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:

The binary picture of opposites is contrasted by the Taoist picture, which sees opposites as complementary. — Jack Cummins

From a system thinking point of view, you can unpack this by recognising that metaphysics is groping after both the dichotomy that founds difference itself, and then also the hierarchy of growth that can arise out of such a symmetry-breaking and provide a further time-like directionality to the whole she-bang.

So two steps. First break the symmetry in complementary fashion. The most general such fashion in systems thinking would be the rather neutral divide of the break between the local and the global. The parts and the whole.

Then if you have the opposites of the local and global, you can see that is itself already the start of hierarchical directionality. Every level of order can lead to a higher level of order which is more globalised or generalise. And the trick there is that it is also more localised or particularised. Complexity grows in a world where all the component parts are becoming every more individuated and specialised.

In human society, we become socially and economically a more complex system – a globalised planet – by managing to integrate across a larger range of people doing specialised things.

So "good" and "evil" don't really speak to the logic of the dichotomy as there is an implied directionality involved. You are supposed to be moving up the hierarchy of creation by way of personal growth. The aim is to achieve maximum personal freedom within an equally maximal space of collective equality and responsibility.

A social scientist would put that as the directional goal of maximising social capital. The more advanced the hierarchical order, the richer the system is in this regard.

But also, the social scientist could identify the underlying dichotomy. Instead of the rather inflammatory terms of good~evil, the better neutral pairing – which allows both halves of the complementary relation to be valued – is to call it the organising dichotomy of competition~cooperation. A society thrives when it sees both sides of this particular equation being maximised in co-creation fashion.

So traditional religions try to capture this kind of systems truth in their language. And the more growth oriented societies focus on the hierarchical direction things ought to be going in, a more static society would focus instead on the complementary balance which is the dichotomy that keeps everything the most stable.

The moral is that everyone is groping after a systems understanding of reality. But this gets murky when people don't quite see how dichotomies and hierarchies are two separate steps towards the final story.

And even the final story becomes itself just a fresh level for a next step in the emerging hierarchical order. As for instance whether you think a society ought to be prioritising growth or stability. Which of these goals is the greater good or evil?

Quantum foam is only a theory — RussellA

But then you have Don Lincoln saying...

The quantum foam isn’t just theoretical. It is quite real. One demonstration of this is when researchers measure the magnetic properties of subatomic particles like electrons. If the quantum foam isn’t real, electrons should be magnets with a certain strength. However, when measurements are made, it turns out that the magnetic strength of electrons is slightly higher (by about 0.1%). When the effect due to quantum foam is taken into account, theory and measurement agree perfectly — to twelve digits of accuracy.

There is no current certainty that the theory of quantum mechanics implies an indeterminate universe. — RussellA

One can always concoct conspiracy theories about how quantum theory is secretly deterministic, but you have to go to rather silly extremes these days. Like superdeterminism.

Much better to accept that it is the indeterminism that means there is something to then become the determined. Everythingness can be constrained to somethingness. Reality can be thermodynamically decohered to the point where it seems perfectly determinate to us in the classical limit.

So what is metaphyically fundamental about reality is not that it is either determinate or indeterminate. It is that it in fact can speak to these two extremes as its dichotomous limits of Being.

And science then frames that in usefully measurable ways. As it does with Heisenberg uncertainty and Planck's constant. We can be certain about where on the spectrum of certainty~uncertainty we might currently place some object or process. Such as even the start and end of the Cosmos itself.

What struck me about josekis is how the patterns develop in a sort of fractal like manner obeying not just the global constraint that good moves should maximize the chances of winning the game (which now can be quantified fairly accurately by neural-networks like AlphaGo) but, at intermediate levels of analysis, by carefully, and in contextually sensitive ways, balancing the proximal goals of securing territory, creating thickness, gaining influence, maintaining access to the center, getting sente (that is, being the first player able to abandon the local fight and take a big point elsewhere on the board), etc. — Pierre-Normand

Isn't what you are describing all about evolving the board to a state of balanced criticality – critical opalescence or the edge of chaos?

So game starts in a neutral state where neither side can make big wins and just want to get their pieces out onto the board in a way that minimises the risk of big losses. The aim is to work everything towards a state of sweeping dynamism after it starts in a state of minimal strategic advantage.

You build up a position to the point that it is extremely tense and one right move can send your opponent's position crumbling.

Fractal statistics describes this state of affairs. One grain of sand can spark the landslide. The world has to be made tippable, and then you start trying to tip in. We are back to dynamical bifurcations in phase space.

In Nature, it is instability that is the resource that life seeks. Gasoline is great as it explodes. Or rather, it can explode in a really bad way if it goes up in your face, and a really good way as it is a cheap and concentrated energy to power your car.

So again, this highlights the contrast between the usual mechanical notion of natural cause and the physical reality of natural cause. The Newtonian view prizes stability – of atoms, of void, of law – while the Darwinian understands that scalefree criticality – randomness on all scales – is the secret sauce of existence.

A system is dead when it has gone to Gaussian equilibrium. It is just a passive and exhausted stuff that fluctuates around its mean. But any living or dynamically evolving process is balancing itself on the knife-edge of growth represented by the fractal or powerlaw attractor that is scalefree criticality.

In a critical state, small things are always happening but really big things as well. And that leads to rational strategies in the kinds of games where we must steadily develop positions that tilt the odds in our direction. At first, mimimise the errors. Later, be ready to pounce with the big risks.

Kauffman spent a lot of time modeling this kind of connectivity story with his critical Boolean networks.

But the point here is about our metaphysics of causality.

Newtonians believe in stable foundations that are then – rather mystically – caused to move, change and evolve.

Darwinians take the opposite tack of believing that radical instability is what grounds the semiotic possibility of constraints being imposed on a system to give it a desired direction or tendency. Life and mind evolve to live on the scalefree knife-edge as that is where the maximum power to act is to be found.

An organism exists because it can put itself back together just slightly faster than it falls apart. The second law says the body must erode. But the larger view of thermodynamics taken by biosemiosis says that this just means the contrary purpose thus taken by Nature is to out-grow the erosion. To become, in a word, a dissipative structure operating as far away from equilbrium as it can get.

This is what makes the process of natural selection teleological. It's not just a passive "physical" environment that exerts a selective pressure. It's the already structured part of this environment—the constructed niche—that pushes back against, or facilitates, the organisms already active (and teleologically oriented) attempts to thrive (most often exercised unknowingly, as you noted). — Pierre-Normand

Yep. This is a hierarchy theory point that is almost universally overlooked.

A hierarchy – in the natural philosophy view – is a system of constraints that is producing or shaping up its own degrees of freedom. So it takes the messy world and simplifies it in ways that create the grain of action which then exhibits the unrelenting tendency of recreating the system of constraints which are forming that grain of action.

It is a self-organising feedback loop between the top-down formal cause and the bottom-up constructive cause. The fit between the two starts off loose and sloppy at first, but if it has any "competitive advantage", it will keep evolving towards a tighter and tighter connection.

A simple example is turning people into soldiers so that there can be an army. The army exists as some accumulated set of constraints on human behaviour. History has shown that the better organised the army – the more it has the "right stuff" in terms of its component parts – the better it serves its function. And so as an ecological niche, it is shaped to prune away all the rich free variety of each fresh intake of raw recruits so as to mould them into the kinds of folk that just can't help recreate a militaristic environment when they come together.

So hierarchies exist in nature by being able to shape their own simple parts. And in mass producing these functional units, they remove all the larger free variety that may have existed beforehand. They erase their own past when it comes to the question of what causes them to be the way that they are. A recruit may have a childhood, a past life, but Newtonianism can't just model that and show how all that determined the person's future path after they were put through the transforming machinery which wanted to turn them into something else – just a general purpose unit of a higher level of human social organisation.

In physics, we call this erasure of initial conditions a phase change, or topological transition, or spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Norton's dome is the classic illustration of where determinism breaks down in the usual Newtonian notion of causal determinism. The question of what fluctuation nudged the ball down the slope becomes flipped to the other question of what fluctuation could not have knocked the ball off its precarious perch. The future outcome was always definite and foretold, the initiating event always as mysterious and uncertain as it could get.

So in general, nature has a hierarchical causality. It is a confluence of bottom-up construction and top-down constraint. And the top-down really matters as it is what shapes up the parts making the whole. It is what makes the atoms that compose the system. Precisely as quantum field theory tells us as a story of topologically emergent order.

Is there any evidence that the universe is probabilistic? — RussellA

Physics is based on the triad of Planck constants, c, G and h. So add h to cG to complete the picture here. What happens to the classical description of an object falling under gravity when the scale of the world becomes either extremely hot or extremely small? Any certainty dissolves into the vagueness of quantum foam.

Put simply: Teleological explanation requires a fixed end or final cause. But in a probabilistic system, the future is open at every step. To say that events are happening as a means to reaching some future state C, is nonsensical considering state C isn't even guaranteed. — tom111

In any probabilistic system of interest – ie: one that has the regularity to qualify as a system composed of its degrees of freedom – its destiny will be constrained by a global structural attractor. So shake any bag of degrees of freedom and they will arrive at some equilibrium value where continued change ceases to be meaningful change. You can describe the system simply in terms of its macrostate – its pressure and temperature, for example.

So roll the dice one time and its free individual action seems to have no teleology imposing on the randomness of its outcome. But in the long run, the statistics have to conform to a macroscopic attractor state. The casino always wins in the end as local randomness winds up as global order.

Frank's Common Patterns of Nature is a great paper on this – https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3507

Whether you consider the local degrees of freedom to be "random" or "mechanical" in some metaphysical sense, it doesn't make a difference. Change is only change until it thermalises. After that it becomes change that makes no further difference from the higher perspective which is the "system" that is the embodiment of some set of constraints imposing on the degrees of freedom.

That might then be not what you mean by "teleology" of course. But tough. Systems metaphysics trumps Newtonian metaphysics precisely by making teleology make natural sense.

If Nature is probabilistic at root, the usual way of thinking about causality is up for a more sophisticated rendering. :grin:

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury? — Wayfarer

Yep.

Would that comprise an 'overall increase of intelligibility'? Does that sound Hegelian? (Then again Peirce professed affinities with Hegel.) — Wayfarer

Peirce called it the “growth of concrete reasonableness”. You get an evolution of the Cosmos that is the move from spontaneous chance to organised habit.

Don't they have to exist before they can stumble across anything? — Wayfarer

Language forces us into linear argument. That is both its strength and its weakness as a tool of thought. It is bad at dealing with the complexity of actual real world causality. But it is great for enforcing a mechanical mindset - which was useful even in those first cells that wanted to encode genetic programs to construct their molecular machinery.

Likewise, 'desire' can't help but sound teleological or anthropomorphic. Perhaps 'tendency' might be preferable. — Wayfarer

I have frequently noted that systems thinkers like Salthe make that distinction between tendencies, functions and purpose - three grades of semiosis to cover physics, biology and neurology.

For that matter, the capitalised Being above — Wayfarer

I was talking about Being in the classical sense of the source of fundamental existence.

My argument - as you know - is that semiosis is the mechanism that produces Being. So the cosmos, life and mind are all based on the one triadic causal logic. They are all best understood from the point of view of dissipative structure or topological order.

But life and mind add something to the mix, and that is an internal predictive model of the world. And this indeed completes the physics in a neatly ironic fashion as it is the existence of entropy that demands its dialectical “other” of negentropy or information. Life and mind had to be possible because a mindlessly dissipating universe could - by dichotomous symmetry - become entrained to an “external” control … if that control was encoded in a fashion that put it inside the body of an organism.

So this - as I’ve said often enough - is the fun realisation. Life and mind are implicit in the thermodynamic order of the universe as once the universe is a concrete system of dissipation, this in itself generates the conditions for life and mind to appear as the apparent negation of everything that mindless world stands for.

Symbol processing is inevitable once a noisy world creates the contrast it can stand against.

Physics isn’t in conflict with the existence of life and mind. It was the entropic move needed to make possible the informational counter-move.

From the triadicity of the hierarchy, flows the fourthness of the transfinite landscape. — Arcane Sandwich

I appreciate the thought but there is a technical difficulty that is key. My approach is Peircean and so although one, two, three is being counted off as a sequence, each next level incorporates what has come before it. So oneness is the line, twoness is the plane that includes now both length and area, threeness is the volume that includes length and area as now part of a volume. Which means that a fourthness has to continue this incorporation in a way that makes some useful sense.

Sure, you could go 4D here. Invoke a hypersphere in which the unit sphere is embedded. You could call that the infinite beyond that is some candidate next step. But my Peircean systems approach truncates at a threeness for the same kind of reasons that network theory says all possible networks can be simplified to networks of nodes with three links. Four, five or more links can reduce to 3-adic structure. And then 2-adic, or 1-adic are just to few. Therefore reality - in the logical sense of a space of relations – actually just is 3-adic as its simplest possible form.

So the mental image has to one of the number of internal convolutions involved, not some number line extension. What we are counting is the intricacy of the relational structure. And any fourth level would have to incorporate the first three in some further holistic sense.

Proceed one more step, and now you are about as aware as a rock: you have removed Firstness, you have removed your Physical First Person Perspective on the world, and it just seems like "A Thing, In Itself". — Arcane Sandwich

You see how this works in the same triadic fashion. Firstness is just the bare thing of first person response. Secondness is the second person point of view of two first persons in some immediate relation. Then the third person point of view is what emerges from innumerable such conversations – the generalisation over all possible first person views and the dyadic interactions that could result from there being two points of view.

The third person point of view becomes the one that incorporates or contextualises all the points of view now appearing within it. It now shapes the individual viewpoints in a positive fashion, imposing its educated structure on what would otherwise remain a confused or vague cacophony of hesitant opinion. Voices in the dark and going nowhere in particular.

So in the definite sense, the first person view doesn't even exist outside of the context of a third person framing. But when random ideas meet some dichotomous resistance, and when that clashing of views develops into a habitual community structure of understanding, then you arrive at the thirdness that incorporates everything to become the final historical something.

How should ontological concepts work? Presumably given the complexity of reality, top-level concepts should be wide and general, and yet because of this there will be significant limitations on their explanatory power. So for Aristotle you "begin" with the concepts of act and potency (and already you have a tension between two principles rather than a unitary atom). Being broad, they explain everything and nothing. Or taken individually, half of everything and half of nothing. But then the diverse kinds of act and potency flower within each concept; the appearances do not force us outside of the basic, broad concepts (unless one wants to see the interaction of act and potency as a third sort of thing, which apokrisis may be able to speak to). If not everything is a nail, then the top-level explanations must be able to generically accommodate a large variety of diverse phenomena. — Leontiskos

Aristotle is a systems guy and the systems answer is always triadic. This thread seems another example of how everyone arrives at some dichotomy – as symmetries must be broken to create realities – and then either tries to be reductionist and treat only one arm of the dichotomy as "the fundamental reality", or instead knows how to go on and see how that which gets forcefully separated is then also that which gets freely mixed. From the duality of the dichotomy flows the triadicity of the hierarchy. You get some pair of complementary limits on Being, and then the space of concrete possibility that those limits create.

It is like how black and white are the extremes of luminance that then bring with them all the possible shades of grey. You don't have anything until you have that possibility of a symmetry-breaking contrast – the first action of being a little lighter and so equally, a little less dark. And then from there, you have a division that can grow in scalefree fashion. You can keep going towards a state of absolute brightness ... to the degree you are continuing to go away from the counter-possibility of absolute darkness.

Neither black nor white are primary. Indeed, as absolute bounds, neither is realisable as a state of being as to arrive at either destination would mean losing all contact with the other that must be being measurably left behind in the rear view mirror. So an actual reduction to one or other state is impossible. It is the antithetical relation between the two – the actualisation of a world with this particular structure of contrast - which is what a reality is founded upon. It is the emergence of a concrete middle of all the possible shades of grey which winds up as the place we all want to talk about.

This is clearer in Aristotle's hylomorphism than being~becoming as we have the hierarchical sandwich of potential, actual and necessary. There is "material" possibility that interacts with the formal cause of structural necessity. What physics now calls the interaction of quantum indeterminacy and topological order. And out of that interaction between the randomness of action, and the need for it to become at least statistically organised as a global attractor, you get the substantiality that ontology seeks. You get a system where global constraints emerge and a free potential is shaped into some set of concrete "degrees of freedom". All the shades of grey that white and black paint can mix. All the fundamental particles that can exist as localised excitations under the constraints of gauge symmetry breaking.

So always our inquiry into the nature of Nature is going to arrive at the central logic of symmetry-breaking. Some kind of dialectical divide where the "everythingness" of an unformed potential begins to grow a self-grounding split. It will start to head in one direction – the apparent "primal act" or fluctuation – and that in itself is already the co-creation of whatever can count as the other direction it is then leaving behind. Thesis and antithesis is revealed as soon as there is any "act" at all.

So the symmetry that gets broken is the potential. The act that breaks it is already in fact a self-grounding relation. The background on which the mark is being made is being made along with the mark. And then the broken symmetry is where all this has got past being just a fluctuation and become the wholeness of a growing system, kept alive by its own capacity for a persistent dynamical balance.

A whorl of turbulence spins up into existence and wants to keep growing. It turns a laminar flow into a rotational flow. If it keeps growing, it both gets larger and also starts to break up into the scalefree complexity of a chaotic turbulence. There is a phase transition where all the smooth laminar flow is lost and the stream is just every shade of vortical motion. The action achieves its most extreme state of asymmetry. Not just a little bit different as one passing knot of turbulence but as much difference as the world of the flow can contain.

This is the fractal distribution of matter and energy that best characterises Nature. We see it in the Cosmic Web. It is the new "better" explanation for dark energy. Symmetry gets broken. Potency gives expression to its primal act - a Planck-scale fluctuation. But then that act isn't complete until it has grown to be expressed across all possible scales of being. As a division of figure and ground, it has to become a universalised motif – the gravitationally swirling structure that is vortexes of material dissipation over all scales from spinning stars and black holes out to galactic clusters and beyond.

So actuality arises out of the interaction between material potential – the possibility of an action with a direction – and structural necessity. The constraints that must emerge once every kind of action is trying to actualise itself and so cancelling away most of the other available possibilities. There is a contest and some statistically-constrained regime emerges as the global state of the system. All that remains in terms of the local action are the shades of grey or fundamental particles that are permitted by the self-grounding system. The world that has grown itself in a free way that expresses its central organising dichotomy over a hierarchy of all dimensional scales.

What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close). He ends up using different language to say the same essential thing. — Leontiskos

A key difference would be that Peirce makes formal cause clearly immanent rather than leaving it sounding transcendent. You don't need an outside mind imposing a design that is "good". The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist. There is an optimising principle at work. But it is self-grounding. It is whatever is left after all else has got cancelled away because it didn't really work.

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

Assemblage theory is another way of talking about dissipative structure theory – the naturalness of fractal or scalefree hierarchical organisation. It is for good reason the flattest ontology as it just is the simplest statistical pattern that Nature could be organised by.

Nature – as a flow of entropy – is organised by its information, its boundary constraints. And the simplest state of such a flow – the one requiring the least information to be stored – is one of open log/log fractal growth. Mountains and coastlines are fractal structures as they represent a dynamical balance of accumulation and erosion over a wide hierarchy of spatiotemporal scales.

Every point of a landscape is either a little more built up or a little more broken down than its immediate neighbourhood. From there, it can either become a little more like or unlike that local context. Revert to the norm or become more exceptional. Repeat that easy to remember/low information distinction over all scales – from minutes and inches to eons and continents – and you get a fractally-organised world.

Clouds and ducks don't look much alike, so you have to show how they can both be accounted for ("generated" perhaps), how using the same underlying mechanisms can produce endless forms most beautiful. — Srap Tasmaner

If dissipative structure is the flat ontology of Nature – one based on the ur-dichotomy of entropy~information – then we can account for life and mind as another step on top of that where the information regulating the dissipation is moved to be inside an organism rather than standing out at the global boundaries of the physics as a whole.

So organisms arose when they stumbled across the further trick of encoding information using genes, neurons, words and numbers. Organisms could form semiotic models of their world as they might wish it to be. They could mechanically switch the entropy flows to construct their bodies and even their local environments. Bacteria brought about the Gaian revolution of a world with a carbon cycle, steady temperature and a high oxygen level simply by being able to encode the right metabolic algorithms. So even a little coding power could completely remake the chemistry of a whole planet, bringing it under the control of the desires of its biology to have its optimum growth conditions.

Does metaphysics get this fact? Well, it seems to lag well behind the science. In principle, life and mind just are expressions of the generalised cosmic desire to optimise dissipation. The Cosmos does its best but is hampered by the fact that all the information handling the dissipation is as distributed about the environment as it can get. The Cosmos operates at its simplest level - the flatness of assemblage theory (as another name for the Prigogine's dissipative structure science). But life and mind arose to take advantage of that flat ground to become its own hierarchy of semiosis – of encoded dissipation regulation – that could grow vastly more complex.

So the same dichotomy is at the root. Entropy~information. But information moved from the generality of some statistical erosion~accumulation pattern formation to an organismic self-model which started making things happen in an agential goal-oriented sense.

Disorder only ever existed in the context of order. And biology is part of Nature because it applies more order to the business of disordering. In some ways it is causally very different. In the larger way, it is more of the same, just a way to put some greater distance between sources and sinks. The information is packaged and its resulting waste more widely dispersed.

The 3 axes of the model are communism/equality, individualism/freedom, and authoritarianism/stability. I thought a lot about whether these 3 axes are really the correct ones. Are these 3 axes really mutually exclusive and complete? — Brendan Golledge

I would take the systems science view on this. Society in general is based on the "political" dichotomy of competition~cooperation. The system needs to be tuned so there is a broad level of global cooperation – a system that everyone agrees they are part of and bound by – but also still have a creative local freedom. To work well, the individual should be as free as possible to make intelligent and adaptive choices.

So there is a general balancing act between global cooperation and local competition. A hierarchical order that expresses a scalefree or fractal balance. That is, the dichotomy is being implemented with equal strength across all levels of social structure.

If democracy is the general mechanism for balancing the needs of the collective against the wishes of the individual, then a well-balance society has families being democratic (rather than authoratarian or communist), as well as its governing elite also acting democratically in their relations with each other. You have ministers sat around a collectively voting cabinet table. Or even nations voting collectively at UN assemblies.

If democracy is your balancing mechanism, then changes in level, changes in scale, should make no difference to the amount of democracy being shown. In scale symmetry terms, it should be a flat and constant balance across all levels of the social hierarchy.

That gives us a feel for what – in hierarchy terms – an ideal balance would look like. If democracy is the balance metric you like, then the look of a society ought to be vanilla in those terms. Every higher level mimics the balance of interaction found at any lower level.

But if we dig a little deeper, a human society is not just a political but – perhaps more fundamentally – also an economic structure. Now what is having to be balanced is not the political dialectic of competition and cooperation, but the economic dialectic of capital and labour.

However once again, this is a dynamic that ought to be organised in a scalefree hierarchical fashion for the same reasons. A system must cohere, but it must also be free to act. A system has to hang together in a long-run stable fashion, but it must also have enough plasticity or immediate freedom to adapt and change. And a system that wants to optimise itself has to thus express that balance between stability and flexibility, conformity and independence, across all its physical scales.

So when it comes to the economic foundation of a modern society, we would be looking for a relation between capital and labour that has that same kind of scalefree balance. Money free to act equally smartly whether it is being spent at the family or the national, and even planetary, level.

This reframes the trichotomy as a collection of dichotomies. A modern society is having to balance both its politics and its economics. Both the information it uses to organise itself – the democratic distribution of choice – and the entropy it must consume to exist. That is, the economic distribution of resources.

Information and entropy are two sides of the same coin. Each is about the other. So politics and economics are connected at the hip – or probably should be. Although they can seem to be different conversations.

Anyway, systems science sets us up with a consistent central criteria. The idea of an idealised balance where both information and entropy are matchingly scalefree as an expression of social order. From top to bottom, everything looks the same even if we zoom in or zoom out in scale. No one is winning or losing in unbalanced style, even if governments can make national level choices with national level budgets while families make their household level choices with household level budgets.

Now stack all this up against the usual authoritarian~communist dichotomy. Does it become anything more than two ways that the scalefree social hierarchy, with its need to glue politics and economics together, gets tipped out of its optimised balance?

Democracy is just our general term for how a society delivers some appropriate degree of collectivised and informed choice. We have the political democracy of the ballot box and the economic democracy of the marketplace. An actual machinery for delivering self-organising balances at any scale of a society.

Socialist states can work to the degree they are needed to counteract the problems of a society gone out of balance in terms of labour unfairness. Authoritarian states – like Singapore – can work to the degree they tackle social problems like a lack of collective identity or a need to direct capital into nation-building projects.

So I don't see communism or authoritarianism as actual alternative political systems. In practice, they might be directions to tilt the general democratic and market balance for strategic reasons. A way to steer the ship.

But to the degree they over-ride the principles of scalefree hierarchical order, they are becoming systems that would institutionalise a bad balance. They are setting themselves up for systems failure.

The same can be said about the world's supposed "democracies" as well. If wealth or power accumulates in a bloated elite, a corrupt oligarchy, etc, then these democracies and their free markets are also failing the systems science ideal.

Again, the basic social good to be delivered by a human social system is a fruitful balance of competition and cooperation. Political and economic theory then try to deliver these things. And hierarchy theory gives you a picture of what a well-balanced social order would then look like. Zoom in or zoom out at any level and the two imperatives would look always equally in balance across all the scales of that society.

The few rules in the axiomatic theory will not succeed in decompressing themselves back into the full reality. What facts from the full reality that they fail to incorporate does not say particularly much about these facts (deemed "chance", "random", ...). They rather say something about the compression technique being used, which is the principle that chooses what facts will be deemed predictable and what facts will be deemed mere "chance". — Tarskian

I was targeting a deeper point about the reversibility of mechanics and the irreversibility of nature.

Mechanics seeks time reversible descriptions of nature. It seems to succeed which then makes the thermodynamic arrow of time a fundamental problem. So how to fix that?

The point I would make is that lossy compression is just a mechanical sieving that involves literally throwing information away. So the claim is the information did exist, it has merely been discarded and that is how any irreversibility arises.

But the other approach is says rather than actuality being discarded, the story is about possibilities getting created. As the past is being fixed as what is now actual, future possibilities explode in number.

This is what chaos theory gets at. Standard three body problem stuff. The current state of the system can only give you so much concrete information to make your future forecast. Time symmetry is broken by indeterminancy at its start rather than by information discard by its end.

Basically your efforts at future prediction execute in polynomial time but your errors at each step accumulate in exponential time.

Aaronson did a nice article – Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity

Quanta also – Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge

But then after arriving at a proper model of chaos, one can continue on to a larger story of order out of chaos – or the topological order of dissipative structure. The idea of the mechanical sieve and its lossy compression comes back in over that foundational chaos in the form of evolution or a Darwinian selection filter.

If a system has some kind of memory, this starts to select for possibilities that coordinate. Sand being blown in the Saharan wind can start to accumulate as a now a larger structure of slowly shifting dunes. A lid gets put on random variety and so out of smaller scale chaos, or degrees of freedom, grows larger scale order, or a context of variety-taming constraints.

So the holistic picture speaks to irreversible mechanics as something rather like ... exploding quantum wavefunction indeterminancy and constraining quantum thermal decoherence.

You get the complete causal story by being able to point to the fundamentally random, and even chaotic, scale of being that then got topologically tamed by its own higher scale dynamics. A lossy algorithm is what developed over time due to natural selection. A mechanics is what emerged.

When a compression algorithm forgets particular facts, — Tarskian

Now you are making points about variety in types of compression algorithms, not about general principles.

But then again, it also does not mean that the information forgotten in the compression is "accidental" or "random". It does not even need to be. There is nothing random about arithmetical reality, while it is still full of unpredictable facts. — Tarskian

The picture I have in mind goes beyond just a lossy compression - although that is a way to view it. In the hierarchy theory view, the determined and the random become the global constraints and the local freedoms. The point of this difference is that the freedoms rebuild the constraints. They are the two sides of the one whole and hence have a holistic completeness.

Steven Frank wrote this nice paper which indeed argues your point that it doesn’t matter if the fine grain is considered to be deterministic or random. What matters is that microstates can be described by macroscopic constraints as they are freedoms that can’t help but rebuild their global equilibrium.

Similarly, there is absolutely no need for the physical universe to be random, for it to be largely unpredictable. It could be, but it does not have to be. — Tarskian

It makes more sense to see randomness and determinism as the complimentary limits on being. Each limit can be extremitised, but only in the effective sense, not in an absolutist sense.

Incompleteness raises much angst in the determinist. But It only takes an infinitesimal grain of chance to complete things.

If the forward direction of a phenomenon incorporates information that cannot be decompressed from its theory, then it will also be impossible to decompress the information needed to reverse it, rendering the phenomenon irreversible.

The only problem I have, is that this view makes the details of the compression algorithm (the underlying theory) a bit too fundamental to my taste. — Tarskian

This is why natural philosophy also recognises accidents or spontaneity in its metaphysics.

The ball perfectly poised on Norton’s dome can never start to roll down the slope if we were to believe only in Newton’s algorithmic description.

But the dynamicist will say that in a poised system, any fluctuation at all is going to break the symmetry spontaneously. There is always going to be some vibration. Any vibration. We can call that a determining factor but really it is just the inevitability of there being an accident. The accidental can’t be in fact removed from the world, even if that is not what axiomatic determinism wants us to believe.

It is circular reasoning. — schopenhauer1

It is the dialectical reasoning of the systems science view. The complexity of a system arises from the fruitful balancing of its contrary impulses. Rights and responsibilities are one such way of capturing the essence of modern social structure.

I only used your emotive jargon - burdens - to make the connection to your own reductionist position. You can see that burdens are really just the global responsibilities that can justify a person also having their particular local rights.

Speaking more generically, a system is a hierarchical balance of the dichotomy that is constraints and freedoms.

So at every level of natural order, we have the same general idea of a balancing of top-down long-run constraints and bottom-up constructive or creative freedoms.

What you call burdens are in fact the constraints that shape up a society as a collection of individuals with their freedoms. The freedoms that are meaningful and pragmatic as they are how the society can continually renew its own globally persisting being.

But you don’t seem to have an understanding of nature as a developmental or self-organising system. This is why your logic is so broken.