for instance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You might find is strange. An anthologist like Richard Wrangham instead accounts for the evolutionary value of such behaviour in terms of the self-domestication of humans - the step that actually allowed humans to become tribal creatures. Both generally empathetic and coldly predatory. Strong in forming in-groups as also strong in identifying out-groups.

You are simply applying this ingrained human principle. Social science explains why it was useful for there even being someone like a Socrates in the first place to prize or murder.

First, how is this not a monadic view of freedom? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is getting desperate. Freedom and constraint are being accounted for in terms of each other. They are a unity of opposites. You might then call that one thing, but it is the one thing of an irreducibly triadic hierarchical relation. So not monadic and not dyadic but triadic.

If such "freedom" isn't aimed at any prior end then it is sheer arbitrariness, but sheer arbitrariness is the opposite of freedom. The muscle spasms is not the paradigm of free action. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And away you go. Not listening to a thing I say.

The arbitrariness or contingency is precisely why the system can also consist of its other that is its constraint or necessity. There is the counterfactuality of a contrast taken to its limiting extremes. Which is how meaningful states of balance can arise as a spectrum of concrete possibility inbetween.

A muscle spasm is the kind of paradigmatically locally free and unconstrained action which can now make sense of the other thing which is a muscle contracting under the global constraint of a volitional intent. It is a local power that can be collectively harnessed.

Yet the idea that choice is a limit on freedom is contradictory, hence freedom collapses into its opposite. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Only in your confused telling. The idea of freedom can only exist to the degree that it’s “other” - a context of constraint - also exists.

Hence, freedom as the self-determining capacity to actualize the good must already have an end or nature in view (although we haven't attained it at this stage). — Count Timothy von Icarus

But here you are talking about freedom as it would be understood by the suitably socialised individual. One that has internalised the constraints of their community and culture, so is equipped to trade off their personal agenda against that larger collective agenda.

All you are doing is describing the way that western people were being taught to socially construct their habits of conduct under a particular axial religion and feudal economic structure. The monkish formula of a personal relationship to God which meant an individual had to act with the goal of achieving a Platonic level notion of what was good, true, beautiful and divine.

You have been socially constructed to think a certain way and you can’t escape that training, no matter how often that causes your rationalisations to collapse into self-contradicting confusions.

But survival isn't the measure of virtue. A mountain may last aeons, but it isn't virtuous or self-determining, nor even much of a true whole. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Another argument that is just stupid. Could even a chimp be virtuous? But isn’t a chimp somewhat self-determining?

If you want to argue, at least find interesting edge cases that might be designed to get at the issues in hand. Make some kind of effort to not waste both our time.

To whom does the socially constructed notion of virtue apply except to those who have been socially constructed under that cultural paradigm.

When the missionary lands on the Polynesian beach, Bible and rosary clutched in hand, what is his proper judgement of the savages he confronts - unsaved souls in perhaps some natural state of disgrace. What is his most virtuous course of action when confronted by some other set of people with its own adapted lifestyle - its own socially constructed way of life that seems to have functioned pretty well even in the absence of the Catholic Church and its medieval rehash of Ancient Greek philosophy.

Let’s put your arguments out in the reality of the wider world as see how they fare.

The problem for Hegel though is that his providential teleology seems like wishful thinking. It's Hegel's naturalism and his desire to domesticate the divine by wrapping it in the immanence of history that leads to the good deflating into a monadic attractor. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. Even an Aristotle or Peirce becomes problematic once they try to connect the inherent force of their logic to the socially-constructed paradigms they are meant to also be upholding.

Rationality is telling them one thing - it points towards the structural order of a self-organising nature. And custom is telling them they still need to bend their account back towards being near enough socially-acceptable.

They need to be doing this as if they really mean it too. Otherwise … Socrates! Or the fate suffered by the many Enlightenment rationalists that the Inquisition existed to suppress.

He acknowledges they have strong points and then just defaults to "if you don't like liberalism you can leave," a funny comment from a defender of a globally hegemonic ideology that insists on inserting itself into every culture, by coercion or force if need be. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So Fukuyama likewise follows the logic of his own argument until he hits that point where he encounters the dominant socially-constructed paradigm of his day. He goes a little weak in the knees. He makes the sacrifice he rather regrets which is to acclaim the Pax Americana as the End of History.

Who needs to read the books once you have already read the headline?

But then also, when you speak of “a globally hegemonic ideology that insists on inserting itself into every culture, by coercion or force if need be”, isn’t that more true of the Catholics, Mormons and Scientologists of this world?

As a faith, liberalism seems far more wishy-washy and porous in nature. We did have the UN and various international bills of rights and courts of war crimes. A legalistic structure for embedding a liberal philosophy. But that hasn’t really stuck. History didn’t in fact end at that high water mark.

So again, you can see there is a dichotomy being discussed, yet then treat that as a paradox to be reduced to its correct monistic answer rather the actual dynamic being negotiated in triadic fashion within a hierarchical structure.

Freedom is the power to act. Constraint is the collective rational good. And thus as I have argued page after page, society arises out of the algorithm that is to strike the fruitful balance that is to be found between local competition and global cooperation. Foster the power of independent choice. But then place that in a context where it is being shaped by a communal telos. One knows whether one is fitting in or striking out as the distinction becomes very clear in one’s mind. To compete or to cooperate becomes a choice one has to own and so a power to spend wisely.

Fukuyama is good at giving a structuralist account of how every society in history has had a similar set of ingredients, but balanced somewhat differently due to historical and geographic circumstance. And through examining that evolutionary variety, a general systematic trend can be observed.

If he doesn’t seem a strict Hegelian, it is only probably because Hegel serves as a useful peg to hang his structuralism on. Being a Hegelian in the world of Anglo history departments is instantly controversial. Or it was back when that is how he became overnight famous just for a book title.

:up: