But, Hoffman describes a Veiled Reality, in which we do have some contact with Fundamental Essences, by means of the embodied Information that he calls "icons" (signs, symbols, semiology). — Gnomon

As I say, this part is epistemology 101 so far as it goes. What cognitive scientist doesn’t say this sort of thing? Of course our notions of matter are useful fictions. Even physics says that.

But “consciousness” is likewise a useful epistemic fiction. It is easier to think in terms of powers and substances than to move on to a properly laid out and mathematical systems view of what reality “really is”.

So Hoffman states the obvious about cognition and then gets silly by saying this means the material world is our collective fiction and therefore consciousness is what is fundamental.

The mind and the world are both owed proper scientific accounts. Hoffman’s idealism doesn’t have anything help here.

So no, the equation of Causal Energy and Mental Information is not a figment of my imagination. Is that the "issue" you feel needs to be sorted? :cool: — Gnomon

I plainly said that information and entropy are just mathematical systems of measurement. They don’t tell us about informing or entropifying as real world processes. So the issue is about the how. You coined a term that suggest some general systems theory arises to cover this. But then the hand-waving begins. You speak as if information and energy are substantial things - like forces of nature - and so they just “do it”. Nuff said.

Again, you are misinterpreting the theory somewhat. If you look at the paper, they say a rock can be described under the theory and its more or less mathematically proven that the principle can apply to something like a rock. What you are talking about is a special case of system that is highly complicated. — Apustimelogist

I come back to the point that to claim belief for a rock is to collapse your epistemology into ontological confusion.

Sure, one might have the intellectual purpose of modelling the continuity of all systems and Bayesian probability might be your candidate theory of everything. But my view is that this plainly is a wrong move as Bayesian reasoning is great as a general theory of the organism in its semiotic relation with the world, and so then loses its way when it goes beyond what it was meant to be and is bandied about as a theory of literally anything.

If we can no longer distinguish a rock from a mind under the Bayesian approach, then now the theory is a failure. It becomes the new panpyschism.

The best theory of absolutely everything in my book is dissipate structure theory. And that as a general systems theory does apply as happily to the Big Bang as neoliberal economics.

Obviously, a rock may not be very interesting though as a kind of dynamical system. — Apustimelogist

I was reacting to the first paper. The second by Friston is far more challenging and I’m glad you flagged it.

A quick point is that the kind of dynamics that could even be coupled would have to be in a state of criticality. So a whole landscape of moving and eroding rock could be viewed as a hierarchical system in the way being suggested. It is a tectonic flow. A balance of geological and chemical forces over many scales of being. In some sense its own model as at some particular distance or horizon, the landscape’s smallest fluctuations become a lower bound blur, and its largest fluctuations become so large the system now appears to live inside a fixed background, captured by its laws.

So Friston is walking familiar ground. But then you can see how the humble rock lacks that kind of dynamics which brings this systems perspective into things. The rock has congealed and merely erodes. If the tectonics could be considered lively, the rock is as unlively as it gets.

I’ll have to read Friston’s monograph more closely. But on a skim, I would say he is trying too hard to explain everything by the self-organising dynamics and being too glib about the self-information or measurement aspect of a hierarchical system. But a fun read so far.

It does. — Apustimelogist

No, it really doesn’t. The information that the rock contains bears no resemblance to a system of belief.

You can present your evidence to the contrary if you wish of course.

This can be applied to virtually anything complicated enough, from a rock to a brain to a planetary system to... virtually anything. — Apustimelogist

You may misunderstand. A rock doesn’t actually have beliefs about its environment.

So Bayesian mechanics is based on thermo maths - the minimisation of free energy. And that formalism is a way to model the beliefs of organisms. An organism models its world with the intent to minimise its surprisal - an index of its prediction error that can be written down in thermo maths.

But a rock has no world model. Put a hot rock in a cold place and it will indeed minimise its free energy as the equations describe. It will go cold in a way that says its internal state could be regarded as a model of its external environment. But the rock never had any say in the matter.

Whereas put an organism in a place it doesn’t like and it will keep moving until it finds some place it does.

But I have mentioned the Bayesian Brain as exactly this kind of exercise of marrying the science of organisms to the science of thermodynamical systems. So same mathematical framework. But with the essential twist that an organism is in a modelling relation with its world.

The organism is at root just another thermodynamic system. However it is also this special kind of thermodynamic system.

My problem with what’s called philosophy and philosophers, is that much of the technical jargon often reeks of posturing, of self importance. — Mikie

That being said, why is it important to have a technical notion of “system,” — Mikie

Beyond language, there is the maths. Is that what perturbs you?

Would intelligence be desirable in itself, i.e., worthy of love? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doesn't society always attach that judgement on the individual while being equally convinced of its own inherent worth? Being worthy of love is something in the eye of the beholder. And the individual starts off already grossly out-numbered.

n common parlance it seems to me that "intelligence" has drifted a good deal away from "wisdom." — Count Timothy von Icarus

But why would we use two words if we could do with just the one? My argument is that they are both basically the same thing, but then also completely different in terms of scale.

So the brain exists to do cognition (broadly speaking). And the primary functional division that then arises for the neuroscientist is between attention and habit. The intelligence of the ability to consciously focus and figure out something complicated, coupled to the wisdom of accumulated habit which allows you to react to everything else as if it were already completely familiar and reflexively understood.

This then maps to how we socially view the intelligence~wisdom distinction. We can see how an immature mind could be very smart but not very world-wise. And also how a mature mind cannot help to have become pretty experienced in dealing with the world, even if never having being the sharpest tool in the box.

So it becomes a scale issue. The young mind often seems a bit precociously sharp. The aging mind surprisingly full of a stock of sensible habits. The brain is the same brain. It has just gone from living in a world where all was surprising novelty to a world that can hardly surprise at all.

We say there is no fool like an old fool as almost nothing can dent the security of sedimented habit. While we equally find the kids to be as much smart-arse as witty.

So yes, we apply our social judgements. And we might have different criticisms of folk at the opposite ends of the lifetime that they have spent adapting themselves to the opportunities and viscitudes of the world.

And I know that there I just related "intelligence" to the sensible, but this is only because "intelligence" sometimes seems to become wholly estimative and computational. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Commonsense ought to matter more in everyday life. But society has changed. Work itself has become more computational than practical. Or perhaps more polarised into computational and emotional intelligence as the focus of what people do.

So talk of IQ assumes a generalised intelligence or G factor score that you can attach to an individual. But we know it isn't quite so simple. And what the labour market prizes is itself evolving in time.

But two seconds on AI would sort that out for you. And it is the most basic of philosophical distinctions.

Ontology is the philosophical study of what exists, reality, and being, essentially asking "What is real?". In contrast, epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge, concerning how we know what is real and the methods and principles of gaining knowledge, answering "How do we know it?". These two branches are distinct but related, as our understanding of what exists (ontology) shapes how we seek and acquire knowledge (epistemology) about it.

Philosophy being philosophy then takes a thousand views of what this really all means. So as a technical distinction, it will rapidly become less clear. :smile:

Surely no one these days reads a book and expects a glossary, or even references? Always quicker to google. To get with the times, we should just have AI automatically hyperlink every long word perhaps. Hover over it and get the definition. Who would have time to scroll a messy thread?

Wisdom seems to provoke a lot of wistfulness around here. But prosaically, it is only the habituation of intelligence. The construction of a generalised system of thought which comes itself to be so widely applicable that it takes hardly any effort in the thinking.

If there is a reason to champion wisdom, it is because we are social creatures and wisdom is taken to be what should be the view of the largest human context. And intelligence is prized as the opposite – the genius of the individual.

But again, they are just the dichotomous limits of the same thing – the reasoning process. And that was neatly defined by Peirce as truth being what would be believed in the limit by a community of rational inquiry.

