The "Golden Rule' sums it up. Although I think it would be better formulated as "Do unto others as they would want you to do unto them". Individual flourishing is important and so is community flourishing. If you flourish at the expense of others then you harm the flourishing of the community. — Janus

Exactly. Flourishing is a balance of two imperatives that at first blush seem antithetical. But arranged in the architecture of a hierarchy, we can see the natural logic. A social system seeking to maximise its growth potential and adaptive flexibility must be "good" at creating suitably motivated individuals within a fairly constraining community. What is being optimised is a balance between local independence and global dependence. Each in themselves is the opposite of the other. But each also provides what the other one is missing.

The ideal situation is where both sides of the bargain feel the deal being struck is fair. A win-win. I get to do anything I can imagine wanting to do ... to the degree that I can also rely on everyone else being there to bail me out when I stuff up. And everyone else says I'm free to stuff up as much as I like, but there is a limit to the bail-out that the community is willing to provide. In the long run, my free action has to be judged as being a positive contribution to the community.

The end is survival and flourishing. — Janus

And in biology, death and decay are part of the cycle. Or part of the great re-cycling. :grin:

Nature has to have a way to break down its own adaptive structure as it has a habit of becoming too optimised, too adapted.

You couldn't have an efficient process of evolution unless bodies got routinely destroyed to make way for the fresh contest of a new generation of gene recombination. The big step from simple single cell life – based on cloning and gene exchange even across species – was the ability to cleanly separate an immortal germline from the mortal body.

And even at the level of ecosystems, the old eventually must give way to the new. You have the canonical life-cycle that is immaturity, maturity and senescence.

To be young is to be growing so fast and furiously that many mistakes get made, but also many mistakes are recoverable. Growth papers over the accidents and starts to establish the smart habits that define the mature organism. But individual organisms and even whole species and ecosystems can become over-adapted to a way of life they have co-created with their environment. Senescence becomes the stage of life where the organism/ecosystem has become so wedded to predictable habits that they are both super-efficient but also fatally brittle.

A mature forest is a vast maze of stable relations that recycles itself so efficiently that it produces its own soil. It even makes its own rain. It is the opposite of wasteful and has arranged the world exactly to its wants. Even lightning strikes and forest fires are incorporated into its collective genetic scheme – its global identity.

But then there are always perturbations larger than its own adaptive time frame. A volcano erupts and temperatures drop. Or a land bridge emerges and new kinds of animals or pests arrive. The forest might be flourishing and supremely optimised. But in achieving this high state of efficiency and purpose, it then lacks the furious growth and wild experiment that is natural to youth. Suddenly it is in a world it no longer knows and has lost the capacity to learn about.

But nature rolls on. A life runs its course, always aiming for complete mastery over the world that it finds. And it all works until it suddenly doesn't. The carcass is recycled and the game of life is renewed.

I like this view as it says each stage of life is optimised in its own obvious way. We are immature – and that is itself already an optimal balance between clumsy mistakes and necessary life lessons. We are mature, which sounds really good, but now also a mix of mistakes and lessons. It is only the proportion of the two that should have progressed in some sensible fashion. We should be highly effective but also able to pick ourselves up off the floor.

Then senescence isn't actually failure as yet. It is becoming so well rooted and wise in the ways of a world we have helped construct that we are highly efficient and don't need to sweat the small stuff anymore. However, that complete adaptation to some knowable horizon can only extend so far into the future. And something will always come over the horizon to knock us down.

At the ecosystems level, it really is left to chance – vagaries at the geological level of weather, plate tectonics and crashing asteroids. But at the level of individual members of species, nature throws in some planned obsolescence too. Hearts, teeth and hormones and other things don't have to be built to last forever. Especially if the vagaries of disease, famine and accident are likely to take you out of the game anyway.

If you are aiming at balance, then for you balance is good. — Leontiskos

You are still strawmanning. My position is irreducibly complex and not - like yours - fundamentally simplistic.

So balances can be “good” or “bad”. And the difference? One in some quantifiable sense works and the other doesn’t. A typical way to quantify this would be survival. The good balance has the further fact that it lasts. It persists. It is successful in perpetuating a state of homeostatic identity even in the face of environmental perturbation, etc.

It's as if you think that shades of grey are all that is needed to explain the world, and I think we need colors. — Leontiskos

But what are colours but exactly the kind of opponent channel processing that my dichotomising approach specifies? Red is not-green and yellow is not-blue. Hue discrimination is the complexity built up from having three frequency sampling forms of retinal cone cells wired up with a dichotomising circuit logic. Blue is blue to the extent yellowness is lacking. And vice versa.

You plucked an example from the air and it completely proves my point. The logic of dichotomies is a basic fact of perceptual science.

With that objection and one or two others aside, I see nothing overly wrong with a "balance" approach to ethics or metaphysics. Such is soundly Aristotelian. — Leontiskos

That is gracious of you. In return, I think you sometimes almost get what Aristotle was wrestling with in trying to flesh out his hylomorphism and four causes.

That's possible, but I have no reason to believe it, and the reason this discussion can go nowhere is because your esoteric theory is opaque to those who have not spent a large amount of time with it. — Leontiskos

Or you haven’t spent any time studying the science of anything and it’s all too overwhelming. No social science. No neurobiology. No evolutionary biology. No systems science or complexity theory. :grin:

"Optimize" how? This is a value-laden term, just like your earlier invocation of "Darwinian success." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Optimise speaks to the idea of finding a middle path between dichotomised limits. Finding balance within a system of dynamics.

You may read it as finding the best path. But I am using it as meaning the most balanced path. The one that emerges out of the confluence of opposed forces.

And this is simply how Nature works. Physics is based on the finality expressed as the principle of least action. The Lagrangian. The greatest distance covered with the least effort.

If it is a laden term, it is laden with physical realism. Finding the trajectory which balances out the competing forces is the end towards which Nature universally tends.

Good and bad is just a world described as a single fixed direction. There is no balancing described and so no flexibility or dynamism. No emergence or evolution. Nothing of interest or complexity involved at all.

As metaphysics, it makes no actual sense of the world as we know it or life as we live it. Folk can’t optimise their behaviour in terms of being some balance of being reasonably good and reasonably bad.

Of course, we all end up having to arrive at some notion of that balancing act. Pragmatism rules. But all the talk of good versus bad just frames life as a guilty confusion. A constant battle with our failure to meet some impossible and unliveable standard.

No wonder people need therapy if they have been brought up like that. Never good enough and just having to trust their sins will be forgiven. They will ride the up elevator rather than the down one at the final curtain call. Their life will have been weighed in terms of good and bad and they did just enough to tip the balance. Grudgingly allowed to join the club of the good, the true, the perfect, the beautiful, the divine.

Value-laden thinking is the assumption that reality is monistic - to be weighed against a standard measure. But Nature tells us that reality is always relativistic - some balance that is always complementary. An optimisation of two “goods”.

Society is good when it is civilised. When it understands that it is good to be both competitive and cooperative in one’s behaviour. Optimisation is then being flexibly positioned between those two general extremes in a way that seems most appropriate to some particular occasion.

Good versus bad admits to no flexibility. Thoughtful choice isn’t even required of its adherents. It only seems a pragmatically useful idea if you want to run some hierarchy of subjugation. You run the show and you tell people how high they need to jump.

You are using paradox to argue against itself. You say liberalism is contradicted by the fact that complete individual freedom isn't even desirable. And that slavery is not so bad because the owner is incentivised to take good care of their property.

Sure, these are points. But where they should lead on to is my general point that any form of political or economic organisation has to have an organismic balance. Rather than dealing in baffling contradictions, we need to be dealing in the clarity of complementary balances.

Argument by paradox is a very normal tactic. But it isn't useful. It should just be telling you that you are stuck trying to boil reality down to some reductionist monism – a single principle – when really you should be seeing that contradiction is where you are starting to see the outline of a fundamental dichotomy coming into sight. And once you can resolve the contradiction as a complementary balance of actions, then you can arrive at the third thing which is the triadic structure of a hierarchy.

A story of two things in complementary interaction, organised by scale. The systems story of some set of global constraints and a matching set of local freedoms. A logical dichotomy arranged so that there is a separation of the two sides of the equation – as the local and the global are far apart – but then also the two sides can mix and find a balance as they become two counter-actions being expressed with equal vigour of all scales. That is how a complex system can exist and how a complex system can just keep growing by adding levels of complexity – levels over which it is both differentiating and integrating.

So there are habits of thought we bring to philosophical discussions. And pointing out seeming paradoxes is some kind of start to that. It demonstrates that every attempted monism undermines itself.

But then you need to be able to move on and dig deeper. Discover the more complex story that will be some emergent system of balanced forces. Some deep division that has arrived at its complementary resolution. A seed of structured organisation with the capacity to scale or grow.

Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands — he regulates. He does not care — he provides platforms. He does not answer — he disconnects.

Are you free?
Then be responsible for everything. — Astorre

There is now an extensive literature on the superorganism approach to understanding what is really going on in human affairs.

It is pointless trying to understand liberal democracy in terms of moral philosophy. We can't just impose values on a natural system. Values have to arise out of the success of the system. They have to be what is learnt from pragmatic experience. Indeed, the success of the system is what winds up imposing its values on us. And it is by believing otherwise that we become disconnected from the system that is evolving its complexity. We can't be masters of a world we misunderstand what is really going on.

So what is going on? An organism is a mix of information and entropification. It is a system that can evolve because it has a memory and can learn. It can become the master of power. It can develop a narrative that regulates physics and so set itself up as a self-remaking structure – an organism that knows how to both repair and reproduce its essential fabric of being.

In terms of humans as social superorganisms, we have gone through three major restructurings in those terms. First we were foragers, then farmers, then fossil fuel burners. Each developed its own narratives to collectively organise its populations around the business of entropification. The flow of power – of free energy or work capacity – through its veins. Tribal cultures have their typical narrative. Agricultural empires have theirs. And an industrialising world had to develop yet another.

Tribes have to have a deep understanding and connection with their natural landscapes.

Farmers have to be organised about extracting calories from their land and generating enough surplus to cover the overheads that come with that. The bureaucracy to organise the people. The military to protect what can be taken. The trade networks that bring in the technology and resources from lands beyond what is owned.

But the third story of the machine age was very different as what it started to eat was ancient raw energy stores – hydrocarbons buried just under the ground. Instead of having to adjust your social values to the constraints of waiting for the sun to come up each morning, the rains to come each season, the harvest to roll around each year, there was suddenly an unlimited supply of power that could be consumed as soon and as fast as you liked. All you had to do was re-organise your society and start helping yourself. Getting to the head of the line first, bringing the largest plate you could imagine, stuffing yourself silly.

The availability of power used to be a restriction on human desires. Now the problem was the consumption. The scramble was to grow the collective capacity for entropification. Rebuild society on a narrative of exponential expansion.

So that is what happened. A new set of values came in.

At first perhaps, moral philosophy thought well we know what we should do with unlimited power. The agricultural world we just left behind could have been better served by generating a greater surplus that was also distributed more evenly. The new industrialising world could be a utopia with no need for wars or poverty. All labour could be mechanised. Housewives would have dishwashers. Husbands would work in clean, safe and well-lit places. Everyone would be living like kings and queens.

But such fantasies were overtaken by the realities of the superorganism. Mechanised fossil fuel consumption promoted its own new virtues. The ones where humans became increasingly atomised as cogs in the machine. Life became displaced from natural landscapes and even farmed landscapes. We moved into the abstractions of urban landscapes and eventually cyber landscapes.

Or if we really lift the covers on what has been going on, we live in capitalised and financialised landscapes. With neo-liberalism, that new master narrative emerged. Capital flows and natural resource flows made their direct connection that now cut out the middle person. The economy was now a stripped down dragster for burning fuel. It had to become that way as it was the only way of creating a large enough mouth to gobble all the still buried energy at the 3% compounding rate that had become established.

OK. That is an exaggerated telling of the tale. A narrative to account for the narrative. But my point is that natural systems have their own dynamics. And we humans can't just dream up some values – do a little moral philosophy hand-waving – and expect to apply them to how the world works. We can say no to war, to slavery, to spoilt landscapes, to social inequality, and a whole long list of things that seem not-very-good, and so terribly-bad. But nature is just going to roll on over that in ways that we really ought to learn to recognise.

As Art Berman says in his “The Great Simplification” – “Energy is the economy. Money is a call on energy. Debt is a lien on future energy.”

And David Graeber points out in his masterly "Debt: The first 5000 years", debt is slavery. It was how slavery got culturally institutionalised in the age of agricultural empires. You had to borrow in times of hardship and after that you slid into being owned by your creditor. Money was invented as it stands for that exact relation – that exact dichotomy. Life almost immediately became a question of which side of the ledger your number was entered into – as a debtor or a creditor – as soon as life became civilised. From the time of Sumer and even before, the world could slide from owing you to owning you.

Aglietta and Orleans illustrate how this central organising principle is expressed even in religion where human existence is itself treated as a primordial debt. The Brahmanas verses that assert: “You are born to death and only by sacrifice can you redeem yourself from death.”

So both classical liberalism and neo-liberalism were just the scaling of this ancient civilising principle – the exact narrative that could lock the individual into a system of collectivised entropy production. The age of agriculture was already organised into an intricate web of credit and debt. Presented with an unlimited free lunch of entropic power in the form of fossil fuel, humanity had to scramble to keep up with the opportunity. Debt had to be super-sized to bind humanity to the Herculean mission of dissipating that much power in an orgy of consumption.

So at every turn of the human story, a systems logic is at work. Nature self-organises. And the human superorganism is simply another level of that developing natural complexity.

As participants in nature, we would seem to have choices. And moral philosophy would like to think those choices are absolute. There is some divine imperative that is the master of nature. And we were created to get that job done on this tiny speck of dust orbiting some completely anonymous solar fusion reactor for the brief moment until we cooked the planet we were living on. What a joke that line of thinking is.

But even if we are not the masters of the universe, we can learn to understand the metaphysical logic that explains nature at its most general systematic level and go from there.

And as I say, the politics of the modern neo-liberal superorganism – the conversion of all human life to a lien on future energy – has become a busy field of research and discussion. The pragmatic reality is being analysed and evidenced. The reasons we have been acting as we do is not so paradoxical in the light of how things naturally come together in a world that is fundamentally self-organising.

This discussion can go nowhere I believe because of a basic difference in our metaphysical logic.

I've said it before, but I will repeat. There are two ways of making a dialectical distinction.

The first is that you can argue there are two extreme poles of being and they connect in a single direction. There are the good and the bad, the true and the false, the beautiful and the ugly, the divine and the bestial, etc. It is just obvious that there is the one pole representing the direction things ought to go, and then the other direction they thus need to be leaving well behind.

One is the right pole to reach, the other is the correct pole to reject. That creates an absolute rule that doesn't seem to need any further justification. There is just one correct finality and you must keep aiming at it even if you can't always get there.

The second view of how it works is instead that there are two poles, but their relationship is complementary or synergistic. They might be opposites, but they are fruitful opposites as they go together in creating the larger thing of a balanced system. They are the dialectic that make for the greater whole.

So now we are talking of the Unity of Opposites. The fundamental categories of the Greek cosmos.
Chance and necessity, discrete and continuous, local and global, matter and form, atom and void, one and many, chaos and order, etc.

Their relation as poles of being is one of mutual co-creation. They are the basic contrasts which allow anything to actually exist as the stable reality that arises inbetween. Instead of one standing for the rejection of the other, they each stand as supplying what the other lacks. In its only in their balanced combination that things become properly whole.

So you and I look for quite different things to organise out explanations of the world. You say societies just ought to be directing all their efforts towards the good, as why on earth would it make sense to aim at the bad?

I say that it is instead some fruitful balance of opposites that must be struck. One is looking for the actions that play the complementary roles out of which a flourishing society could evolve.

Social science uniformly gives the answer as to what complementary pair is – competition and cooperation. And how this dichotomy can push in both these directions by being organised in terms of hierachical scale. Competition is natural to the more local scale of being, and cooperation is natural to the global scale of being.

What else could bind a complex whole into a state of self-organising dynamical balance but that it be ordered as some set of global constraints stand in relations with some set of local freedoms. Or global necessity yoked to local contingency.

Neither side is a bad thing even if both sides couldn't be more logically in opposition. It is only when you have such an opposition that you can have the third thing that is their self-organising balance. You can have a society that is both globally coherent and yet locally dynamic. A society that can be integrated because it is also differentiated enough for that integration to even be a thing.

So there is a clash of metaphysics. And my argument is that the real world only supports the second story. Opposition can only truly exist if the opposition is complementary – a two way street that creates its own dynamical balance.

If your arrow of causation just points away from one pole and towards the other, then how could anything ever in fact arise? Why would the bad ever come into existence if the good is always the goal? And how could the good even be said to exist unless the bad did exist as well? Is the bad secretly the good because the rejection of the bad is how the good gets achieved?

You can see how this kind one-way absolutism goes around in circles unable to ground the central relation that it wants to claim.

But a metaphysics based on the emergence of complementarity is self-grounding. You need complete opposites as then you have two things that work together. And they can only in fact be complete opposites as working towards a complementary balance is the very thing that is constraining them. If they failed to be complementary, they couldn't survive the test that is their ability to hang together as a unity.

Needless to say that all ancient metaphysics – Greek, Taoist, Buddhist – understood this fact about the logic of Nature. You need fundamental opposition. But it has to be organised to play complementary roles. And reality emerges in self-creating fashion out of the resulting balancing act.

Right, but my point is that your approach is materially identical to post hoc rationalization. "What is superior/pragmatic is that which survives; Nazi Germany did not survive; Therefore, Nazi Germany was inferior." That is the premise, and then one has to provide reasoning to connect the ur-cause to the effect, which in this case has to do with fossil fuels and fascism. — Leontiskos

What survives is the fact we can examine. We can use it to ask the larger question of why that general kind of thing might be what emerges from the test of time.

It could be just due to contingency. Or it may be due to a structural advantage.

So you throw Nazis into the conversation. I say fine. Europe had its well known history of evolving into a community of sovereign states, Germany had its history of struggling to build itself up into a great industrial power despite some significant cultural advantages. We can examine the particular in terms of the general and debate in what ways a fascist turn was at first a success and then a failure. And to what degree the reasons for either were contingent or structural.

But it seems you like your history dumbed down. Nazis bad. Boo, hiss.

My other point with Nazi Germany is that your approach seems to have suffocated contingency. — Leontiskos

Well I cited contingencies. Such as a lack of oil fields and defensible borders. Accidents of geography that turned out to matter given the political and economic structures that had evolved to dominate the European landscape.

So again, try to be less sloppy.

On your evolutionary principle "what works is what survives." So is it possible for the human species to commit accidental suicide and fail to survive? If so, then what survived was precisely what did not work (for humans). — Leontiskos

Once more you betray that you can only think of worlds where ends are reached and history is complete. Utopia is constructed and heaven on Earth is achieved.

But my whole outlook is dynamical and relative. There is no necessity that anything lasts forever, nor that it be relentlessly all onwards and upwards until final perfection arrives. You are creating strawmen.

Whether he is right or wrong is fairly simple, for time will tell. If X out-survives Y then he will say, "I was right." If Y out-survives X then he will say, "I was wrong, and now I will switch sides." He is always a "fair-weather fan" in that sense, for moral perplexity cannot arise where there is not more than one moral telos. — Leontiskos

All these weak arguments. If I make a wrong prediction, I discover something about my understanding of the structural principles involved.

With climate change, it was looking as if global governance would react just like it had over aerosols destroying the ozone layer. But then when the US republicans in particular became climate deniers, I had to revise my model of what was going on. I had to make the connection to the fossil fuel lobby and its political power. I had to understand human society in the more general context of thermodynamics and dissipative structure theory. This larger picture - still just as evolutionary, but now at superorganism level - revealed what happens when the world gets so financialised under neoliberalism that capital flows hook into whatever maximises profits. And cheap energy is the base of the pyramid.

So it was not about switching sides. It was about recognising how the issues were much larger than political agreement on some obvious technical fix. The beast had evolved and was using an army of lobbyists to distort our very grasp of reality so as to perpetuate its own superorganismic existence.

We went to turn off the tap. And the tap said no. That was a strange enough turn of events to dig deeper into the politics of it all.

there is a very strong cultural premise whereby one would continue to resist the Nazis even after the war was lost and the Nazi "survivability" proved itself superior. — Leontiskos

Your analysis is about Game of Thrones level. Winning a war is not winning the peace. Darwinism isn’t a battle to the death. It is about flourishing at the long run ecosystem level. Life on Earth has suffered many mass extinction events and then bounced back with even greater richness and complexity.

You seem trapped in some narrative about the war of good over evil. I’m simply pointing out that organisms have a natural structural story that we can discern. And that applies to social history just as much as biological history.

"Selfishness" has to do with individual survivability and "collective" has to do with the species' survivability. — Leontiskos

Again you have an old fashioned notion of evolution as a brute individualistic struggle rather than a collective flourishing. Nature has no beauty for you I take it?

On my view the evolutionary reductionism does not properly account for the human mind and human teloi. — Leontiskos

Your view is reductionist so no surprise it seems inadequate. Try answering in terms of what I’ve argued rather than this continual strawmanning.

Perhaps neither (or either), but is either one the same as the evolutionary survival account? — Leontiskos

You keep talking about survival because you want to pretend that by organismic order, I mean mere contingency. But as I said, it is about what works. What can sustain itself over time. The structure that can adapt and flourish. The organisation that can organise itself.

The ur-cause here is the evolutionary principle. What works is what survives. What can sustain itself over time through a capacity to repair and reproduce itself. — apokrisis

Of course there will always be some percentage of sociopaths―no society is ever going to be perfect. — Janus

Interestingly, Wrangham’s self domestication story I just mentioned argues that the genetic change in favour of empathy/cold blooded predation was achieved by tribal groups being close enough to remove any bullies or cheaters from their gene pool by just killing them.

This is still recorded behaviour in tribal societies. Someone makes a nuisance of himself for too long. There is a night of ritualised discussion in the long hut where everyone gets high and muses about the strange visions they are having. Mr X is oddly seen having a nasty accident. The idea hangs heavy in the air.

Next morning, the senior men are on a trip to a claimed sighting of a honey hive up a tall tree. Mr X is teased about being too scared to climb so high, especially where the bees sound so angry. He puts down his spear, starts the climb. Looks down to realise the others are now quietly seated with their spears held easy. Just a certain patient glint in their eyes. Someone ain’t making it home and it will be one of those things.

A few thousand generations of that would certainly have its impact on the percentage of those not adept at fitting in to the small band structure of prehistoric life.

And it goes also to my theme that a belief in the transcendent is part of the larger framework that is evolutionary pragmatism. The men can’t just come out and say we have to murder one of us. The idea has to be sanctified as something that kind of happened because of its own righteous logic. It appeared as foretold in collective mystic ceremony. The idea formed and so Mr X’s fate was sealed. It was probably revealed he was some kind of demon or evil spirit. Everything after that was just pragmatic detail.

See his article….

I don't see how that follows. Presumably, it is bad for a bear to have its leg mangled in a trap, yet I'm not sure how this would be "socially constructed." — Count Timothy von Icarus

How can you not see that this kind of attitude is relatively modern? In more traditional times, it was more likely to provoke laughter, amusement and excitement. Bull fighting and fox hunting are still respectable public spectacles in civilised parts of the world.

You are picking examples which illustrate the very opposite of what you intend.

But it also seems obvious to me that the human good is affected by principles that lie prior to any particular society, just as human nature is prior to human culture, in that the latter cannot exist without the former and is always shaped by it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. But have you studied human evolution? Are you familiar with Richard Wrangham’s self-domestication hypothesis where a crucial step that distinguishes sapiens is that we evolved the new dynamic of empathy coupled to cold blooded violence. We evolved a new level of switching in our brains where we could shift suddenly between two new states - essential to becoming socially constructed beings - in that we either feel a nurturing closeness or flick into the other state of a predatory aggression.

Chimps live in social groups but have only limited empathy coupled to only reactive or hot blooded aggression. Humans tweaked this neurology so that cognitive structure could overlay the emotional circuits. We could extend empathy and so live in close domestic harmony with our surrounds, but also just as usefully, switch into collective organised violence that was premeditated and executed without being a problem for the other thing of our state of domestic harmony.

We could go out as a small band and slaughter a whole herd of mammoths. Then bring back the bounty to share out equally. And this neural dichotomy still deeply marks everything about who we are.

Not to go off-topic, but from a metaphysical lens, it's the Good, as "that to which all things strive," that makes anything any thing at all, in that true organic wholes emerge (are unified) by being oriented towards an end (i.e., organisms). Hence, it would seem to me to play a central role in resolving the Problem of the One and the Many. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is what I am arguing. Except the surprise is that contingency is as essential as finality at this metaphysical level. Evolutionary order is achieved by developing guiding constraints on contingency. But then contingency is still needed so that evolution doesn’t get locked into believing it has arrived in some perfect state of adaptation. Natural selection needs random variety so it can continue to optimise a living and mindful structure of habit.

Accidents can be mistakes or they can be discoveries. But they can’t become understood as either unless accidents are being produced in sufficient abundance.

What is naturalism here? The idea that everything that exists is changing? The idea that everything is mechanistic? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It starts off by opposing itself to the supernatural. It contrasts evidenced fact to narrative myth. It believes in a Cosmos that is somehow its own cause. And right from the first proper metaphysician - Anaximander of Miletus - the general logic of this was being sketched out.

For one, philosophical value judgements are prior to all the normative areas of the sciences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But that is just a socially constructed stance. You might say it is so. You certainly haven’t shown it is so.

It is just a narrative framing so you can claim top billing in the social hierarchy you have constructed in your mind.

You may believe in the reality of these narratives, but you don’t believe each is transcendent in itself. You believe they are historically contingent. — Joshs

Thanks for telling me what I believe rather than listening to what I say.

I argue for pragmatism/semiosis as ontic structural realism. The final Platonic truth of how existence exists. The metaphysical logic that rules it all - and demands contingency as part of that very structure. What Peirce called the tychism that is the “other” of the synechism. Or what systems science calls the degrees of freedom that are “other” to the global laws or constraints of an evolutionary ontology.

So I believe in contingency and I believe in necessity. They are the diametric oppositions that together can bound the world as we find it to be. Some pragmatic mix of the two arranged into an upper and lower bound on our reality.

At a certain point these begin to sound awfully similar. Better and better knowledge orients and organizes itself teleologically on the basis of the ‘way things are’ as a ground of becoming. The divine in-itself has given way to the natural in-itself. Meet the new boss… — Joshs

Social theory tells us why humans have to organise under transcendent narratives. We have to believe in something bigger than ourselves to accept that as our common tribal identity.

So yes. That is just an essential feature of the semiotic technology. We can accept a boss if that boss is also subsumed into the collective identity by being just as restricted by some supreme boss.

The supreme boss could be a narrative about ancestral spirits, a god in heaven, or a moral philosophy encoded as law and political structure. We can accept kings and presidents if they too bow a knee to some transcendent power that properly closes the human social system and gives it a known identity as it now has its clear boundary.

This narrative is not a fiction in our lives. We have to believe in its reality. Otherwise our own identity would be unmoored.

So my pragmatism doesn’t put an end to the need for a transcendent narrative. It just opens the way to a self-conscious discussion - a philosophical discussion - of the evolution of the jumble of such narratives that we find being handed down.

On your sort of reasoning, if Hitler had won the war then Nazism would be wise and it would be a higher point of progress than the more democratic alternative. — Leontiskos

Argument by bogeyman, eh?

The ur-cause here is the evolutionary principle. What works is what survives. What can sustain itself over time through a capacity to repair and reproduce itself.

So you zero in on Nazis as a gotcha. But I would step back and ask what it is about a world system of sovereign states cooperating in trade and yet competing in wars is all about. Why did that particular social structure emerge and have considerable success in organising the modern world.

A Hitler figure would have to not just win the war but win the peace too. History says instead that WW2 cemented the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana. So we know there who won and who lost what. There was a succession in the hegemons. But also, very little real difference in the brand of politics and economics they were peddling.

Each could claim that their track records proved the wisdom of their ways. But of course, the alert historian would say not so fast. They were lucky too. They were easily defended maritime nations sitting on top of immense fossil fuel reserves. Germany’s problems weren’t that it was intellectually deficient but that it always had the problem of no natural borders and a grave lack of its own fossil fuel resources. Hitler’s early land grab was completely in line with the rational objective of fixing those two problems in a way that the larger European collective could understand and the US didn’t even care.

The problem with fascism was that it was great for mobilising a broken nation for this project but lacked the pragmatism which might have stopped the land grab before it went too far too fast.

The Brits and Americans instead could tell the world that it was being colonised for its own good. Liberal democracy came with just love, peace and trade in mind. It would respect your people, your sovereignty, your cultural differences. All you had to do was accept your position as a branch office of the corporate headquarters and life would be sweet.

The other oddity here is that if you abandon morality in a thoroughgoing way, then you are not capable of any normative arguments. You end up in the quandary of a fatalism that precludes free will. For example, the climate change theorist might say that we should reduce CO2 emissions, but if we fail to do so and a catastrophic event occurs, he cannot but look back and say that the catastrophe was inevitable and his effort to avoid it had no chance of succeeding. The fatalist cannot choose to fight for the Allies or the Axis. — Leontiskos

This is nuts. Being brought up as a pragmatist is what always gave me my own voice in society. I could either choose to go along with the way things were or act according to what I thought was better.

A trivial example is that I refused to be promoted to a Sixer in the Cub Scouts as I said I didn’t want to order the other kids around. The look of incomprehension from the adults made me realise what this para-military organisation was all about and I left soon after.

So I see no problem of working within norms and then also challenging norms. The capacity to make this critical choice is central to being a pragmatist. You either play the game or change the game. And it is reason which tells you which way to go and any juncture.

So a climate change scientist can see the need to reduce emissions. But if society fails to heed, then the climate scientist has to think that either society feels it is OK that global collapse is OK - some will survive - or that society lacks the capacity to escape the world view that fossil fuel has constructed for it.

I was a climate change activist until about 2010. After that - seeing the reality of the politics and economics up close - I stop wasting my energy. It will be what it will be. And I make my own pragmatic plans within that.

Isolating a metric and making it the whole story always seems simplistic to me. It either ignores the fact that humans act for ends, or else stipulates an end without sufficient evidence. — Leontiskos

This is because you have the fixed normative habit of seeing dichotomies as unresolved monisms rather than the identification of the complementary limits on being - the complementary limits that then make an active choice of where to strike the useful balance.

So my systems perspectives says there can be local ends and global ends. These are measurably different in being selfish and collective. Or competitive and cooperative. So you have some general bounding contrast in play, and the system would want to balance those rival imperatives over all scales of its being. Hence the pragmatic understanding of society as a hierarchy of interest groups. The contrasting pulls of individuation and integration at every level of social order.

The metric speaks not to the polar divide but to the spectrum of balances that is to be found inbetween.

This is why the natural world is fractally organised. That is what you get when the balancing is not just at one level but the same balance being expressed freely at all levels. Even the balance can be measurably balanced once you understand that the dichotomy leads on to larger natural thing of the hierarchy. The Platonic structure that science only discovered in the past century in the maths of fractals, powerlaw distributions, scalefree networks, dissipative structure, and all the other ways of saying the same thing as a new metaphysical perspective on natural order.

But eudaimonia is not an everything-is-a-nail to the guy with a hammer. — Leontiskos

Happiness is probably a vague enough term to hide the difference between talking about seeking a life balance and pursuing a hedonic pole.

But if we are to understand eudaimonia properly, we have to dig into that exact difference in viewpoint. Do we mean what it feels like to be in balance with our life and world - a state of equanimity - or what it feels like to be madly ecstatic … just turned down to some low simmer that feels like the sustainable norm. A quiet content. A state of equanimity in short. Neither especially happy nor upset. Just ticking along nicely in the sense that sudden joy or sudden upset are adaptive states we could flip into as quick as circumstances might demand or justify.

So you keep saying that my position is the one that can’t say anything much about the good and the bad. But my reply is that you don’t even seem to have started to understand the dynamical nature of such things. You are treating the good as a fixed destination placed at some impossible distance from wherever we are. I make the argument for how it is all about the dynamical balance that can stabilise our sense of being a self in its world. The pragmatism of being as adapted as possible, both in the short term and the long term, to the game that is living a life as a social creature.

I'd argue that everyone answers these questions (re method, truth, and values) one way or another, either reflectively or non-reflectively. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But if there is no God and we know “the good” to be a necessary organising idea that is always socially constructed, then that puts moral philosophy on a quite different basis. One rooted in naturalistic metaphysics rather than transcendental beliefs.

Solutions to problems are to be uncovered by better social science rather than getting closer to God.

If the self help industry seems an issue as it is lightweight and commercialised, isn’t that more because it seems to sell non-Western practices as a distraction from the faults of the Western socially constructed view of life, or because it sells the promise of an insider’s track to mastering that way of life, with all its flaws.

Therapy based on a pragmatic understanding of human social organisation doesn’t need to us to become either medieval monks or masters of the universe. It is just the commonsense approach of understanding why the game is what it is and how to think your path through that.

That might be because this topic is philosophy of religion. — Wayfarer

So why is it filed under General Philosophy then?

If you want the grounding assumptions of the argument to go unchallenged, perhaps you ought get it shifted pretty quick.

In the Western tradition ascetic/spiritual exercises were meant to re-order the soul toward truth, goodness, and the divine. In Buddhism, mindfulness is embedded in the Eightfold Path and oriented towards liberation. By contrast, modern adaptations tend to treat these disciplines as mere tools for the self-interested individual, e.g., a means of coping, maximizing productivity, reducing stress, or achieving “authenticity.” — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are making an argument premised on the belief that there is actually something more than just pragmatism when it comes to living life. You name these higher facts as truth, goodness, and the divine. You want to put these at the centre of our attention and efforts, and advocate for practices that are self-denying, self-effacing, oddly self focused in being self-rejecting. A life built around rejecting the everyday stress and pleasure of being a social self and aimed at becoming this notion of some more perfected state of being. A godly creature barely existing in the world as it generally is, and generally must be, for an organism pragmatically dependent on its socially-constructed environment.

So what supports this metaphysics as a factual argument? Where is the evidence that this ought to be any kind of project for us humans?

What you dismiss as modern watering downs of real therapeutic strategies – positive psychology, outward bound courses, and the like – I instead see as useful turns towards the recognition that the human lot is a social co-constructed one. It actually applies the theory by highlighting the rules of the game that is becoming a self within the context of a society. Positive psychology draws people's attention to the fact that they are socially embedded and the little nagging voice in their head may be a cultural programming speaking scripts that they have some possibility of changing.

These kinds of life lessons can be worked into the educational curriculum from a young age so that children start off properly equipped with an understanding of how their real world works, and the possibilities for improvement – of the self and its society – that flow from there.

You then say that this pragmatic realism then finds its distorted reflections in toxic developments like the Manosphere. Well yes. Society has been run too long on romantic notions of truth, goodness, and the divine. And of power, domination, and all that seems "other" to those wishy-washy principles.

So it is not positive psychology or pragmatism that produces the Manosphere. It is the celebration of humanity as bestial rather than celestial. And that is just another way of by-passing the real facts of what it is to be human – which is to be socially constructed as a self fit to live in the kind of society that that self will in turn tend to re-construct by their actions. The organismic view of what humans are. The view which finds us placed somewhere more everyday practical between the bounding caricatured extremes of the selfish beast and the selfless divine.

In summary, your assumptions need questioning. And the counter-argument is that all the evidence supports the fact that the human self is socially-constructed. So any therapeutic technology would have to be based on that understanding. The starting point is the relation we might individually form with the community we live in.

And "you" might not even be the problem. Your society might be what is fucked up – particularly in ways illustrated by the Manosphere. Or even by some of its hair-shirt, ascetisim preaching, cults run by dodgy gurus.

The issue at this level isn't even philosophical. You will get no solutions from examining ideologies. Ideologies of any stripe become the problem when they are marketed as the absolutes that must rule our lives rather than some possible wisdom about how best to play the game that is being a useful member of a flourishing community.

I think if you check my posts you will see I am here to mock the AI hype and not endorse it.

Artificial Intelligence — I like sushi

In what. way is that different? Be as specific as you like.

No. you clearly do not understand what the technological singularity is suggesting. — I like sushi

It ain’t about us being able or no to predict where it all goes. It is about what it means when it becomes a self-driving feedback loop where us humans have got left way behind.

Once there is a first decent step to machines creating machines, then the singularity takes off in recursive fashion. Each step becomes a larger and faster one than the previous. Smart machines create a next generation that is immediately even smarter. Let that algorithm run and the curve of increasing intelligence looks like it is pointing straight up at some point in infinity which will soon be reached in finite time.

It’s a nice little mathematical conceit. And Landauer’s principle suggest a different singularity lies in store as information processing carries an irreducible cost so instead this run away intelligence collapses under its own uncontrolled gravity to leave only a black hole.

I've wondered whether that is just hype, given that it seems that all that's being said is that knowing the spin of one particle we are close enough to observe will tell us what the spin of the entangled particle is no matter how far away it may be. So, it seems we would not be deriving the information from the far away particles but from the proximate one. — Janus

That would make things too easy. It takes us back to Newtonian physics. We wouldn’t have quantum tunneling or superconductors or lasers or other technology. We couldn’t even have electrons and photons as we know them from the entangled symmetries of particle physics.

The problem there is that you have to place those entangled particles in the same containing spacetime box. So the quantum description already has to include this classical fact.

There is a Universe. And that is a constraint that gets plugged in by hardwiring Poincare invariance - the symmetries of special relativity - into the quantum field description of nature. You have already defined the box which contains any form of entangled content. And furthermore, this box has now grown very large and very cold. And so it’s energetic contents very disconnected.

This dramatic expansion in scale says the current state of affairs - a void with a bunch of crud, the gravitating mass of the stars and galaxies of the cosmic web - is about as thermally decohered as it can get. If everything was once maximally entangled, it is now likewise maximally disentangled. There is no reason to worry about spooky correlations between some rock on Earth and some rock on another planet circling a star in some other galaxy.

Given holography came up, the Heat Death of the Universe will result in a return to a highly entangled state. All the material crud will be recycled to radiation with a temperature of absolute zero and so a wavelength the scale of the visible Universe. Photons as a single beat stretched billions of lightyears long.

But even then, special relativity has to be plugged into the quantum description and so classicality gets smuggled in the back door to put actual hard numbers on what it could mean for there to be a holographic space of entangled particles, let alone the current topologically emergent structure that is the disentangled comoving cosmic web doing its gravitating inertial mass thing.

Is everything much more connected than it seems? Well yes. But that is as much because it is all crammed into a classical box as because particles can form their fleeting states of entanglement.

It is weird. The photon emitted by a distant star is absorbed by the retina of your eye. And in some sense, a space of all possible paths was collapsed only when that happened. There was a ray that arrived exactly there, and exactly nowhere else in the entire Universe, as all those other possibilities just got erased. A story of instant effect or superluminal connection that seems completely outside of our regular notion of space and time.

But in a cold and large Universe, this is just what happens. Almost every quantum choice that exists as a degree of freedom at the start gets decohered in just the very first few seconds of cosmic existence. Things get rapidly boiled down to a crud - a gravitating dust of atomic matter - that now barely interacts at all anymore. The void is swept so empty that a photon can travel a very long way for a very long time in classical spacetime terms before it goes pouff all of a sudden in an act of probabilistic collapse. A collapse that acts as if no intervening space or time ever existed.

And yet the photon is dreadfully aged, it was released at 5000 degrees - the average temperature of a radiating star - and now might be so cold and stretched that is only some radio wave as far as our instrumentation is concerned, As a radio wave, it passes right through us in fact. We need some kind of antenna and amplifier to know that it was there.

This is what happens with cosmic microwave background. At 380,000 years after the Big Bang, electrically neutral atoms could form and there was the sudden release of a hot flash of light. All the photons left out of this matter formation had nowhere to go except stream off towards the end of time, redshifting forever. But our radio telescopes could pick up this crackle that now has a temperature just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. We can end the trajectories for the tiniest number of this photon flood and so put a concrete classical number on their individual quantum adventure.

So the point is that quantum maths is really useful for telling us about reality in terms of its free possibilities. But it has to be constrained by the classical maths that tells us how cosmic history comes to weigh on that. Entanglement is a thing. But for us in our own view of reality, it is the general degree of disentanglement that is the more remarkable fact.

Connection is in essence uninteresting. It results in the hot and maximally featureless vacuum. But mix in disconnection as a contrast and now you can have a world made of definite things. The world that we really want to know in terms of how it got here. How it could have evolved and have such a robust classical structure.

A last thought to add is that nobody much talks about how weird classicality is. There you don't even have a quantum wavefunction feeling its way over all possible trajectories. Somehow classicality just knows the shortest geodesic path that minimises the action. It hops straight to it without any fuss.

Classicality also brings in all the weirdness of contracting lengths and dilating durations. At least in the direction of motion. You have the weirdness of the speed of light as a constant. The weirdness of inertial motion. The weirdness the Universe only being able to exist if its mass contents are in an exact flat balance with its gravitational deceleration – and the critical mass that we can see is only 5% of what is required.

We know that some "dark matter" adds another 23% as that is what fits with the gravitational waves now imprinted on the cosmic microwave background. And 72% has to be "dark energy" as that amount buys us sufficient flatness right at this point of cosmic existence, but comes with the price that it will only keep growing and eventually overwhelm the very container it exists in and that is why a fixed holographic bound will form around the visible Universe while all its material content is whisked over the horizon as if disappearing into an inverse black hole. One that sucks any remaining energy density out of our small corner of an ever expanding metric and leaves only the quantum sizzle of the least hot photon excitations possible.

Again, a lot gets made about quantum mechanics being the ultimate mystery. But classicality looks just as strange if you don't also get the logic of its inner mathematical symmetries.

The hope of course is that the mysteries of the quantum and the mysteries of the classical are arranged such that each cancels the other one out. The mystery is zeroed as they are the two faces – the yin and the yang – of the one greater symmetry maths.

That project is going quite well. It all looks kosher down to the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang at the moment. And even the first trillionth if we are right about inflation.

Moreover, I am convinced that individualism, on which liberal ideology is based, is unnatural in its depths. It was good as an ideal, as a direction, as a promise of freedom, as long as there was something to be freed from. But today, when we have met with living results - with a generation free from everything: from obligations, from attachments, from communities - liberalism itself was horrified by its own embodiment for the first time. — Astorre

The idea of the sovereign individual is a useful social construction. It framed the world in a certain light that allowed for the explosive growth that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and the rational mechanisation of "everything".

This construction of the Enlightened being – the citizen who could live and thrive within the parameters of a liberal politics and a liberal economy – was a complex thing with many moving parts. But it followed the same old structural logic of setting up a system of collective constraint that would then shape the local degrees of freedom – the kind of individual member of society whose action would on the whole rebuild, and maybe even grow and improve, that society which had invested in an effort to socially construct just such a type of person.

So individuals are free to make mistakes. But that kind of inventiveness and risk taking is how an open market of ideas, skills, services or goods works. The market in the end exerts its democratic constraints, sorting a crowd of striving individuals into the winners and losers. Or into some statistical band of winning and losing that is pragmatically useful to the stability and growth of that society over the long enough run.

Thus individualism is not unnatural. It is the same old naturalistic dynamic of any organismic system. But homo sapiens of course took this approach to social complexity building to its new semiotic level. Modern humans added language and then maths to their toolkit and so could start to form socially constructed selves on top of their genetic and neurobiological selves.

Homo sapiens was an explosive success because it represented the narrative turn in nature. Neanderthals only had simple social structure as they weren't elaborate story-tellers. Humans came along and could start inventing the binding mythologies that gave their tribal groups an ancestral identity. We became the people of a place. And that then meant we lived in a larger landscape of other people in their places.

Humans didn't just live in the everyday immediacy of hunting and foraging, of coping with the basic physical challenges of existing. They now lived in landscapes that were social and alive – inhabited by an ancestral past and shaped by networks of relations between hundreds and then thousands of individuals. There was trading that greatly benefitted all who could participate in the trading. There was warfare and raiding, which might not sound ideal but was just as basic to the creation of socially-constructed landscape. A patchwork of tribal identities that could balance their cooperation and their competition so as to overall rise and dominate over the other hominids who didn't have the level of language to match. Who had not learnt to act as if all individuals were bound under a shared social narrative that now lay heavy across the landscape as far as the eye could see, or the mind could even imagine walking.

So homo sapiens developed a narrative approach to social identity. Notions about reality were extended to cover the reality of a binding web of custom, history, morality. What defined self and "other" at all levels of social experience and across space and time.

Then liberal democracy sums up the Enlightenment's retooling of the cultural narrative in a way better suited to the machine age that was starting to emerge. The idea of the individual as a self of entrepreneurial ambition became something that could be widely imagined. Everywhere people looked, this was the narrative construct they expected to find looking back at them. This was the new landscape that was being inhabited. Where you had rights but also responsibilities under a society-wide legal framework. Where you could own property and accumulate capital, yet also lose it. Where you got an education that presented a wide range of opportunities, but you then had to get on and make something of your own life.

It would be a bit strange to expect this "liberal democratic" formula to spring into being fully formed from start date and then never to have evolved as it went along, responding to its own successes and failures.

Your comment focuses on the idea that it was a formula meant to free the individual and so has now become meaningless because everyone is as free as they could be, yet a little bit miserable with that outcome.

But I am arguing it was a formula to restructure the social concept of being a member of a collective social identity. Sure, the freedoms got turned up in the sense of pick any job you like, take any risks that seem worth the gamble, treat everyone else as players in the same game. My liberation is your liberation too. And in general, that still works.

Yet there is a big difference between living in a steady state balance and living in a freely growing one. Steady state systems are closed and so arrive at Gaussian bell curve distributions. There can be some central average condition that the system targets, and even a restriction on the variance around this mean.

But unconstrained growth leads to the exponentialism of a powerlaw distribution. You get the kind of world we see with social media or fossil-fuel powered consumerism. You get a tilt in the distribution of the economic goods and social capital know as the Matthew Effect. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. A few become super wealthy or super famous. The greater number become the bulk who exist in minimum wage debt slavery and feel unknown and unloved, soon enough to be entirely forgotten. There is no longer a central average outcome. A powerlaw distribution arrives at no mean and only has its trend to ever greater polarisation.

So liberal democracy began to form in a still agrarian society and became tuned to a limited growth rate. Plague, famine and war was enough friction to keep things level enough. But then the Industrial Revolution put things on a new footing. And with the Information Revolution, they really took off.

Has liberal democracy adapted? It was trying to with forms of life more appropriate to a powerlaw curve. There were always plenty of ideas. Emissions trading. Happiness indexes. Social entrepreneurs. Universal basic income. Non-governmental organisations. The international rules-based order.

But the underlying problem with accelerationism is that all thinking becomes short-term. The future gets crowded out. Eventually people even stop trying to fix things. Irrational narratives start to take hold as excuses for not attempting to keep up with the socioeconomic game we are creating. Or billionaires and autocrats have emerged with an interest in preventing any change to the settings.

So forget "liberal democracy" as some kind of modern theology. Humanity coming to its senses and seeing what was right and moral in an absolute way that will be true for all time – and so can also be now discovered to be a false idol.

What really happened is that Homo sapiens has always spun the narratives which allowed for the social construction of the individual self. This social technology step us up through the gears, from foraging, to farming, to the fossil-fuel powered mechanisation of everything. And so around 1900, we entered an era of rocketing acceleration.

And over the past 120 years, we have needed to rethink the social narrative at the same accelerating pace. Is it any wonder that it might feel the wheels are finally falling off? But also, given the structure of social order is always the same underlying deal, the possibility of keeping up is still there.

The question was has the Western metadiscourse ended. It is a good question as we do rely on having some narrative large enough to encompass some collective future. But while "liberal democracy" does a good job of picking out the ideological shift that occurred, it can be seen that many think of it as just a matter of moral philosophy that is then either right or wrong in some idealist absolute fashion. The entropic logic that underpins the whole shift is seen as beside the point. As is the fact that it is just a social narrative which has been rapidly evolving in the very act of keeping up with its own real world consequences.

Hence the need to turn the political conversations back towards the pragmatic realism which they have become increasingly divorced from. Who the heck has opinions on emissions trading, happiness indexes, social entrepreneurs, universal basic income, non-governmental organisations, the international rules-based order and all the other practical stuff that seemed the hot topics even a decade ago?

There is no special compatibility between such a theory and liberalism or democracy. You would be making the same claims if you found yourself in a tribal or feudal society, or a guild-based economy. — Leontiskos

And I do make that structuralist claim about human social organisation. The same hierarchical systems logic applies right through history from prehistoric times. A society is a structure of global constraints and local freedoms. There must be a collective state of mind that can then make its individual choices within that context.

History then becomes about tracking how this general theme becomes expressed in increasingly complexified and mechanised ways. There are the major transitions in the moves from hunter/gatherer lifestyles to agrarian empires to industrialised nation states. We have the shifts from oral to literate to mathematical semiosis. We have the shifts from ancestor worship to the axial religions to pragmatic realism. At each stage, the basic logic of social structure is the same, but its expression becomes focused on meeting the organisational needs of the next step.

Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is the kind of approach I would recommend if one is to focus on the actual genesis of the "Western metadiscourse". He points to the way the Catholic Church inadvertently paved the way for "liberal democracy" when for its own reasons it was breaking down the traditional kinship structure of Medieval Europe. From my notes....

Henrich tracks the rise of the modern industrial mindset. He says it starts with Catholic Church atomising kinship into nuclear families. This then sets up a generalised competition that can scale. And that gets supercharged by Industrial Revolution with its fossil fuels and universal division of labour.
So breaking down tribes that collectively own a landscape and resources. This frees things for a new economics and social structure that can scale according to its ides and resources.
You get the rise of European monasteries and universities, then universal education and literacy under German reformation - the church being pushed out and the state coming in to create nationalistic atomism.
Urbanism, property rights and national law then law actual ground for liberal economics and mechanised production. Which fossil fuels supercharges.
Henrich evidence from the spread of church bishoprics across Europe shows sharp uptick in authors and innovators resulting, along with the new mobility where people are mixing across a collective Christendom. A production of creatives.
Gregory Clarke’s theory of Catholic Europe’s creative rise is based on the new virtue of Protestant patience. Thrift and long term investment. Planning for stable collective growth. But Clarke argued this as a genetic trait rather than a social skill.
England of pre-industrial era was a collective brain of 3 million while Ming dynasty China was 100 to 160 million. And Henrich says that larger brain showed in gun powder and all the other Chinese innovation.
But destruction of European kinship organisation after 1000 AD opens floodgates on people flow. Henrich’s group mapped a grid of 1.5x1.5 bishoprics and followed flows of a list of a million famous names by their birth and death places.
By 1200, more Europeans had moved to cities than in China. And where clans had owned a craft, now it became more individual with guilds. Masters with strangers as apprentices who then moved off to open own shops.
Catholic Church atomised by eliminating polygamy that favoured chiefs with many wives. The traditional kinship structure that organised a hunting-farming landscape in tribal hierarchy style.
Eliminated even cousin marriage out to 6th relation and even spiritual kin like god parents. Church also created inheritance by testimony rather than lineage. So that atomised nuclear relations both genetically and legally.
This all creates indivuated family units of the smallest possible scale. A household on its plot. And to a degree this was accidental as plague and war created widows, while the church was incentivised as the widows also left their wealth to the church.
The church also directed collective action towards the general good of the community rather than building up your clan. So a clear payback in terms of agriculture as entropy production in the Middle Ages, couple to a matching surplus and the trade network that allows. Again setting the course for the Industrial Revolution .
Chinese by contrast maintained relations with their clan village and moved into clan enclaves in the cities. They were tied to a share heritage by a religion that meant they had to return home for key religious events. Catholics could go to local church in any new city.
Greece and Rome made some steps towards this with republicanism and morals, but still remained a system of clans and patrilineage. Son owns nothing while dad lives.
Henrich says no evidence that church was actively thinking of the advantages of atomising clans. No record of an argument in the many local bishopric discussions of an evolving norm. Only one quote from St Augustine about the benefits of distant marriage that even hints at a philosophical approach. So seems instead a structural attractor story of stumbling into the global transcendence and local initiative systems paradigm that could unlock first medieval agriculture and social stability, then paved the way for fossil fuel supercharging.
Henrich agrees that it was self-fueling in the fact that the churches could spread as they created more successful villages. So as a top down system, it worked to unlock social power and thus propagate itself across the medieval landscape.
And of course this all feeds into his collective brain story as a Europe wide network of knowledge and coordination is the intellectual power to match the entropic power.

So that is just one example of the now extensive literature that looks to a structuralist account of social development rather than treating it as some fortunate story of a few clever people suddenly having great ideas that somehow then spread contagiously.

You want to frame this as a debate over the origins of liberal democracy as a moralistic ideology. I instead argue that it was the new system that emerged from the same old natural principles of what a social system just is.

So where does liberal democracy begin? Well inadvertently, according to Henrich, the Catholic Church had got the ball rolling in ways that could release the intellectual and economic energy to tap into a more mechanistic approach to life in general. And once you have a mechanistic mindset, you can not only imagine engineering society so as to improve its general functioning, you can't not but help stumble on to the idea of mechanising agriculture – the first steps of fencing the country side and harnessing the rivers and wind for their mechanistic power.

Then one minute you are mining pits for coal to heat your hovel and needing steam pumps to stop them filling up with water, the next you are mining coal to drive your whole world.

Ian Morris's "Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels" set out the general case (although others like Vaclav Smil have been tidying up his actual numbers. Again from my notes on these sources...

Ian Morris, Stanford historian, is good on human social and economic story….
Ian Morris studies of growth in social capital defines civilisation in terms of communities being able to get things done in world. So about community self-actualisation. Or in a complex society, that means organisation by interest groups – a high contrast mix of integration~differentiation.
He developed separate metrics to cover western and eastern societies, one radiating out from Mesopotamia, the other from the Yellow River valley. And he analyses in terms of energy harnessing, urbanisation as social complexity, war making capacity and information technology. And he then ranks progress with an index, with energy capture being 80% of the ability to project communal power.

Morris's social development index claims West rose from a score of just 4 some 14,000 years ago to 43 by 100 CE. The number wobbles between 28-41 until 1700. Then quadruples to 170 in 1900, and 906 by 2000.
Of the 2000 total, energy capture, war making and information tech all get 250 points, organisation adds another 156.
The ranking for the East is similar until 1800 but lags at 71 in 1900, and 565 in 2000. So the oil driven 20th C sees West jump x20 over its 1700 level on overall civilisation power and community self-actualisation scale, while the East improves by x13.

One can always debate these analyses. My point is that they are plainly far more informative about why as humans we are organised the way we are.

The structuralist perspective – the one that sees humans as social creatures organising to take advantage of the resources that nature has to provide – tells us far more about why we believe what we believe than any amount of "history of moral philosophy" story-telling.

The rate of improvement seems to be slowing. — RogueAI

Yep. If you are just averaging over the collective scribblings of humanity – even if doing that math in a split second of "thought" – then that puts a ceiling on how smart you can pretend to be. The signal starts to get lost in the noise. Performance plateaus.

The confabulated output might start off with an impressive degree of believability but it is not on any independent track towards a singularity point of infinite intelligence. The system can't become smarter than the diet of word associations it is being fed.

Humans will of course get better at prompting the database, learning to work within its limitations to extract better answers. As tokens get cheaper, more can also be spent on increasing the depth of the searches.

But this video covers the scaling problem that hides behind the LLM hype.

Does that mean to you that the singularity is not and never will be a significant risk to humans? — T Clark

Like all technology, it becomes another way we can screw ourselves if we do dumb things with it.

But I’m not worried about human replacement, just the regular old level of risk of letting humans amplify their actions without taking enough time to understand the consequences.

Accelerationism works well, until it doesn’t. Move fast and break things can become just Musk breaking things until there are rather a lot of broken things and empty pocket investors.

If this isn't projection, then name me one founder of liberalism who has expressed such views. — Leontiskos

It is clear that you want to take a “great figures in history” approach to understanding human affairs and I prefer the Hegelian structuralist approach - suitably updated.

So you seek a basis in material/efficient cause and I in formal/final cause. You say there was a first moment when some genius had the basic idea. I say we are talking about a natural dynamic that has always structured humans as social creatures and simply underwent a phase change. It became supercharged by the switch from agricultural empires to mechanised nations.

So the structure always existed. But the form of its expression evolved rapidly from kinship based social hierarchies to interest group based social hierarchies. It was about families and their plots of land. Then it became about institutions and their capital flows. Society became self-consciously organised around the idea of the free individual as the differentiating force in human affairs, coupled to the dispassionately integrating machinery of the rule of law, free markets, and other aspects of the “social contract”.

Folk like Fukuyama and Turchin show how structuralism is in vogue again. And structuralism gives a base to explanation that focuses on the whole that constrains rather than merely the parts that compose.

Your critique is based on not even understanding how my account is properly Aristotelean. Liberal democracy was not some free creation of some individual mind but an expression of the natural logic which shaped the reaction to an Industrial Revolution about to shake up everything.

It was how society could absorb a sudden surge in entropic power that was beginning to flow through the system. A politics and economics appropriate to managing the forces being unleashed.

The amount of investment that goes into AI from governments and companies suggests that the technology has taken-off, with the means to go on self-referentially improve itself without human intervention for some time to come. — Nemo2124

Nope. It has much more to do with the business case that someone has finally come up with a credible demand for all the next generation chips that we could produce. The computer industry is founded on the ability to etch ever smaller lines on silicon. It had stumbled on a product that could scale forever in terms of circuits per dollar. More power every year for less price. The problem was then to find a demand that could match this exponential manufacturing curve.

So right from when IBM was selling mainframes, there was a hype-based marketing drive. The industry had to promise magical business productivity gains. Corporations were always being oversold on how the latest thing – like a relational database – would revolutionise their business performance.

As computers became consumer goods, it became how the iPhone would revolutionise your daily life. An app for everything. Siri as your personal assistant.

Every few years, the tech industry has had to come up with some new sales pitch. Cloud computing and big data was a brilliant way to push demand for both personal devices as humongous data centers.

Again, the business case was that every corporation and every individual needed to invest as it would just make their lives unrecognisably better. Or leave them way behind everyone else if they didn't. IBM marketeers coined the three-letter acronym for this hype strategy – FUD, or selling customers on fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Now we have the latest versions of this hype train. AI and crypto. Of course they may deliver benefits, but as usual, far less than whatever was advertised. And they will make someone a shitload of money – like NVIDIA and all the tech giants investing in gargantuan data centres plus the nuclear plants needed to power them.

So large language models are just this year's relational database or cloud computing. A use case to flog etched silicon. They are not artificially intelligent. They aren't taking over their own design and manufacturing in pursuit of their own purposes. They are just the usual thing of a way to soak up chip capacity in a way that also concentrates world wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

There will be some real world impact on us all in terms of informational machinery. All machines exist to amplify human action, and information machines can certainly do that. We can use tech to extend our human reach and so transform the ways we choose to live. We can continue a shift away from lives rooted in the here and now and towards more virtual and invented versions of reality. Databases and cloud computing certainly did that.

After all, large language models are powered by the same graphic processors that became the next big thing in chip designs when gaming took hold. And what is now being delivered as AI is just a kind of database and search engine technology with a souped-up front-end. Everything humans have ever written down in reasonably coherent prose reflected back to us in a nicely averaged and summarised format that is neither the smartest thing ever phrased on some topic, but also far from the worst quick answer on something it might be hard for us to find a suitable expert to tap out off the top of their head.

Hype has it that AI is the start of the Singularity. But comfortingly, I just checked with our new masters and AI replied thusly...

No, large language models (LLMs) are not the genuine start of the singularity, though they have accelerated discussions about its possibility. While LLMs are powerful tools demonstrating impressive abilities within a narrow range of tasks, they still have significant limitations that place them far from the characteristics of a true "singularity" event.

That would be exactly the "off the top of the head" reply I would expect from a real human expert on the issue. Or at least an expert wanting to be nice and fair and not too pejorative. What you would get if you paid some consultant wanting to cover all the bases and avoid getting sued.

Modern liberal democracies are positioned as a form of conflict-resolution, and therefore presuppose deep-seated disagreements. Thus it is no surprise that a large dose of nominalism attended their rise. I think a rather compelling argument could be made that realism goes hand in hand with intellectualism, whereas democracy and liberalism are bound up with voluntarism. This is a basic reason why we now see a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles - there is an inherent tension. Yet Aristotle pointed out long ago that there are different forms of democracy. — Leontiskos

That is why I stressed pragmatic realism from the start. Liberal democracy was a rational exercise in expanding the scope of opinion so that society could shift from a steady-state agricultural basis to a freely growing industrial basis. Society could sense the value of intellectual diversity as the path to becoming a more plastic and adaptive entity.

So what was targeted was the win-win combination of both more competition and more cooperation – in both economic and social affairs. The freedom to differentiate combined with the constraint that integrates. A dynamic which always existed as the basis of social order, but with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, a dynamic that could be made even more dynamic by spelling it out as a self-conscious ideology.

Tolerance for dissent was one side of the bargain. The ability to then impose a collective wisdom was the other. This is why I stressed that a pragmatic realism leads to a society that is composed of its interest groups or institutionalised habits. Society is supposed to learn what works best by allowing free experimentation, but also then decide what actually makes sense and institutionalising that balance at every scale of its hierarchical organisation.

Society could only become complexly developed by following this formula where things are self-organising over all its scales. You have the local mah jong club doing its thing in terms of the resolving its tensions, managing its own affairs, and then the same pragmatic realism being applied up at the level of a treasury or judiciary.

So you say modern liberal democracies are positioned as a form of conflict-resolution, and so presuppose deep-seated disagreements. But equally, they are positioned to encourage the flourishing of such disagreement, given that there will be the certainty of a Darwinian machinery to then sift what is working from what isn't. Which is where the pragmatic realism comes in – judging success in terms of community level goals.

And where should those goals come from? You might say there is some absolute moral imperative or transcendent good that human society ought to be entrained to. I say instead that we are natural creatures doing natural things. What we wind up being entrained to is thermodynamics. We organise our affairs to maximise our entropy throughput. That is a measurable fact of history.

And if we don't like that answer, we theoretically could do something about it. But also, the laws of thermodynamics are pretty hard to resist. We see that everywhere we look in modern liberal democracy. Drill baby drill as they say in the US and everywhere else.

Is there also some kind of intellectualism = realism and liberal democracy = voluntarism at play here? If you find that a compelling argument, you certainly haven't made it. I don't know in what way you think it is relevant.

Then as for a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles, this seems to be your code for the kind of reductionist mentality – the ideology of the machine – that you would want to oppose to ... some transcendent principle you are too shy to articulate.

I find that the holism of pragmatism is a better place to attack reductionism as it can explain why there is reductionism as part of the larger triadic whole, and doesn't just angrily reject it in dualistic Cartesian terms.

From the start, I was speaking of pragmatic realism. And you immediately projected on to that your own Cartesian framing in terms of the real and the ideal. While never being willing to acknowledge that my arguments are essential Aristotelean in systems science fashion.

Nature is shaped by the structural accomodations that must emerge from its own free interaction. As Peirce argued, even the Cosmos is the product of evolutionary habit. Liberal democracy as a political machinery for trading off the counter-forces of local competition and global cooperation are just expressing that natural hierarchical dynamic at the level of organismic order.

And what other structure could have been expressed?

Sure we can have a debate over the current settings of the world order in terms of some sub-dynamic such as whether it is better to be organised around a steady-state policy or a maximum growth policy. We can argue all the details of the dynamics down to whether multiculturalism or assimilation makes for better society – in a world where we are still also trying to organise under our identities as nation states.

But I like the Big Picture view that grounds such debates in the reality of systems hierarchical order where complexity arises through an ability to balance the driving dynamics in play over all scales of that hierarchical order.

And this is the basic plumbing issue that liberal democracy is meant to address. The how of how we construct a society that is balancing its freedoms and constraints over all its scales of being – a scale of being that has the added stress of a compounding growth rate.

So the pragmatic model of society – such as expressed by Arthur Bentley in 1908 based on Dewey – is of a hierarchy of interest groups. Institutionalised habit forming over all levels.

Realism is not some concrete given in this equation anymore than idealism enjoys some transcendent status. Instead pragmatic realism is a society's own judgment on the success of its project. Truth emerges from the collective rationality that is striking an adaptive balance over all scales of a society's organismic identity. A sensible amount of dissent or conflict is also leading to a sensible degree of integration or shared learning.

That is why we can look at the shift towards technocracy and globalisation as something that seemed to make sense as a next step for liberal democracy. Or why we can see that authoritarianism cuts across the ideal of society as an organic whole – a hierarchy of interest groups where the interactions between humans is something that can organise its own local wholes within all the larger wholes. It is richly and intelligent structured at any degree of magnification. Whereas a dictatorship just wants to impose some kind of hierarchical structure of control that treats society as if it were actually a machine and the dictator as actually a supreme being.

So my pragmatic realism accepts that truths are relative and there are no moral absolutes that must rule over human affairs. But then it insists on the reality of structural universals as the kind of patterned regularities that even a free nature can't help fall into due to its self-interactions. It is hard to imagine a flourishing society that isn't organised as an organic hierarchy of interests groups properly in touch not just with the real world that is its physical ground, but also with the reality of the world it is thus making.

It is the realism of being self-aware enough that society is in precisely this pragmatic recursive loop of adaptive habit formation and so being able to frame our debate about that fact with intellectual precision.

We can see that liberal democracy just arises as the obvious way to plumb a hierarchical structure intent on its own rapid growth in scale and complexity. It isn't a problem that requires any moralisation or mystical justification. We can see it for what it is and respond accordingly.

by making an observation? — Wayfarer

Observations don't make the world. Reading the numbers on a dial don't change anything except how you might think about the state of the world. But making a measurement – poking a switching device into the flow of the world – will come with some probability of the switch getting flipped. And you may have arranged things so that a different number then gets displayed.

So sure. To be modellers of the world, we have to split ourselves off from that world and just have it become some idea in our mind. But then we must also interact with the world in a way that has some meaningful degree of correlation. And we like taking measurements employing the counterfactuality of a switching device as that makes the resulting maths tractable. The switch at least is either on or off. And that is the observation we can record in our log.

And then out there in the world, things are happening in ways that more or less conform to our mathematical models. We are getting a pay back on our efforts to predict its future events.

So if you want to get realistic about observations, you need to understand them in terms of a pragmatic modelling relation we can form with the world. Our skill at tying abstract mathematical models to precision instrumentation.

Opening your eyes and reading a dial is not where the action is at. At that level of world modelling, you only want to be able to move about without bumping into things.

Just to remind you what was actually said…

The West has lost authority because it is beginning to cannibalize itself.
— Leontiskos

Nope. What has changed is that liberal democracy has given up on its commitment to pragmatic realism. Citizens have been empowered to invent their own alternative facts. The essential institutions of fact checking have been undermined to the point that widespread illusion takes hold….

…The design is commonsense. Let everyone organise on any scale. But the total of the activity has to produce the surplus that gets parcelled out accordingly. And realism is about being able to tie the two sides of the social bargain together in an empirically determined way.

This realism about what the actual facts are – what people really want and the scale of the surplus that exists to be shared – is basic to liberal democracy working as a coherent system. And it is the realism that has fallen apart in a big way. Voters are now entrained to the various brands of cultural make-believe. — apokrisis

I'm not much interested in engaging the anti-religious chip on your shoulder, as it seems to be an excuse to avoid giving explanations for your claims (such as the claim that realism generates democracy or liberalism). — Leontiskos

You are not much interested in anything but misrepresenting my position and avoiding awkward questions about yours.

I’m asking again how you think the notion of liberal democracy arose and took hold on human affairs.

You have neither refuted my account that is the structuralist one that as biology goes, so sociology follows, nor have you made any effort to provide some other better theory.

The ideas had to come from somewhere. If not natural circumstance, then from where?

You only seem to be leaving supernatural circumstance as your position. And I can only conclude you are too shy to try and support that in a public forum.

You haven’t answered my question yet. What are you saying is some other convincing story of how the path would have been followed? And how is that in some sense a better answer than I have provided?

Did you mean to use 'holographic' rather than 'holomorphic'? — Janus

Did I say holomorphic? I could have quite easily as my head is full of spinor maths at the moment and thus how “complex number magic” does lead on to holomorphic functions and a twistor-based view of spacetime.

Anyway, I think what matters about holography is that it is an example of the holistic approach to understanding causality. Things - events, objects, happenings, particles - are shaped by contexts. If we start by presuming everything is possible, then somethingness can start to emerge as everything else is being cancelled away or generally suppressed. A context arises that comes to define what is possible or allowed within the limitations of that context.

And this is the relation of quantum to classical reality. The quantum level still contains more unsuppressed possibilities, And the classical level arises when we feel all those possibilities have been “collapsed” to the point that now there is just some completely particular something.

So quantum and classical are not different except to the degree in which a confused everythingness has been boiled down to an exact somethingness. When two particles are entangled, no one can really say which one is which. But when the particles are further constrained by the decoherence that is some further act of measurement, then each is fixed by that new context, that new point of view.

So it is story about creating the context sufficient to fix the event. And that is a sliding scale. When thing are either very hot or very small, there isn’t even the room or the stability to frame events within contexts. But at a human scale of observation in a world now both very large and very cold, a massive amount of context restricts almost everything we encounter to a state as decohered and particularised as possible.

And that is the holistic view that holography is speaking to. It is a concrete way of putting a number on the weight of cosmic context that now impinges on every smallest point of fluctuating vacuum. You can measure the surface area of the sphere and say this cashes out as some matching number of fully resolved quantum particles or “bits of entropy”.

So it is not a hologram in the sense that the boundary somehow encodes every individual detail of a scene. Instead, it is a hologram that imposes the same general weight of constraint on every possible location - but doesn’t specify beyond the quantum level of things.

If entangled particles are up/down pairs, then holography is saying there is some collective total of up/downness that a holographic horizon is surrounding and thus conserving. But the horizon doesn’t have information about which particle is the up or the down. Or anything really about this particular particle pair.

That extra information has to be created as the next step of adding some local context - such as an experimenter creating a set-up that forces a known choice onto particles as now as fully individuated as they can get in that regard.

So it is all about contexts being a real part of the physics. And the quantum to classical transition is about being able to model the evolution of contexts - the jump from the highly constrained state of a system prepared in some globally general form described by quantum field theory in a relativistically fixed dimensionality, to a view of that system as it has become fully individuated in the local sense of a decohered particle.

The electron could have been up down as there wasn’t yet even the information to say which of a pair of electrons it was. But then an experimental set up insisted on some counterfactual definiteness. And suddenly each electron owned its own orientation - at least until it wandered off and got re-entangled some other way.

How does realism get you to democracy and liberalism? — Leontiskos

Via pragmatism. :roll:

As I have said any number of times, my metaphysics is naturalistic. I understand society as a biosemiotic organism. An organism is a dissipative structure that persists by constructing a model of itself in its world. An Umwelt. And so “humanity” can be best understood by accepting this is really what is going on and thus the metaphysics we might apply to any question of how best to order our collective affairs.

So even if the facts of reality are socially constructed, they are structured under the constraints of pragmatic habit. If we must inhabit an Umwelt, best that we all share one which is similar enough in the aspects that matter the most.

Traditional society was generally theistic and even animistic. Which worked out well enough for societies at that low level of complexity and change.

Then first the ancient Greeks and then the European enlightenment began to explore a more naturalistic basis to organising their societies. One not ruled by gods and spirits and fate and ancestral tradition but instead founded in pragmatic inquiry. The collective truth seeking of public reasoning.

This didn’t really go anywhere much with the Greeks, just somewhat better agricultural empires with more organised militaries, economies and bureaucracies. But in Enlightenment Europe, it caught fire as the focus on naturalistic accounts drove science and technology. Britain in particular discovered it was sitting atop a limitless store of coal and you had the Industrial Revolution as the entropic bonanza which forced itself on humanity as its new reality. And an eager society restructured itself in response.

Agriculture was largely a steady-state regime. Fossil fuels tipped global society into runaway growth as its embedded goal.

So our ideologies are neither God-given nor freely chosen. They are just the structural habits that do the best job of adapting our collective behaviour to the opportunities that nature presents. And that’s the pragmatic reality.

If we recognise that fact, then we can start to think in larger terms of how we do perceive the world and what then we can do to make a better job of properly seeing its reality.

So as a small example, we place a lot of store in measuring society’s GDP. But we could instead shift our goals to measuring Society’s happiness index or whatever other measure of social capital growth seems to make sense in terms of the deep goals we ought to have.

The concern with the real is what drives naturalism. We already know the world well enough to reject the supernatural when it comes to the basic business of causal accounts. We can see why knowledge is built around the semiotic relation of hypothesis and test.

Then liberalism and democracy were a pragmatic exercise in setting out the general rules of human social interaction and a way to measure collective opinion about the outcome. A feedback loop was created so that social order could start to evolve at a speed suited to an industrialising world.

And given the whole model was about this process of pragmatic inquiry - being open to discovering what works best - it is no surprise that truth seeking public institutions were given a special place. The fourth estate, parliamentary process, open markets, an independent judiciary, and all the rest.

So again, if you want to dispute my account, please explain on what basis.

You need to set out your position rather than expecting me to guess why you can’t see that folk need some method by which to agree on the facts. And that was what the Enlightenment was about.

Democracy and liberalism are moral/political positions. — Leontiskos

…based on asserting that social order should follow from the reality of human interactions rather than claims about divine will.

As far as I understand in biosemiotics it is the membrane which is the basic interpretant. — Janus

The membrane is certainly one of the expressions of a biosemiotic relation. But what does it represent? It speaks to the organismic imperative of being able to separate self from "other". And so the immune system is also frontline in that. It is constantly making judgements about molecules and whether they are part of the self or an intrusion on that self.

Is the viral particle part of me? Is that arthritic bone spur part of me? Is that mushroom I ate something to be digested or violently rejected?

So a membrane is a general barrier. But it is also a system of gateways – pores that just passively regulate the molecular traffic for the simple stuff or actively manage it for the critical stuff. And interpretance would be that general orientation of the organism to being able to maintain its integrity, plus then the further thing of acting from that position to achieve its larger purposes.

With interpretance then, the membrane would only be basic in the sense of creating the most physical level of separating the me inside from the world outside. It all then gets much more complex even just with the intelligence built into the pores that do the actual trans-membrane regulating based on a larger traffic of signalling.

Is there any way you can make "Information is physical in being the global holographic horizon on the Cosmos" understandable to me despite my being math-challenged? — Janus

A holomorphic function is something else. It is a function that is "holistic" in the sense that it uses a number base that is more complex than the reals. Instead of counting points, you are counting something else like rotations.

Holography is the idea in physics that the dimensionality of the world is just as real as the material events it contains. If you have a dimensional boundary – such as arises due to the speed of light at the horizon of a black hole or the cosmic event horizon – then that becomes a necessary element of the physics. It imposes constraints on what can even occur in terms of the local material events.

So if you imagine space and time in the classical Newtonian fashion as an infinite Euclidean void, then they are just a passive backdrop that place no constraints on what can happen physically within them. You just have atoms banging about and a vacuum which plays no causal role in that.

But once you relativise spacetime, then the speed of light – c – becomes a bounding limit. No causal connection can exceed c. And that then forms horizons that are perfectly real. A part of Nature with its own measurable consequences that the physical theory can't ignore.

So when matter falling into a black hole passes a threshold, even the radiation can't escape. Radiation moves at c, but the gravitational gradient is sucking it down faster that that rate. The radiation thus disappears from the lightcone which defines our physical reality. The light that has gone over the black hole's horizon can no longer affect us causally, just as we can no longer interact with it.

The same with the cosmic event horizon as a global boundary on our small corner of the Universe.

In a Universe being accelerated by dark energy, an event horizon forms where even light that crosses the boundary can no longer return. Like a swimmer stuck in a rip tide, it can strike out towards us at c, but the tide of space under it is now moving away at a superluminal rate. Like the Red Queen's race, the horizon becomes the spot where light is running is fast as it can just to stand still.

The current event horizon is sat about 16 billion light years from us. That is the cut-off. Light emitted by stars to the other side now can't reach us anymore.

So the horizon isn't particularly material. It just reflects the fact that the relativistic view of spacetime creates a structure of boundaries that then have direct consequences in terms of the decoherence of quantum events. The Universe rather than being causally continuous and infinite is instead holographically finite. Able only to impose its light-speed causal connections within a finite region and so only able to decohere or collapse a finite number of local events.

Its sort of like if you buy a fish tank. For a certain size tank, you can safely house a certain number of fish. Container and content are in a physical relation. And for physics, the relation between the two becomes mathematically exact.

A difference would be that over-fill your fishtank with entropy or local quantum degrees of freedom and the gravity of matter content would collapse the tank into a blackhole. It is more dramatic than the fish just dying.

Alternatively, endow your fishtank container with an accelerating expansion and the fish will find themselves becoming lonelier and lonelier as all their tankmates get physically carried over the horizon that is the threshold speed at which any fish could swim. No matter how hard they might struggle to remain together in a fishy school, spacetime itself would look to be carrying them off away from each other at an ever greater rate.

So holography is a holistic view on causality. It says dimensionality is just as much a causal player as the supposed contents. It is as real as the local particles are real.

Even if the vacuum is driven to its heat death, it will still have its dark energy content because there is a cosmic event horizon. The horizon will in effect radiate with a last faint sizzle of photons. Just as a black hole also evaporates so that all its gravitationally bound matter eventually escapes (the black hole horizon contracting, and the evaporation speeding up, in proportionate manner.)

So the physical meaning of "information" is very different here to the lay meaning. It is a way to count physical degrees of freedom – the bits that are the atomistic contents of some spatiotemporal container.

There are different ways to conceive of liberalism, but are any of them inherently bound up with realism? — Leontiskos

You seem to be understanding “realism” as “political realism” here. And I mean realism as in knowing the rational truth of the matter. Pragmatic realism.

So that is not moral realism either. :roll:

That said, some semioticians advocate for pansemiosis, and it really depends on how attenuated you are prepared to allow the concept of 'interpretant' (not to mention 'mind') to become. — Janus

As a pansemiotician, it is heartening that physics has arrived at this dichotomy of information-entropy. An Aristotelean tale of form and matter that speaks of a reciprocal local-global order to Nature that can be measured or weighed in fundamental Planck-scale units.

Information is physical in being the global holographic horizon on the Cosmos. The lightcone causal structure. Entropy is then the other thing of the local material fluctuations or degrees of freedom.

So it is holomorphism made science. It is the systems view after it has been modernised by special relativity and quantum mechanics.

Although the physicists who push the informational turn in physics don’t quite understand that this is what they have done. Or at least in the popular accounts, information is spoken of as the very stuff of reality - the new substance that replaces the old material substance.

As ever, when dichotomy such as hylomorphism arises, it is treated as a dualism that needs to be reduced to a monism. And the systems approach says that instead the dichotomy is the path to larger whole that is a hierarchical structure. The triad of an upper and lower limit to reality, with reality then being the stuff - the informed being - to be found inbetween.

Then another confusion is that biosemiosis is the further step that is an organism that models the world in terms of a semiotic system of interpretance. A subjective point of view gets inserted into the pansemiotic or hylomorphic physics. A physics that is ruled only by its completely general finality of thermalising.

So physics has moved to a pansemiotic story. Yet a lot of effort continues to go to making it sound like the new monism which a reductionist metaphysics must arrive at.

And yes, semiosis and pansemiosis are the same thing at a deep level, yet also completely different in that physics has no internal model or internal point of view. It just emerges in a regular dissipative structure fashion.

While life and mind can take a personal interest in how entropy is produced as organisms can encode the information to impose their own mechanical constraints on the physics of the world. Organisms can have habits of interpretance that are the behaviours freely emitted when the organism feels it has been given the right signs by Nature.

.How would life have been different for others without my existence in causal chains? — Jack Cummins

What if the best outcome is to be a pebble that makes the least ripple on the surface of the pond?

There are two ways of coming at this question. Either the heroic mode that puts us at the centre of everything or the zen mode which prizes equanimity.

And if both those extremes seem unappealing, that leaves us with some kind of state that is inbetween.

An inbetween is an easy place to be. We made as much or as little difference as we did. It is what it is in causal terms.

Realism is great, but it isn't democracy or liberalism (per se) that gets you there. If one wants to use democracy or liberalism to achieve realism, then they need a particular flavor of democracy or liberalism. The flavor of liberalism has to do with a focus on the individual and inalienable rights. The flavor of democracy has to do with a relatively autonomous demos (which is probably no longer possible in our internet age). — Leontiskos

So you don’t see realism assumed as a foundation of the social package but rather an optional flavour? Institutions such as independent courts and a free press aren’t envisaged as basic?

I would say it is more correct that it is realism that gets you to democracy and liberalism. A public concern for the real facts, the real truth, is the precondition.

Of course we can have our sophisticated debates about the epistemic reality of realism given we are socially-constructed creatures. But that too rather proves the point.

Do you see this as a phase or the beginning of catastrophe? — Tom Storm

Many commentators have said the US has had these kinds of convulsions regularly. The old always has its fossilising tensions. The system must appear to be dissolving itself so as to be reborn in some new more functional alignment.

George Friedman, ex-Stratfor, is a good example of those who think Trump is the useful buffoon fronting for the realists behind the scenes. The Project 2025 manifesto was at least some people's blueprint. And US political realists generally agreed the US ought to let go the larger world and rebuild within its own North American continental fortress. Absorb Canada and Mexico for their resources and cheap manufacturing. Just live within that comfy gated community and dump the whole failed world liberalism project.

So there are real forces at work behind Trump with a perfectly pragmatic socioeconomic vision. The problem was these forces couldn't quite believe just how incompetent Trump would be. And how many other incompetents he would appoint when he got a second term.

Say Vance takes over. Say the geopolitical realities of US self-interest get competently implemented. There is no reason the current mess couldn't crystalise into a new liberal order. The reality show of woke and MAGA concerns would still linger a long time. But the US could become reunited under a socioeconomic compact that is recognisably realist and competently run.

The big problems would still exist. You would have Europe aging out, despot regimes everywhere you looked, climate change ratcheting up the pressures, nukes still poised for launch in a last moment of madness.

But no. We can't actually live life as a reality show. And liberal democracy has proven its robust adaptiveness beyond doubt.

There is every chance of catastrophe. Nukes, climate, pandemics, famine. But also every chance that the US emerges from the current moment to forge a new plan around circling the wagons to create Fortress North America. That is an economic and military objective that makes its own obvious geopolitical sense. And Canada, US and Mexico can be a trio that also makes equal sociocultural sense.

The stability of nations depends on having defensible borders around required resources. Coupled to a national identity that owns that space. North America just happens to have the most of everything as a geopolitical region. Minerals, water, energy, agriculture, population. And its impossible to invade.

Compare that to Russia with its wide open steppes that force it to want to push into even Poland to find a defensible boundary – some natural barrier like a mountain pass.

So I think geopolitical realism will show through. Trump was already meant to be speaking those lines and indeed his first administration started the ball rolling as the realists behind the scenes got their guys into the top jobs. Biden – as another figurehead – then quietly kept the project going. Vance could be the next puppet in line, or some real leader could emerge with a broader sociocultural angle on the same geopolitical agenda.

The part that isn't so clear is what happens to the US dollar and world capital. There is still an internationalist level of superorganismic order that is its own thing. The Davos, drug cartel, petrodollar, tech bro, oligarch, private equity, cryptocurrency level of planetary society that floats above mere geopolitics. It has its own rather undemocratic and illiberal view of what suits its continued existence.

Does that sphere of unplaced power have its own philosophies that go beyond liberal democracy and the wealth of nations? Is a figure like Curtis Yarvin its Adam Smith or Karl Marx? A guy with the plan?

I jest. But most of the actual wealth of the world has been sucked up into this global realm that is its own gated community wherever it sets down foot on real ground. The Davos era version was trying to implement some workable global version of liberal democracy, just as Bretton Woods did in 1944. But who can tell us what political understanding it will come to in its need to organise itself heading into the next 50 years or so.

That seems the much more interesting question of the moment from the political philosophy or history of social structure point of view.

If the elite can't be taxed, seen, regulated – kept within the community of nations level of world organisation – then how is that new world going to regard us ordinary folk? Are we the healthy foundation to its own existence. Or does it even need us as an exploitable resource anymore?