If you agree with Donald Hoffman's Interface Theory*...That's an Idealistic philosophical approach, but for practical purposes, common-sense (science) may be a better guide to dealing with Reality. — Gnomon

As epistemology, his point is mundane. As an ontological commitment, it makes the usual idealist mistake.

Idealism is the reaction against reductionism – an attempt to reject a world of only atoms blindly banging around in a void. But idealism fails to replace reductionism with anything better. It falls back on a mind stuff to replace the matter stuff. Making the same mistake in the other direction. Or tries to sustain a Cartesian dualism which tolerable to both the church and the scientist. Each side absolves itself in the other side's "great mystery".

But the holism of the systems science approach is perhaps much crueller than the Idealists ever had in mind. Systems thinking simply incorporates reductionism under its greater causal generality. It takes it in and then sits it firmly in its corner. :grin:

So reductionism models reality as a great complication built up from its fundamental degrees of freedom. Information/entropy are all about counting those. Instead of atoms or even fundamental particles, we can count the quantum numbers that are the discrete states being shuffled about the cosmic board by their wavefunctions. Reductionism goes as small as it could possibly go.

But then the systems view comes in and points out that all differences are differences in terms of larger context. And indeed, the context shapes those degrees of freedom to be the "simple as possible" things that they are. Quantum physics makes this plain too. A maths of symmetry and symmetry-breaking tells us why – in Platonic strength fashion – these basic quantum numbers emerge. The greater context defines its own smallest thing.

So idealism just doubles down on the mystery that reductionism creates. And systems science is the proper philosophical antidote. It shows that reductionism is one pole of the greater whole. The world can be simplified to a large degree. But in the end, it is revealed to be an irreducibly complex whole. And even physics says that directly these days. Idealism is still stuck in the 18th Century so far as metaphysical debate goes.

I don't understand that assessment. Energy & Entropy are Processes, not substances. Information --- or EnFormAction, as I like to spell it --- is also a process. — Gnomon

But you had to invent your own term to turn information back into informing. So you clearly can see there is an issue to be sorted.

Entropy/information arose as a way to count bits. Put a number on distinctions - whether they were a difference that made a difference, or even when they were differences that were just noise.

So that was a valuable step. Science could count the differences that any kind of system - physical or organismic - could contain. Then came the difficult bit of adding back a distinction between information that indeed informed, and entropy that instead was work or free energy.

Eventually this has led to the current rich variety of models that put meaning and action back into any counting of bits. We now do have process accounts like dissipative structure theory in physics and the Bayesian Brain theory in neuroscience.

So first we reduce everything to the bare notion of countable differences. We reduce it so far that it completely loses its larger systematic structure - the coherent context that even allows the difference to count as a difference. And then we need to repair the damage by building back some story of a process that is organising this whole show.

Ideally, the whole of reality will then be described under this one common process. But as has been said, organisms are different as they encode their environments in terms of their selfish wants. So under the most general class of systems causality - which I say is dissipative structure theory - you have at least this one major sub-class that contains the novelty; which we can call semiosis, or very loosely, information processing.

system must be less complex than its environment and it reduces complexity through a kind of code that "sees" only certain things in that environment. That becomes its reality. — Baden

So you wish to limit your definition of a system to an organism then? Which is fine, as code-based or semiotic systems are their own class of thing. Life and mind as opposed to mere physics.

But if talk about systems is talk about some general causal model, then it has to include the physical realm. And we do talk about weather systems, solar systems, atomic systems, ocean current systems and all the other systems that are globally coherent in being hierarchically self-organising.

And the big advance in biology and neurocognition has been to recognise the continuity that underlies the “mind-world” difference. The organism is a system with a code and the environment is also a system - lacking a code but still a system of constraints.

So reductionism is left with no where to hide. It is systems all the way down. And this is why both physics and organisms can make sense within the one larger causal model offered by dissipative structure theory.

The world was already doing something organised. The organism only had to latch onto that grand entropic enterprise as a bit of viral code.

But at some point the zooming out needed exceeds the human perspective — Srap Tasmaner

Boom and bust is a natural thing. Speak to an environmentalist and they would say all legislation would have to be framed through the lens of how your latest proposal would be viewed through your grand children’s eyes. Or even out five generations hence.

But we have engineered our markets so that they can panic and crash in seconds with programmed trading. Then re-jigged them so they can’t be allowed to crash as the national debt instead gets exponentialised to the point that even five generations of thrift couldn’t repay it.

So our problems certainly don’t exceed our grasp at an intellectual level. It is more that systems rigidity of this kind - laws that might bind us five generations out of- have become politically unthinkable.

It is all about balance. Traditional societies might have had the mindset of no social order change ever. Modern society might have fetishised not just change but infinite acceleration. No limits. Let’s just blast through the singularity.

In between those two extremes, the environmentalist pushing a five generations rule would seem to have a better intellectual grasp of the world’s ecological and thermodynamical realities.

It is for these reasons that I gave my own definition. — Astorre

Sure. That’s the game here. To the degree you state something clear, then there is something to expand upon or challenge. :up:

In this case, if we take a chaotic world order as a starting point, then "system" = A, if we take an ordered world order as a starting point, then "system" = B — Astorre

The interesting thing here is can you even have pure chaos or only a relative lack of order? If you look into chaos theory, it turns out to be the theory of fractal self-organisation in nature. The grand pattern that everything can’t help but fall into when everything is as unconstrained as it can be, but then also still constrained to be in globally closed interaction.

So if it is a “world” but also “chaotic”, then you have a system as I have described it. A global state of constraint with its local degrees of freedom. Chaos theory describes such world’s where fluctuations are so unruly that - unlike a Gaussian bell curve degree of randomness - there is now a randomness that is fractal or powerlaw and so doesn’t even have a mean. And yet that still leaves the world in a very definitely constrained state in that it is completely specified by its powerlaw fractal order. The degree of internal disorder is precisely measurable and predictable as a statistically emergent pattern.

But what if the system is just our idea? Chaos or order - our idea? Maybe everything is somehow different? Science is built on the basic assumptions that the universe has some kind of order. But this is precisely an assumption, which is confirmed by the existence of paradoxes.

So in this case, all our judgments are nothing more than opinions. — Astorre

Well no. Science is distinguished by the way it freely proposes its ideas and then backs them up. So it is more than just opinion. And if we are here talking metaphysics, then even that relies on being able to demonstrate some conformity between our beliefs and our experiences. You want a logical approach to reality - a rational model of causality - that seems to apply in a universal fashion.

That would be the goal of traditional metaphysics anyway. A post modernist might of course like to claim the licence that everyone should have the right to their opinion and than judgement isn’t about a process of collective wisdom that stands the test of time.

It was metaphysics that claimed reality was a Cosmos. And the first metaphysicians did not see “paradoxes” as the problem but rather as the essence of existence. A world could arise as the dynamical balance of its fundamental divisions. A principle Heraclitus popularised as the Unit of Opposites.

So philosophy itself was founded on the systems view. But the Greeks also invented atomism as the alternative reductionist paradigm. And that proved very appealing once 16th C Europe wanted to re-imagine the world as a giant mathematical clockwork - a machine that could be constructed. Reductionism became the religion of the Industrial Revolution as engineering is a very effective mindset if you want to impose human control on the natural world.

To run nature, you have to be doing something that nature itself isn’t actually doing.

There's an issue I don't think has been raised yet: "system" often carries a connotation of rigidity, though we can certainly point to systems that are flexible and adaptive. My point is, it's always a question with systems. — Srap Tasmaner

This is a misunderstanding that arises if you view Nature as a piece of reductionist machinery. But not if you view it as an organic whole. Systems science starts with the very idea of a universalised dynamical balance. Rigidity and plasticity are always relative as the balance that a system must seek to optimise if it is to persist, and thus even exist.

To be able to adapt is to be able to live in a changing world by also changing. And this is then achieved by becoming a hierarchy of rates of change. You need the global laws that change only slowly and the local degrees of freedom that can be spent very fast.

You need the banking system as your global context and the small change in your pocket to make quick and simple choices. Rigidity and plasticity are just the same thing - a dynamical balance - viewed over vastly different organisational scales.

The money flows through the economic system over all scales. All that changes in a well-plumbed system is scale of that flow.

It then becomes a separate debate whether a society has an optimised hierarchy of capital flow. Is it too rigid or too fluid on any particularly level, or even as a general whole.

I justify this by the fact that a system in the world itself can be both an ordered set of everything and a chaotic one. We have no evidence for either the first or the second approach. — Astorre

A reductionist might say - on epistemic principle - that there is this either/or choice. But the holist would expect order and chaos to compose a … system. :smile:

They would be the co-arising limits on Nature. The complementary qualities that form the dynamical balance.

And physics has the evidence. Nature is ruled by criticality. It is neither completely ordered nor completely chaotic but the balance of the two - as is recognised when we talk about a Universe closed under thermodynamics.

A third characteristic I would name is a certain stability over time. If a collection of something instantly falls apart into separate parts, it's hard to call it a system — Astorre

This is key. And it goes deeper as a system in fact exists on the edge of chaos, as they say. It feeds off instability. It is the stability that arises in organising instability into a predictable flow.

So water is an eroding source of instability. And a landscape shapes it into an efficient collection of drainage channels. A system is the global pattern of constraints that emerge to create an efficient collection of local actions. Nature is visibly hierarchical when you can see it organised into a fractal pattern of dissipation.

So a system is all about stabilising instability. And it indeed has to optimise this as a dynamical balance. It needs to exist in a persistent state of criticality, or at the hinge point between building itself up and falling apart.

Any organism is exactly this. A balance of its growth and decay. Every molecule of the body is being turned over. This is how the body as a system can stay optimised within its own ever changing environment.

For Physics, Interaction is an exchange of Energy (causation). And for Philosophy, Interaction is an exchange of Information (meaning). Yet, the relationship of Information & Energy*4 is not well known. { https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page30.html } Perhaps the best way to define a holistic System is to describe it in terms of Synergy*5 : energy + together. — Gnomon

My problem with this is it lapses into substance ontology which is reductionist. An ontology of stuffs rather than of processes or the holism of systems of self-stabilising interaction.

So I would point out that energy and information do indeed speak to the connection between the entropic world and the informational creatures who construct models of the world so as to entropify it more cleverly. There is something both essentially the same but also absolutely different when we apply a systems metaphysics lens to Nature. Our theories have to handle that.

But to approach this from the process philosophy point of view, it is important to capture the architectural holism of the causality. A system has a distinct causal structure which is the hierarchy. And a hierarchy is the self-balancing and emergent mix which is top-down constraints shaping bottom-up degrees of freedom.

If we are using physical jargon, then entropy-information is a good dichotomy but also locks us into an ontology of substance rather than process. Whereas constraints-degrees of freedom is how physics speaks about an ontology of hierarchically-organised causality. It speaks directly to the architectural principles that apply to thermalising systems of any kind - physical or biological.

This leads to the conclusion that a system, in our everyday understanding, is a conscious construct. — Astorre

That could be an implication. But the evidence is against it.

A system’s metaphysics is usually understood as being about closure under causality. A system in some fundamental way makes itself. It bootstraps into being.

Systems science is thus usually founded on thermodynamics. And more particularly, on dissipative structure theory or self-organising systems. So it is a physicalist story. But very different from reductionism in believing that a natural system is also telic in some basic sense. It is driven to structured order by the “need” to run down a gradient. It emerges as there is a Darwinian selection just to be optimised for entropy production.

Then within this strictly physical story we must account for life and mind. And that is easy enough to do if we see organisms as the further evolution of entropic structure. Life and mind are what come next in the hierarchy of nature when systems that can model their worlds - using codes: genes, neurons, words, numbers - arise and become “selfish” feeders on this world.

So life and mind are no longer blindly entropic. As systems, they represent a real shift. A causal novelty. And yet they are still completely part of this world with its over-riding and causally closed thermalising imperative. Life and mind are more of the same in the most general physical sense of being evolved dissipative structure. They just happen to spend energy on modelling their environments so as better exploit them.

How important do we think wisdom is in our lives, and do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we “suffer a wisdom famine in the West”? — Tom Storm

From a neurocognitive viewpoint, I would say the most useful definition is to oppose wisdom and cleverness. They relate to each other as the general and the specific. Or in brain terms, wisdom is accumulated useful habits and smartness is focused attention on a novel problem.

So wisdom comes with age and cleverness with youth. Being wise means hardly having to think about what is generally best while being smart is being able to leap to a particular answer.

These are not two unrelated qualities as any brain relies on its accumulated habits and its moment to moment attention. The best adjusted mind would need to do both things rather well. But if we indeed suffer a wisdom famine, I guess that could be blamed on the modern novelty feast.

Yet I don’t think that really makes for a penetrating analysis. If modern society was making us all smarter, then it would be achieving that same win/win balance of a greater collective wisdom and a greater individual genius.

It felt like that this project - born in the Enlightenment era - was making progress despite all its critics. But now with social media, Trump, AI, private equity, crypto, identity politics - the usual suspects - not so much.

But in general, wisdom and cleverness are a natural dichotomy that organises the brain. And so also organise society as our collective brain. We have something of major metaphysical importance that goes beyond personal neurology and speaks to our societies as the combinations of its institutions and its innovations.

There is something there to be debated - a philosophical imperative - when it comes to our politics, economics, and the humanities in general. How do the two sides of this equation play into each other, and is something new indeed occurring as a next phase of its evolution?

A system is formed of its interactions rather than constructed from its components. So a general systems theory is successful to the degree it takes that idea to its metaphysical extreme.

Aristotle’s four causes were the first clear expression of this logic and so he is still the patron saint of systems scientists and hierarchy theorists. German philosophy was systems oriented through the 18th and 19th C and that tradition showed through in modern sciences like biology, ecology and sociology.

CS Peirce was the preeminent philosopher in modern times, framing the most abstracted and logical systems-based metaphysics, but the importance of that only started to be recognised quite recently.

Von Bertalanffy was of course a key figure in the 1920s. And then hierarchy theory followed on from his general systems theory in the 1980s, with Stanley Salthe publishing two key books.

So there is a long history of this approach to causal modelling. But it has always existed on the margins as its focus is on complexity rather than simplicity. A systems thinker would say that Nature is irreducibly complex and so nothing about it can be properly understood until this is understood. But reductionism thrives as folk get quick payback from treating Nature as a mechanical construction.

Reductionism believes there is only simplicity and its complication. Anglo philosophy holds to that belief with ontological fervour.

Holism makes the point that simplicity arises out of hierarchical order. To use the jargon, a system is a hierarchy of top-down constraints that shape the bottom-up degrees of freedom. And the purpose of the constraints is indeed to shape those dof - make then the simple atomistic components that they are.

If you want to build a sturdy shelter in the least effort way, you are guided to the idea of setting up a brick manufacturing business.

If you want to mobilise your empire against another, you want a structure of discipline that turns a tribal mob into hierarchy of fighting units that behave in simple and predictable fashion.

You can build more complex structures to the degree you can mass produce more simplified materials.

So simplicity and complexity go hand in hand as the causal feedback loop that is the basis of the systems view. Material simplicity and telic complexity co-arise in Nature.

Reductionism is then the attempt to cut that loop and just view Nature as a store of materials with varying degrees of complication. Mass-produced components sitting about waiting for someone with a plan and a reason to use them.

So you can see that this divergence of metaphysics ain’t value neutral. Ecologists can’t help but be systems thinkers. The rest of society earns its coin by becoming skilled at feeding Nature into the maw of its excellently engineered machinery. :grin:

You'll have to be more specific. Put this in math terms. — jgill

Fibre bundle?

Physics observes without understanding. — ucarr

This is all arse backwards. Special relativity unified space and time under Poincare invariance. Dimensionality emerges under the 4D Minkowski signature where you have three directions of spatial symmetry and one of time~energy symmetry.

So what makes physics actually physics is that it creates the mathematical picture that answers to the observable facts. It doesn't do the naive Euclidean thing of building up from atomic points. It defines the global constraints that combine to zero the metric to a collection of points under a general covariant symmetry condition. The physics creates the metric from the top-down rather than builds it from the bottom-up.

You have to look at all the stuff – the 10 symmetries – that compose the holistic constraint on existence that is Poincare invariance. You have the three translational degrees of freedom, but also the three rotational dof, the three Lorentz boosts, and the time~energy dimension.

It all sounds spatialised, but it is also temporalised in being bounded by a "speed of causality" – the speed of light. The fundamental units are no longer metres and seconds but light-metres. Separations described in terms of the durations that are separating them.

Lorentz boosts deal with the frame-dependent contraction of length and dilation of time that then result from putting the speed of light at the centre of things as the Unit 1 measure of a 4D hypersphere where when you zoom in, the metric looks remarkably flat and Euclidean in its dimensionality, but zoom right out and you can see all the translations become instead rotations. Go far enough in a straight line and you wind up coming back at yourself.

In short, the point is that special relativity describes dimensionality not as points make lines and lines make planes, etc, but instead as a system of constraints which has a rich causal structure.

Dimensional flatness is only emergent in the limit. And dimensional curvature is then emergent as its complementary limit. The two tie together in Unit 1 hypersphere fashion so that each stands as the ratio of the other. This is why you wind up with three directions of translational symmetry complemented by three directions of rotational symmetry.

So rather than the usual mathematical story of a metaphysics of construction – start with the simplest thing and add complication – physics expresses a metaphysics of holistic constraint. Find a symmetry-breaking that can divide a potential against itself and develop that breaking towards its dichotomising limits.

If you start with a notion of dimensionality that is neither really curved nor straight, great. Now these can be the two directions that fly apart in a Big Bang. You can expand the hypersphere and find that the apparent distance to the curved horizon has stretched out ever flatter, allowing for Newtonian physics and its inertialised momentum, while simultaneously angular momentum has become also a thing. Objects can now rotate just as freely on the spot. They can rest in one place for a duration while spinning on their centre of mass.

The place to understand physical dimensionality is with the physics. The physics is about space, but also about the spatial dof of translation and rotation. And also about time or the way c closes the space in terms of its causal relations and ensures that localised entities can persist as they are underwritten by a global energy conservation principle.

Poincare invariance speaks to the package of stuff that composes the actual metric of a physical realm. And even then it is not the last word. It has only 10 symmetries. You can step up to the next level of the 15 symmetries encoded by twistor space – the de Sitter invariance which includes the further fact that the Big Bang happened and so the scale of things was as small and hot as it could be in the past, and will become as large and cold as it could be in the future. You add 5 extra "conformal" transformations that are there to preserve the angles between things but not necessarily the distances.

So again, in general, Euclidean geometry doesn't act as a good starting point for a leap into the metaphysics of physical reality. You instead need to work with a logic of constraints. You start with a state of "everythingness" – a vagueness or potential like the concept of a quantum foam. Then you start to consider the way it can break that symmetry into opposing tendencies – like the way that flatness can know it ain't curved and curvature can know it ain't flat as part of a mutual relativistically-closed spacetime relation.

Mathematically that is, you can place your geometry on a hypersphere. Poincare invariance placed 3D space on a 4D spacetime hypersphere. De Sitter invariance placed this 4D story on on a 5D conformal hypersphere.

So the maths is still bottom-up in that sense. The search was for a Unit 1 description which bound translations to rotations as a pair of local symmetry-breaking freedoms. And it started with 3D Galilean symmetry, then 4D Minkowski, then jumped another step to 5D de Sitter.

Maths is rather locked in to its way of building up complication from simplicity. And that can create a misleading impression about how to understand Nature in terms of its own holistic causality.

But physics came at the maths from the other direction. Special relativity stumbled into the importance of Poincare invariance as Lorentz boosts were something that got spat out of Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism. What worked at the level of local gauge symmetry suddenly had obvious implications for the global symmetries of spacetime as a unified 4D c-rate whole.

The same for de Sitter invariance as a mathematical next step on Minkowski space. That was originally an odd-ball way to rewrite Einstein's general relativity. A totally unphysical-seeming mathematical exercise where you could recover the GR equation from the symmetries of a Universe that was completely empty but also an exponentially expanding void driven by some "cosmological constant".

It seemed a joke back in the 1920s. Then eventually it did become evident the Big Bang happened and now dark energy has shown up as a physical thing. The future of the Big Bang will be a heat death state that arrives at this de Sitter story of a void that continues to grow at an ever-accelerating rate due to an inherent cosmological constant.

So if the OP is about metaphysics and how to relate its two offspring disciplines of maths and physics, a picture should be emerging.

The physics delivers the observations. The maths delivers the models. The metaphysics has to aim at articulating the holism of a structural logic that treats the Cosmos as a functional whole.

The problem is that when metaphysics got going in Ancient Greece, the maths of the time was pretty geometric and so that smuggled a good dose of physical realism into things. But the way maths has developed is that mathematicians want to break geometry down to algebra. It is just easier when wanting to earn a crust doing complicated calculations. The atomistic mindset came to dominate rather completely.

However maths also covers topology and symmetry. So it has its own holistic tendencies. And that is where the physicist would look for the broad metaphysical principles that might explain why everything has to be – at the structural level – exactly the way that we find them.

reflects the nominalist tendency to treat qualities as products of classification, not as independently real (as Peirce does). — Wayfarer

How can Firstness be independently real? Either Peirce’s logic is understood to be irreducibly triadic or it’s not.

So that is enough nonsense now.

Nominalism. Just what Peirce wasn’t. — Wayfarer

You keep accusing me of exactly what I don’t claim. You then post something that nicely supports my systems causality argument. :roll:

I believe the whole universe and all that is in it is a divine mind, realizing its own ideas,

Seeing as you are a fan of AI replies these days, why not check up just how idiosyncratic Peirce’s understanding of “the divine” is.

Peirce understood the divine not as a traditional, anthropomorphic God, but as a creative and unifying force inherent in the universe, manifesting as thirdness and the tendency towards order and habit-taking. He saw it as a principle of continuity and reasonableness that underpins both logic and the cosmos.

Peirce's understanding of the divine is also connected to his evolutionary cosmology, where the universe evolves from a state of potentiality (firstness) towards greater order and habit (thirdness). This process is not deterministic but involves chance and spontaneity, guided by the tendency towards concrete reasonableness.

So follow your cite to its source and you can see that divine mind is poetic licence and reflects Peirce speaking in the spirit of his time and place.

if not physicalism, then what? That is a question that you don't want to deal with, — Wayfarer

Bollocks. The question I am engaged with is “if not monism, then what?” Peirce correctly gives the answer that “monism” is really to be understood as the holism of the triadic relation. The causal story of hierarchically emergent order. Cosmogenesis in short. What is ontically singular is the irreducibility of the triadic logic by which existence gets organised.

That's what I think is the cultural impetus behind the appeals to physicalism and antagonism towards anything perceived as spiritual or idealist. It's the consequence of this division. — Wayfarer

Yes of course religion and science agreed to divide the world between them in this way. But that is ancient history now.

My antagonism is about your constant efforts to frame any comment I might make as reductionist and scientistic. You may need me to dress up in 16th C garb, but I’m too busy with how modern systems thinking actually makes sense of both mind and matter.

Peirce didn’t treat Firstness as something to be discarded — Wayfarer

Where did I say it was discarded? It gets incorporated into the wholeness of triadic interpretance.

Redness becomes something we can name – a species of the class "qualia" – once we learn to look at the world in a certain light. It becomes the colour of a stop sign, a hue in a set of crayons, the opposite of green, etc.

That which is initially some unfiltered instant becomes sharply framed in terms of its particularity within a setting of generality. Firstness as an initial vagueness is transmuted into Firstness as some crisply fixed quality held within a system of interpretance. It becomes seen as a particular instance of the general thing we have learnt to label as "redness".

Some of whom were eminent scientists. — Wayfarer

But as Gemini told you: "The main reasons for their doubt often centered on the perceived lack of a sufficiently powerful and light engine, or an incomplete understanding of aerodynamics (particularly the concept of airfoil lift)."

Your claim was that these scientists said the laws of physics forbade powered flight. As Gemini makes clear, they were doubting that the craft could be made light enough, or the engines strong enough, to achieve heavier-than-air flight. Balloons with propellors were the limit of what seemed feasible.

So nothing was said about the laws of physics. What was being argued was the practicalities of material engineering.

The hallmark of phenomenology is its emphasis on the first-person character of experience. — Wayfarer

Thanks for the lecture. But Peirce got it right by showing how the real story is about the hierarchical order of first, second and third person perspectives. First person leaves you stuck on the platform of idealism long after the train of useful discourse has departed the station.

Where is the number seven? The law of the excluded middle? The Pythagorean theorem? — Wayfarer

Why don't you tell me where you think they are?

Maths finds them not in Platonia – some supernatural museum of ideas – but in the necessary geometry of Nature. The forms that must rule a Cosmos as they are the symmetry and symmetry breaking operations by which dimensional Being itself can arise.

As Peirce taught, logic itself self-assembles in hierarchical fashion. Order isn't transcendentally imposed. It emerges from a Darwinian struggle to get anything done at all. The Comos exists as the universal growth of reasonableness. A geometry of free relations that has its own structural inevitability.

No need for a maker. Chaos can't help but fall into ordered structure. Anaximander saw that right from the start.

With the Renaissance, this began to invert, so that finally, dead matter is seen as the norm, and life the anomaly, something which has to be explained. And I think that's what your model does. — Wayfarer

Jesus Christ. The Renaissance was a moment in time. The rediscovery of Greek atomism was inspirational. It crystalised the reductionist mindset. Differential equations were invented and the Western world went Newtonian. The industrial age was unleashed.

But we have had 600 years of scientific and mathematical progress since then. Catch up a bit. Much of what I'm talking about concerns the past 50 years of intellectual advance – the era when we properly got back to Anaximander and the metaphysical revolution he inspired.

The we in us is still the ghost in the machine. — Punshhh

Biosemiosis inverts this framing. We are the machinery that can constrain the world to our own advantage.

We are modellers of the world for the purpose of regulating the world in a way that it must keep rebuilding and even replicating the delicate biological machine that is "us".

And moveover it feels phenomenologically like something to be such a machine – or more correctly, such a modelling relation – as the model is a model of an "us" in its "world".

That is the semiotic story. What we experience is the Umwelt of our own construction. A point of view that is a self in pragmatically-intentional interaction with its environment.

Consciousness boils down to the habit of predicting the state of the world in every next moment ... so as to be then capable of being surprised by what happens instead and thus learning to make better predictions the next time round.

This is just basic enactivism or Bayesian reasoning. The self is the place from which the expectations arise in the modelling relation and the world is the place from which those expectations are to some degree or other confounded, contradicted, bemused, surprised of – best case – rendered ignorable.

So the standard lay view is that consciousness is about a brain that extracts a view of the world from incoming data. A modern embodied approach to cognition flips it the other way round. We develop a robust sense of self to the degree we can already anticipate everything that the world might be just about to do. We feel purposeful and in control to the degree we can in fact ignore the world – not even need to be consciously aware of it.

The sense of self is that part of the modelling relation which is already secure in its own predictive integrity. The world only intrudes into our stream of thought only by being surprising or unexpected in some way that we might find important or worth learning from.

You see this innate ability to filter out the world by coming at it with rock-solid preconceptions a lot on this forum. When the stakes are low, no one needs to learn anything new.

So we are not meat machines or Cartesian automatons. Biosemiosis says we are a kind of machine in that we can impose a machinery of decisional switches on our world. We can model our worlds in terms of information about the kinds of things we want to happen in the next instant, and then switch tracks to the degree it matters if they don't happen. Stop in surprise for half a second and generate a new set of expectancies. Rinse and repeat.

And a strong sense of self emerges from this prediction-based processing. We know we are the "we" who generated a sense of a world as it was just about to be. Then we are still the "we" who has to halt and start again if the world glitched and we had to restart it from a refreshed point of view.

If we really get to the point that we are almost completely filtering out the world, then we actually begin to lose that usual sense of self. We forget about being in the world and so aren't even now being reminded that we are also in "ourselves".

The Zen ideal for some reason. Sensory deprivation tanks cause the ego to dissolve. It is by having to push against the world that we also feel the us that is pushing. Once the world becomes fully ignorable, so also does our self-image lose its sturdy outline.

We used to think that the laws of physics forbade powered flight. — Wayfarer

You mean history shows we ignored the folk dumb enough to claim that. As soon as gliders and motors showed some concrete promise, there was a rush to patent the early concepts.

On the other hand, patent offices have the good sense not to accept schemes for perpetual motion machines. The laws of thermodynamics do "forbid" those at root ... if you insist on smuggling anthropomorphism into your choice of words as a back-door means of evidencing the beliefs you wish to believe.

There are many things, abstractions among them, that are only perceptible by nous. They don't, therefore, dwell anywhere, in the literal sense, — Wayfarer

What is nous when it is at home? Where does the rational intellect reside? Could it be in Peirce's community of pragmatic inquirers. People willing to construct falsifiable beliefs that can actually be publicly tested by conformity with the evidence?

So abstractions exist in minds? But there are then trained minds and untrained minds. As an epistemological fact – but not an ontological one! – these do indeed create quite different versions of what they might consider "reality".

There is the phenomenological experience of those of us for whom the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking might truly have a look and a feel of some Platonic reality. It is a full sensori-motor experience.

Then there are those who just hear the words, see the equations, and experience simply a bunch of confusing marks on a page. No world springs up in their mind that speaks to the abstractions to which these symbols might hold the key.

I do not mean that universals exist, but they are real. Real, I say, in the sense that they are not figments of the mind but have an objective being, though not a material existence. — C S Peirce Collected Papers, CP 1.27

Exactly. In the spirit of Aristotle, the natural philosopher and systems thinker argues that substantial reality is the hylomorphic interaction of its matter and its form. That is, its global constraints and its local degrees of freedom.

Each side of this dichotomy is the proper cause of the other. So together, they become the co-arising.

Form shapes the matter and that shaped matter constructs the order specified by the constraining form. It is a neat feedback loop. Or more properly, a neat hierarchical set-up. Substantial being is what you get once you have a lower bound set of material freedoms in interaction with a globalised cogent state – a state of rational order so pervasive that it puts strict limits on everything.

Which is why physics is obsessed with symmetries. Dimensionality itself already strictly limits the freedoms that can exist. If you understand symmetry maths you can just see the truth of that in direct mind-grasped way.

But symmetry maths is to be found in that particular community of pragmatic inquiry. You need to become a paid-up member if you want a phenomenological level view – the one that feels maximally objective as it is at least not patently hostage to our everyday subjectivity.

But notice that 'insert themselves' implies agency. — Wayfarer

I'm not disputing agency. I'm defining it properly in terms of naturalistic metaphysics.

Oh - that's right. It's something that could happen, therefore it did. — Wayfarer

If you want to be right, then get it right. The maxim is: "If it can happen, it must happen". If something is not forbidden, it will occur.

This contrasts with the more usual, if something happens, it was made to happen.

There's your materialism showing again. — Wayfarer

Or my brand of materialism. Just like my brand of agency, etc.

I am concerned about how our common terms ought to be better understood. You just sling them around as terms of abuse or a banner to rally to.

Yet in your model, human experience only exists by happenstance, and then only to expedite entropy. — Wayfarer

That is nothing like my model. You continue to strawman everything I say.

What I'm saying, on the contrary, is that nothing is purely physical, that the physical itself is itself an abstraction from experience. And where do abstractions dwell? — Wayfarer

Yes. Where do they dwell? Follow your own argument through.

I really think your physicalist biosemiotic theory could be leavened with some phenomenology. — Wayfarer

A silly comment when Peirce explicity developed his semiosis by starting from phenomenology and extrapolating to logic and metaphysics. Remember how you like to seize on "objective idealism" as if Peirce's careful triadicism – or hierarchical causality – can be heedlessly reduced to your brand of dualism? The two forms of Cartesian substance.

So again, yes to an epistemic cut, but no to an ontological cut. Life and mind exist within the physical world and its generalised thermodynamic imperative. The Cosmos only exists because it expands and it cools. Life and mind the insert themselves into this larger story by accelerating the entropification.

To do this, life and mind of course have to be able to wall themselves off as small pockets of negentropy – refuges constructed of information. Organisms have to be embodied. They must build a physical structure that is a molecular machinery with a metabolism that can digest their surrounds.

Biosemiosis is about how to recognised the continuity of the underlying thermal imperative while also properly accounting for the exact nature of the mechanical trick which allows an organism to form by milking entropic flows for its "own purpose".

A body is nothing more that a physical structure that can rebuild itself just slightly faster that it falls apart. A human uses as much power as a weak light bulb. It doesn't demand a lot of energy to keep one step ahead of the generalised decay rate of our environments.

But then there was nothing stopping humans developing more exalted notions about their purpose in being alive. Indeed if they could start ploughing fields and digging oil wells, there suddenly seemed no limit to how high they might fly.

The cult of endless growth is now a basic habit of thought baked into modern society. Philosophy in the popular understanding has become largely entrained to supporting this collective delusion.

There. Is that enough phenomenology for you? The reasons for why you experience reality in the way that you do. The insistence on personal transcendence. The requirement for an ontological-level separation from the brutish constraints of a thermally-organised world. :roll:

But I would say that if the cosmos itself is a whole that can constrain the behavior of its parts, then it is more understandable how at least some features which we associate with life can 'emerge' or, perhaps, it's better to say 'actualized'. — boundless

The Universe is a hierarchy of constraints. But note that constraints are more a passive than an active thing. It is like putting a fence around a flock of sheep. The fence is just there, but by its presence the sheep are more limited in their free action.

So the basic symmetries of Nature – the Noether symmetries that create the conservation laws – act like boundaries on freedoms. Spacetime is a container that expresses Poincare symmetry. It says only certain kinds of local zero-point fluctuations are possible. All others are prevented.

But then luckily for us, gauge symmetry means these fluctuations can still become quite complex. Point-like particles can have spins that range from 0, 1/2, 1, 3/2, 2 – those five values. And from that we can extract the Standard Model of particle physics.

So from what the global constraints that Poincare symmetry can't prevent – a residual variety of locally gauged spin states – we wind up with a hot big bang Universe that develops quite a bit of chemical complexity on its way to eventual prolonged heat death.

As a model of causality, this emphasises contextuality. What develops is every stricter limitation on variety. But fencing things in also focuses what remains trapped inside. As global constraints sharpen, so too do the local freedoms that evade these constraints.

Physicists of course don't talk about sheep in pens. But quantum physics does like to talk about pendulums or weights on springs. A field of oscillators. Create a cavity and you will find its interior must resonate at that frequency. Its fluctuations can't be eliminated. But they can be made to line up into a neat little sine wave. Or particles as described by a gauged spin state.

Anyway, it appears like you believe that change is not caused, it just happens. — Metaphysician Undercover

Finally you might be getting it. :up:

Cause is about the constraint of fluctuation. The world seems organised and intentional because in the end, not everything can just freely happen. Order emerges to constrain chaos.

As quantum field theory says, Nature is ruled by the principle of least action. All paths are possible, but almost all the paths then have the effect of cancelling each other out. That Darwinian competition selects for whatever path is the most optimal in thermal dissipative terms.

And this is a fact proved to many decimal places. Quantum calculations of physical properties like the magnetic moment of an electron take into account all the more attenuated background probabilities that faintly contribute to the final measured outcome. The tower of cancellations that results in the final sum over histories.

So it is not about what I might believe. It is about what science knows.

This is why the divinity is needed to explain the existence of matter. Matter being that which stays the same as time passes. — Metaphysician Undercover

Piffle. Things stay the same when further change ceases to make a difference. Once things hit the bottom, they can't fall any further.

In that light, the true problem for metaphysics is answering the question of how instability can get started. And this in turn leads back to some notion of Apeiron or Vagueness. A state of unlimited everythingness that is exactly the "right stuff" if you understand causality in terms of the evolution of systems of hierarchical constraint.

Once codes arise — symbolic systems that are rule-based, context-sensitive, and capable of being read — we've crossed a threshold. This isn't just more complex thermodynamics; it's the birth of agency. — Wayfarer

But biology crosses this threshold at the level of the molecule that can be read as a message. Hierarchy theory was how theoretical biologists made sense of the thermodynamical basis of life and mind for a good reason. The genetic code is the easy bit to understand. How genes can be "read/interpreted/implemented" is then what the field focuses on with biosemiosis.

So you can say "agency" is just something absolutely different in kind. But then biology can shrug its shoulders and say they see this magic property in every enzymatic reaction. Codes build the molecular machinery that can clamp chemistry in exactly the right positions so that quantum tunneling takes over and achieves an entropic step that would be "impossible" for regular classical chemistry.

You make the usual big deal that something smells about physicalism because there is this explanatory gap between the quantum and the classical realms of substantial existence. And yet – as I have repeated often enough – biophysics now spells out exactly how life, and therefore mind, exists by being able to sit right on the quasi-classical junction between these "two worlds", mining quantum uncertainty for the purpose of achieving classically stable outcomes.

The explanatory gap instead turns out to be the missing link when it comes to "agency". If quantum physics has a measurement problem because apparently measurements must be something that happen in a human head, well now biology says decoherence of thermal potentials is no big deal as your whole body is a hierarchy of decoherent action. Every part of every cell is dancing the dance of flipping quantum-level switches on entropy flows. We microregulate chemistry right at the nanoscale by "making measurements" in informational fashion.

So step one for biology was realising that life did in fact have its symbol-processing secret. Step two is reconnecting that informational story to the material world as it "truly is". And the topological change in state that is the boundary between the quantum and the classical is exactly where life and mind inserts itself into the thermally-constrained physics of the world.

Thermodynamics of course is being rewritten too. You say:

This isn't just more complex thermodynamics; — Wayfarer

But you are still thinking of thermodynamics as the science of closed systems gone to their heat death equilibrium. The formerly warm bath now forever gone cold. Biologists rely on the new science of dissipative structure and topological order – as cosmologists have also started to do.

A dissipative structure is a system that self-organises so as to be able to accelerate an entropic process. It spends energy on constructing the machinery that will then unlock, or at least waste faster, some environmental entropy gradient. This is an entirely new vision of thermodynamics. One that is more complex in the proper topological sense. Not merely just more complicated.

Collections of things can get complicated. It takes the emergence of hierarchical order to make things more complex – complicated in the causal sense and not just the constituent sense.

So the question can be asked: are you actually dealing with the problems of philosophy? I mean, the problem of agency is surely central to the question of human identity. — Wayfarer

As a natural philosopher, I look for naturalistic accounts of existence. And the great thing is that this approach allows one to explain not just what agency is but why agency needs to be treated as a transcendental property by systems of human social organisation. Transcendence is an essential myth for enabling humans to live as if they were indeed constrained by some higher authority which intends to greatly limit the scope of their personal freedoms.

This is just basic political science. All complex societies need to place even their kings under some higher transcendental principle. It could be commanding gods, it could be the rationality of a constitution, it could be the unquestionable facts of a moral logic. But no large society can exist in stable and productive fashion unless it invents for itself the top-down level of constraints – the bounding information – to which it can swear absolute fealty.

Transcendence needs to be mystical as it has to be "beyond human". With the Enlightenment, we did sort of try just believing in the transcendence of rational pragmatism. But that never really dealt with the way that the same demystifying scientific spirit was busy unlocking the Pandora's box of fossil fuel and all the runaway industrial age thermalisation that could follow. So we half started crafting the well organised society and then that project got run over by the steamrolling economic forces of manufacturing and financialisation.

Economics is about organising the wholesale entropification of the planet. Dollars are how we encode the value of all that results. Rationality opened the door for entropy and it came galloping through. Now we worship entropification in rather direct and obvious fashion. It became the transcendental principle that rules the human world.

So you say I somehow ignore the central problems of philosophy? I as usual reply that I see them as all fully figured out. And barely understood by anyone.

Which is no surprise. Entropy is in charge of the show. Pragmatic rationality had to die to allow that next step in the human condition to be fully realised. Neoliberalism finally stripped away the sensible constraints and we've been off to the races ever since.

And is this the metaphysical project you want to support? Of course not. But then it is not a genie that can be put back in the bottle by a return to the mystic transcendent principle of some earlier agricultural social order where it was just empires of wheat rather than corporations of oil that the entropic bonanza driving the show.

And once you admit something like "desire" into the lexicon — even metaphorically — you're no longer in a purely entropic domain. — Wayfarer

As I say, if I have to wave a specific banner, it would be dissipative structure. That is thermodynamics as a semiotician and hierarchy theorist would recognise it.

As Marcello Barbieri argues, the emergence of biological codes — such as the genetic code — was not merely an incremental extension of chemical complexity but an ontological leap. — Wayfarer

And yet it was Barbieri who correctly focused in on the ribosome as the precise connection between the biological information and its entropic consequences. The molecular machine that makes the molecular machinery.

In stunning self-confirming fashion, the ribosome itself recapitulates the evolution of biosemiosis. The most primitive parts of a ribosome are made out of RNA. And then as it learnt how to start sculpting the proteins it was producing, it added on the simple strands, them the more complex twists, that turned the ribosome from a rudimentary constraining tunnel made of RNA to a fantastic bit of precision engineering with a large collection of proteins components that could add enzymatic steps like splicing and proof-reading the protein strands it was producing.

So you might want to keep finding great gaps in knowledge that speak to there being "two totally different things". But science progresses fast. And biosemiosis cashed out in a big way when we discovered that biology is basically about classical machinery that is able to regulate quantum potentiality for its own private purpose. Life can live on the edge of critical instability – the quasi-classical realm where classical stability is "half-melted" and it cost next to nothing to tip a chemical reaction in some other direction.

Physical existence came with the quasi-classical possibility to be switched on and off in a mechanical fashion. And being possible, this is what had to happen. Systems of switching evolved.

RNA was in at the start as a dual-purpose deal. It was both the code and the structural material – and a bit shit at both. But once a feedback loop got started, these two functions were properly split apart and became the actually separated worlds of DNA and proteins. Coding as informational constraint and building material as structural constraint became divided in terms of the chemistry best suited to serving those functions. A vague causal division became a physically decisive one. The ribosome became its own fossil record that tracked this evolutionary change.

Codes linking signs to meanings are not derivable from physical laws alone. That’s what makes them novel — and marks the boundary between life and non-life, mechanism and meaning. — Wayfarer

How could information regulate matter unless there was this epistemic cut?

What you are quibbling over is to what extent this is also a true ontological cut – as the conventions of realism/idealism, or mind/world, would seem to require of folk who like to consider themselves card-carrying philosophers.

I as usual just argue that holism rules. And that holism itself depends on the ontological fruitfulness of dichotomies. That is symmetry breakings and the topological transitions that symmetry-breaking brings.

If you want to understand semiosis, this is why it winds up back at the triadicity of Peircean logic and hierarchical causality. You start with the "oneness" of vagueness, extract the "twoness" of the dichotomy that can part its waters on complementary fashion, and then watch how it grows to form the causally-balance wholeness that is a state of stable hierarchical order.

You can't keep advancing a semiotic argument here and yet fail to see that semiosis itself puts the dichotomy at the heart of everything. For the physical realm to take a further step up in its topological order, it had to discover the Hegelian "other" which was its own negation. Just by being "the physical" it already spoke to the possibility of "the immaterial".

The task then is not to get strung up in the usual Hegelian simplicity about how the "immaterial" ought to be cashed out. Science's job has been to show how physics is way less material than Newtonianism might have conceived of it, and how life and mind are also way less "spiritual" than the Catholic Church – as an instrument of agriculture-age social power – liked to look at it.

And as I keep saying, biosemiosis can tell you all about how the epistemic cut is actually implemented in everyday flesh and blood terms. It ain't an ontological-level dualism. It is just a very highly developed epistemic dualism. A cut that forced events like RNA's primitive level of functionality being handed over to a proper coding machinery, coupled to a proper structural material, leaving RNA to act as the shuttling messenger between the two sides of this dichotomised equation.

Incredible as it might seem, all the mysteries have just evaporated over the past 20 years when it comes to life and mind science. Natural philosophy – as the systems science legacy of Aristotelean metaphysics – got it right. We won. :razz:

Each individual member of the army must have the desire to follow the plan, and be a member of the army, or else they go rogue. So final cause must be portrayed as inherent to the local freedom of each part, rather than as a global constraint. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a rubbish argument. What distinguishes the coward from the conscientious objector? You are introducing "desire" as a vague preference that could be construed in many ways. What social framing are you going to impose on the situation to make it clear how one is going to interpret the idea of "going rogue"?

My argument is that causality is hierarchical. So finality would "inhere" in the parts – or rather shape the scope of freedoms possessed by those parts – to the degree those parts were actively part of the collective system.

Your mistake is to try to turn this relational story back into the substance-based ontology of the material reductionist.

we must follow the reductionist principles, which are correct, to their base, where we find that something further, the immaterial intent is beyond that, as the thing which creates or produces matter itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Shake hands with God. The prime mover.

No thanks.

The emergence of codes — systems of symbolic representation that are arbitrary, rule-based, and capable of being interpreted — seems to me not just an evolutionary convenience but an ontological shift, a change of register. There’s a crucial distinction here that Howard Pattee describes (here): even if a system is entirely physically describable, its function — as a code, a memory, or a measuring device — is not derivable from that physical description. It requires selection among alternatives, and that involves interpretation, choice, or constraint relative to a purpose. — Wayfarer

Of course. But then how is that any different in terms of baseline causality when the baseline causality itself is a model of such topological emergence?

As I said, the reductionist stumbles where they get to the bit about what grounds any natural system. If you take a simpleminded constructive approach to the existence of things, then even the existence of raw matter becomes impossible to explain. There always has to be the something that already exists to get existence going in more complex ways. And so the reductionist winds up with the essential mystery of how some ultimate simplicity could itself appear out of ... nothing at all.

Physicalism has this huge explanatory gap if your brand of physicalism is reductionist.

A systems causality already accounts for ultimate simplicity as it says that emergent complexity is what simplifies things in the first place. As Peirce puts it, logically the initial conditions of systematic Being is vagueness or firstness. A chaos of fluctuation that is neither simple nor complex. But as constrained regularities start to form, so does the simplicity of fundamental degrees of freedom begin to show.

This is the story of the Big Bang. Hot possibility became constrained by gauge symmetry. Quantum impulse started to fall into simpler and simpler classical shape. The greatest possible such simplicity – the (U)1 gauge of a photon – was the last to emerge and take over the show. A lot of constraints – such as the complicated way that the scalar Higgs field broke the vector electroweak force, with its SU(2) symmetry – needed to evolve so that the Cosmos as a hierarchical structure could strait-jacket quantum possibility as classical electromagnetism and leave us in a Newtonian realm of what seem the simplest possible excitations. The U(1) that speaks to essentially the symmetry of a circle whose only remaining complication is that it can be either a left-handed or right-handed version of that circle.

So if you demand simple beginnings, only top-down constraints can deliver them. And the story of physicalism already has its own stunning "shifts in register". You have the topological phase transition which is the point where the quantum turns emergently into the classical. Or where the Poincare invariance that sets up Special Relativity as a basic global constraint on dimensionality gives way to the emergence of vector gauge particles – like eventually the photon – as an "inner dimension of quantum spin" that classical Poincare symmetry can't in the end constrain away.

The whole of physics is about hierarchies of topological transitions where the addition of further levels of constraint keep making reality more and more atomistic or mechanical in nature. Reductionism seems true as it so wonderfully captures the apparent simplicity of life at our highly constrained scale of being – existence at the level of a world of "middle-sized dry goods". A world of material objects bumping about in an empty vacuum.

But dig into this physicalism and it all starts to fall apart rather quickly. The reductionist has to find this a great mystery. A systems theorist says instead that is only what should be expected. It is hierarchy theory all the way down until you reach Peircean-strength vagueness.

So you are expressing surprise that information can take control in a world based on entropy. But the systems view says that by definition, what is not constrained is free to happen. And if it can happen, it must happen.

So if the physics results in some powerful local entropic gradient – like a sun shining down on an orbiting planet – then if a dissipative structure can arise to "eat" that energy flow, it will. The rocky surface of the Earth already does that job, turning 5000 degree sunlight into 70 degree C infrared radiation being bounce back into outer space. But the evolution of a planetary biofilm – a bacterial self-constructing life form – can manage rather better and take that radiation cooling down to a global average of 20 degrees C.

Given the readiness of the physical world to invest in such biological structure, the telic pressure for life to arise becomes irresistable. Yes, for such an information-based machinery to evolve is quite a leap in terms of complexity. But equally, if it could happen, it had to happen. The desire was there and there was nothing physically-preventing the evolution of that kind of biological hardware.

Physicalism is essentially permissive because it is also essentially constraining. It focuses the definite freedoms of nature by removing all the redundancies. Anything that the historical accumulation of complications does not restrict then become the sharply felt possibilities that get concretely expressed.

All that life and mind do is extend this game from a purely entropic realm – one without a self-model – to the more complex situation of a system – an organism – that uses a self-model so as to arrange the physics of the world to its liking.

The organism is ultimately bound by the same universal imperative – thou shalt entropify. And it develops a sense of self only to the degree that this increases its success as an entropy producer.

Humans prove this fact to the degree we have grown heedlessly self-centred with the most colossal carbon footprints. :grin:

I like this description. Apokrisis is a smart guy. When he says "non-reductionist physicalist model" I think he means one without reference to just the intentionist/teleological explanations this thread is about. Keeping in mind that I often misunderstand him. — T Clark

Hah. I'm usually arguing a case a step more sophisticated. And this is indeed an issue I am wrestling with right now in its most general physicalist sense.

In short, I argue from the point of view of systems science with its basically Aristotelean understanding of hierarchical order and causality. The key thing is how a new state of global order can only emerge by simplifying the local degrees of freedom as the "stuff" from which the new state of global order is being constructed from.

So strong emergence becomes the emergence of a new level of topological organisation that imposes itself on the materiality that underpins it, and thus allows itself to be that which it is. Some globally persistent new state of order.

A simple example is to have the functional thing of an army, you have to turn a random mob of humans into a battalion of soldiers. The army as a "thing" has to be able to shape the parts that make it. Humans in all their free variety have to be turned into the standardised and replaceable units that can't help but then embody the identity of an army as a military machine.

So of course you have to start with some raw material. But that matter has to be transformed by top-down formal and final constraints. And the way this happens is not by the emergence of new properties in some magical fashion. It is by the suppression of the wide and rather random variety of properties that the raw material may contain. You have to knock the rough humanity out of the civilians and limit their behaviour to that befitting their new imposed sense of military purpose. Turn them into the cogs that fit the larger machine.

So for hierarchical order, less is more. Raw matter lacks limitation. Limitation is what then can shape it into something that is like the cells of a body, or the neurons of a brain, or anything else that comes to seem like a unity of purpose expressed as the assembly of standardised parts into a functional whole.

Talk about emergence gets slippery because it is too often framed in a reductionist fashion – a collection of parts already have the necessary properties and so their assembly into a whole is already fore-ordained. The whole adds nothing more in causal terms.

But the systems view says nope. You need global constraints to shape the raw material into the functional units which now come together in a natural way to express that global purpose driving the whole show. It is necessary to form or shape the local degrees of freedom to ensure you already start with the "right stuff".

Emergence strikes the wrong note in these discussions as it implies a flowering of some internal potential. A something from nothing metaphysics that then always begs the metaphysical question.

A systems view flips this on its head. Emergence is really the opposite thing of a narrowing of possibilities at one level of being so that the explosion of possibilities can appear at a new higher level of topological order.

The problem for a bar magnet is that all its dipole iron atoms jiggle freely in all directions. But impose a magnetic field and this global restriction forces them to abandon their former rather random civilian life and line up with a military precision. A constrained dipole can become the organised point in a magnetic field.

So I think that is the root of it. Stop thinking of emergence as the surprise of getting something out of nothing. Think instead about getting something useful or higher level in its order out of the active limitation of the random everythingness of all the other things that raw and unconstrained materiality might be getting up to for not good or functional reason.

Emergence is the collective whole that arises when some source of open-ended potential is turned into a tightly-marshalled collection of degrees of freedom.

And this systems approach applies just as much to physical systems like magnets and phase transitions as its does to living and mindful systems.

The only difference is that physical systems can't encode their global constraints. They just are globally constrained in this emergent fashion. The Big Bang expanded and cooled and went through a rapid series of phase transitions that organised it in the way we know.

Life and mind then lucked into codes – genes and neurons – that could act as internal memories for the kind of constraints that would organise them into organismic selves. They could represent physical constraints – which have to exist concretely in space and time – as information that could now be deployed at any place or moment of the organism's own choosing.

So that was a huge shift from an entropic to an informational system. But then just more of the same in terms of the causal holism that is the deep metaphysical story of any "system" in the sense that Aristotle defined.

What makes a Senior Scientist right and an Associate Professor wrong? — RussellA

Well one is a working physicist and the other is a jobbing philosopher. :grin:

But I'm not rely on single data points. And have you even read Chen's paper?

He is supporting the systems stance I outlined. The problem for classical determinism is that its equations can't predict future states once chaotic complexity or hierarchical information loss intrudes.

If the errors in the prediction increase in exponential time and its accuracy only increases in polynomial time, it is easy to see why classical deteminism falls apart.

This was the lesson of chaos theory. The maths has to switch to the teleological tactic of saying well we just have to understand such systems in terms of their finality – their attractors. The failure of determinism gets excused as a "sensitivity to initial conditions" and swept under the carpet as a measurement problem.

As Chen argues, QM can flip things around as it starts indeterminate but can follow all possible paths to arrive at a collectively determined state. In Darwinian self-organising fashion, the system just finds its own way to where it was always meant to go.

Of course, Chen also then wrongly calls that evidence that quantum theory is "strongly deterministic". Really he should have said it is "strongly finalistic". :wink:

I don't think that the debate about whether the quantum theory implies determinism or not is a secret plot by powerful conspirators — RussellA

The debate ain't no secret. It is tiresomely dominating for cultural reasons that are rather too obvious.

We got locked into this black and white thinking on causality at the point in history when the Scientific Revolution collided with Catholic Church. One side had to defend the sanctity of the imperishable human soul, the other was defending the new holy order of reductionist engineering. Freewill is the banner folk fly so you know which team you are meant to rally around as the true faith.

As a debate, it destroys all that is actually interesting about Nature from a well-informed metaphysical point of view.

Folk line up to chant their chants at every opportunity. I'm already bored and over it. :yawn: