Nice summary. — Galuchat

Thanks, Galuchat. Much appreciated.

There are really two stories here. Kauffman originally came up with the adjacent possible as a law of life and complexity. So it has a semiotic twist.

Once an organism masters a particular constructive act, then that opens up some new space of possible things it could construct. So it is about how evolution can get going once there is a source of requisite variety. Once you can make proteins, all sorts of protein based innovation becomes evolvable.

But the ordinary physical world is simpler, less semiotic. It is just a set of historical constraints that have locked in the accidents of the past and shaping the possible range of accidents in the future as the whole world rolls down its thermal gradient as a developing field of meaningless accidents.

So the physical world produces complication rather than complexity. It blindly develops as dissipative structure, where life and mind are about the invention of construction and the new constraint of evolutionary selection that goes with that.

I remember Kauffman pushing the adjacent possible in a quantum context, so he did stray beyond his initial point. But it seemed one his less impressive moves (and generally I really like his stuff). I think it reflects the fact that the Santa Fe brand of complexity lacked the clarity of more semiotic approaches (like Rosen, Salthe and Pattee). DST had the same problem. The dynamicists tended to blur the line to make everything a simple story of constraints and self-organisation. But for life and mind, the fact of memories, codes and algorithms have to be included as the part of the story that doesn’t reduce to the physics.

So the adjacent possible was a weak idea in not highlighting the difference between the increasing negentropic possibilities of complex construction and the diminishing thermal possibilities of simple dissipation.

No one can actually say what the meaning is, and people have conflicting ideas about it, as is evidenced by the different religions. So, whatever the meaning might be, it cannot be known because it is indeterminable, and there is therefore simply no alternative for any individual but to trust their feelings about it, and place their faith wherever their feelings lead them to. — Janus

Just quickly, the problem here is that you still treat meaning as something to be discovered. You simply place that discovery in the individual, rather than the collective, view.

But what if - pragmatically/semiotically - meaning is something to be constructed. And so the objective part of this is the correct understanding of that process of construction.

The issue isn't what, but how. Once we have a model of the how, we can run the process to produce the what.

And this is how we get into a developmental naturalism where we can see how individual psychology is dependent on both the naturalism of a linguistic social super-organism and a genetic biological super-organism. We, as individuated beings, have to participate in semiosis taking place at two quite different levels - the cultural and ecological. We have to situate our selfhood with the systems of both nurture and nature, as it usually put.

And the general problem - for this selfhood - is that the two systems are not that well aligned in the modern world. Hence all the moaning about an existence lacking clear meaning.

So it ain't about discovering meaning itself, but about discovering the natural process that produces meaning.

From there, we can see how being a human individual is semiotic, but a semiosis that relies on two general levels of semiosis - the linguistic and the genetic. And the obvious philosphical project is to get these two levels of self-making in better alignment ... given we all seem to agree that they are rather out of alignment to some degree that causes dissatisfaction.

My argument with @Wayfarer is that he dismisses biology's general goal of entropy dissipation. That kind of denial prevents progress on the problem.

What if human biological flourishing is defined by psychological flow - the rush that is smoothly managed energy expenditure? Maybe driving a fast car is as much the point of life as much as anything could be?

But of course, ecosystems thinking relies on there being limits. If we want a long-run future, culture needs to find some way to make a flow psychology work within the ecological constraints. Then again, if technology can remove those constraints, what then spells a meaningful and flourishing life?

However, until we have a clear model of the reality of flourishing, a clear view of its semiotic mechanics, we can't address the useful questions. Neither the self, nor the society, are going to discover anything, just blunder on helplessly into whatever eventuates.

What do you think it means that all our knowledge of the physical - SR, GR, QM, QFT, QG - boils down to what we can measure? The best we can do is say, I have this idea, this conception, of a quality. And here is the semiotic process by which you or I can extract a measurement during our interactions with Nature.

The very epistemology of science relies on the "non-physical" idea to ground any conception of the physics. And the measurement itself is just a further idea in that, in the end, we represent the measured state of the world as a number. We assign a value. At the very least, we tick a box to mark a presence or an absence. So the whole of the epistemic operation involves having an idea of what to look out for in terms of some system of signs, and reading those signs off the world, updating our conceptions of the world accordingly.

There seems some critical duality of matter and symbol, or matter and information, at work here, surely? We don't have direct access to the world - the Kantian thing-in-itself. We just have systems of thought where global conceptions are intimately tied to localised acts of perception. We understand our interactions with reality only in terms of a constructed realm of ideas encoded as signs.

This is the epistemic truth that ought not be buried. And that should be science's great strength - in being founded on the philosophy of pragmatism. It recognises that we only model the world and so, in the final analysis, construct a useful working story about it. Which in turn means - as we consider metaphysics, the ontological story of Being itself that we hope to tell though all our fundamental physical theories - that we have to incorporate this epistemic fact into any telling of that tale.

If we construct physics as a tale of the observables by placing the observer outside the physics - in some nonphysical realm! - then at what point are we going to finish the job and include that observer in the very tale we want to tell?

This is the deep dilemma that runs through all modern physics. It is also the problem for neuroscience. And Aristotle's philosophical pondering on time was pretty deep as it focuses on this as the issue.

He pointed out that change looks to be what we are really talking about. Things are not still, but dynamic. There is difference in terms of one thing becoming another thing. But that seems continuous. It is always the case. There seems some sort of constant flow where the past is fixed, the future opens up, and there is no now, no present moment, that interrupts.

But to measure time, we have to start counting intervals. We have to start numbering differences. And we want to number the past and the future in the same way - even if one is the already actualised, the other some kind of unactualised possibility. So we start counting time in terms of spatialised passage of moments. We impose a conceptual framework on our experience that allows us to imagine change happening "in time". There is a crisp stopping and starting to events.

Or critically, there is the stopping that is our ability to shout out "now!", while watching the hands sweep the numbered dial of a clock. A continuous world gets stopped, then started, then stopped, by a ticking second hand ... in the world that is now the one conjured up by our scientific imagination.

So I think you risk rushing right past the basic philosophy of science issues that any talk of "the physical" must answer. And Aristotle was certainly on to it.

Of course most serious philosophers have come around to materialism by now, agreeing with the central conclusions of modern neuroscience: the mind is a physical product of the brain, the operations of the mind depend on brain states, and consciousness cannot actually exist apart from a physical brain. — Uber

But a lot of folk still believe that consciousness is an informational, or indeed computational, state. It is a kind of form - in the Aristotelian sense even - in being accounted for by a functional ontology. Consciousness - in this view - would be multi-realisable. You could build a "brain" out of tin cans and string so long as it replicated the functionality that is the processing structure of the actual human organ.

So a really modern neuroscientific understanding would dispute this. Or at least, it would say there is something special about the hardware of brains that the hardware of computers lacks. Computers are machines and so depend on completely inert and stable parts. Bodies are organisms that depend on the opposite thing of all their parts being in a state of generalised critical instability.

That is how life and mind bridge the "explanatory gap" of causality. States of information can regulate states of material organisation because it takes virtually no effort to nudge an unstable system in a desired direction. The cell is a thermodynamic storm of material structure constantly about to fall apart. And life is the trick of just delivering the right well time nudges to, instead, keep it constantly falling back together. The mind does the same balancing act in terms of behaviour.

But anyway, the point is that some kind of dualism - that seems very much like a form vs matter, or non-physical vs physical debate - runs through both the epistemology and ontology of science. So any scientist, who cares about the big picture being painted, can't afford to simply brush away the issues as somehow anachronistic and not still top of mind.

The way we have constructed our own physical model of the world has ultimately left us standing on the outside of that construction. We got there by sharply dividing the observer from the observables.

And then our best neuroscientific theories have been probing what that means. And the upshot is the emerging dissipative structure or infodynamic view, where life and mind are understood semiotically as the informational management of material instability. Form shapes material plasticity to create substantial being - Aristotle's hylomorphic view of "the physics".

Then even fundamental physics is undergoing a revolution where information is being granted some kind of physical reality. It is intelligible form, structure or constraint that shapes plastic material potential. Again, Aristotle's hylomorphism is being cashed out finally. Or at least ontic structuralism is top of mind in fundamental physics.

As you say, the deep assumption seems anti-dualistic. Information and matter must together compose the one world somehow. The mind is somehow still a product of the brain (or the structure of the brain a product of a lifetime's habit of being mindful?). The Universe is still a product of local material events - even if in the end, there is nothing at all but the blackbody radiation sizzle of cosmic event horizons, the zero-degree excitations being produced by the rather immaterial holographic bounds of a de Sitter spacetime.

So physics wants to reject actual dualism, and yet it can't do without the dialectically divided. Just as the Ancient Greeks got science going by establishing the basic dialectical divisions of nature.

And so - as Peircean pragmatism argues - the only other choice is Hegelian synthesis. If you want one-ness, and have to get there by incorporating a two-ness, then the only way to resolve that is hierarchical three-ness. The holistic or systems view. Which again would be Aristotle's answer with hylomorphism.

So the marvel is how quickly the Ancient Greeks got down to the metaphysical basics. And science has been a long time working back around towards that ontological framework.

But there's a sense of "prior" here which is difficult to grasp. — Metaphysician Undercover

But doesn't this come back to our usual sticking point? I say the problem with the Aristotelian telling is that is seems to put actuality before potentiality - in time. And Peirce would put it the other way round in seeing crisp actuality arising out of vague potentiality, with the Forms being the a-temporal midwife, so to speak.

So the Aristotelian story - actuality generates the potential - does work in the sense that historically actualised states of constraint do then act to give concrete shape to all remaining future possibilities.

Once a river has forked at a certain place, then that choice tends to persist as it becomes a difficult choice to reverse. And likewise, if I make a cube with six flat sides and which is evenly weighted, then I have an actual die which can potentially fall on any of those six faces with complete freedom.

So as we extrapolate from the simplicity of nature - the river and its fractal branching - to human mechanistic control, our desire for a "machine" that is a random number generator, we can see how the Form shifts from something that is smeared out in time, to something that is clearly present in a mind that wants to make the thing in question.

The river is feeling the constraint of a global form from the moment it was a first fresh trickle of rain creating rivulets on a new cooling volcanic slope. Over millennia, it carved out some very definite persisting (because self-reinforcing) pattern of channels while operating under exactly the same Form of Being. So the constraints that made the river were there at the beginning - as finality at least. But also as form, as the form is always fractal. And then steadily some river becomes a particular entrenched form - the Nile or the Tiber. So it becomes hard to pin a before or after on the formal/final cause. It is imperceptibly there from the start. And it is powerfully there at the end. But it is always there, shaping things - placing its restrictions on material spontaneity.

But with the die, it got made because some mind saw it as a form that could serve a rather human purpose. Nature breaks symmetries - as in a fractal. But humans can imagine a world in which symmetries get unbroken - as in a perfect Platonic solid. And so randomness can be idealised and thus realised on demand. We can imagine a cube that has six numbered sides, and we can imagine rolling it in a fashion where we "don't care" about the one it lands on.

Of course, a die is an odd sort of machine. Mostly we want to do the opposite of harnessing randomness to produce order. An engine is a system of cylinders, pistons and cranks aimed at constraining a petrol vapour explosion, pointing all its energy in a certain completely predictable direction to do work. But the causal principle is the same. First the human purpose and the form that inspires, then the actual building of a machine that expresses that system of material action constrained to achieve an efficient cause.

So yes, the Aristotelian story - bricks exist because someone wanted to build a house - does reverse the temporal sequence. And that fits with the notion of a creator god.

But I am talking naturalism where formal and final cause are always present, yet also they begin in that radical uncertainty we call the potential, and wind up in that habitual certainty we call the actual.

So the Tiber or the Nile might have had completely different stories. Maybe the first burst of rain could have been on this naked volcano slope over here rather than that one over there. All the water might have carved out a slightly different initial channel pattern. In 40 million years, a very different landscape might be the result - still fractal in its drainage pattern, but your map of the Nile or Tiber would not help you much.

If the unexpressed future is non-physical, and the past is physical, then the present is the act of expression, whereby the non-physical produces the physical (future gives way to become the past). So if at each moment, as time passes, the non-physical produces the physical, then if this is not instantaneous (which by the nature of "becoming" seems impossible), then we have to account for this expression, as a process. Hence the things which come out of the future first, those which are nearest to the purest of the non-physical, are "prior" in that sense. This order is understood in Neo-Platonism as procession, or emanation. — Metaphysician Undercover

The present is where the actualised past is exerting its historical weight of established being on the possibilities that may ensue to mark out its future. So every moment has some limited set of choices. But the choices are free ones - either properly random, at the level of physical nature, or ones that reflect the kind of options that life and mind can construct for themselves in having their own memories, habits and intentions.

You speak of time then passing, and that passage making the difference. But I am talking about the choices actually happening, and thus establishing a further concrete fact about historical existence. Another brick in the wall that further limits future choices. So time - as something global - does not pass exactly. It gets fixed in place as history. Actuality is getting baked in as the still available free potential gets energetically consumed.

But the things that come out of the future first will in some sense have to be the simplest, the purest, the least complex.

And that is the take of the Big Bang. In the beginning, science agrees, the symmetry breaking command was "let there be light". :)

Well actually, light - as electromagnetic radiation - was several symmetry-breakings later. The first act was the organisation that was the splitting of reality into action and direction in the form of a vanilla grand unified theory (GUT) force and a cooling~expanding gravitational backdrop.

Current cosmology speculates about this first Planck-scale act. The potential that came just before would have been a "quantum geodynamical foam" - a mix of spatial blackholes and temporal wormholes. Matter densities and temporal anomalies.

A bit poetic perhaps. But that seems a solid extrapolation from known physical models to start to try to understand these things. As you push right up to the smaller and hotter limits that define the ultimate Planck scale, you start getting fluctuations so pure and indeterminate that we can only recognise them as equal parts blackhole and wormhole.

This is a nice intro on that - http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html

My [evolving and constantly subject-to-revision] understanding is that the Sky Father is indeed a cultural projection based on an amalgam of archetypes. — Wayfarer

Somewhat irrelevant, but surely there is the earth mother also in the metaphysics of any agricultural society? So always that duality of the thunderous law maker and the fecund materiality.

Anyway, my point is that ordinary language has an agential grammar - as it should, as ordinary speech is all about organising our social worlds. But that then creates a rationality, a view of causal relations, predicated on minds with desires and intents. And so theistic metaphysics just super-scales that basic animism. Although - particular in regard to the Western Christian tradition - you had this new thing of a logical grammar, the root of an abstract or philosophical view of causation, enter the theistic picture.

So we wind up with a scholastic hybrid that tries to preserve a super-animism while appealing to Ancient Greek metaphysical rigour, setting up its own later strong conflict with objective science in this regard.

Does Buddhism protect you from the fray? Does it resolve these issues (in the way I say Peircean naturalism resolves them)? Or are you simply deploying the social animism you find there to attack the mechanical view?

The problem with Buddhism (in my view) is that - like PoMo - it avoids clear assertions about the issues. It enjoys and plays with the paradoxes rather than seeks to resolve them. And so it manages not to be found wrong by remaining strategically ambiguous.

But anyway, my point is about how there are two grammatical attitudes at work - the everyday agential one where even the wind seems to either favour or curse us, like another social player, and then the new mechanistic one where the Cosmos is ruled by Logos ... and somehow Flux still has to fit into that metaphysical equation.

The majority of posters here side either with an agential view of philosophy, or a mechanistic one. And probably that is because unless you have that kind of foundational disagreement, what else the heck would give you an excuse to post when the very nature of "a discussion" is the opposition inherent in a dialectic?

Again I come back to Peirce as the guy everyone is happy to disagree with as he takes the third position which is the resolution of all dialectical argumentation. He strived to create a grammar that was holistic - a story of constraints and freedoms, logos and flux. Semiotics is that more advanced grammar. Hegel and Kant were getting there, but Peirce - as also a scientist - sorted out something with foundational clarity.

That's fine. You've got a good understanding of stuff from the science side - you kind of got me from the moment you mentioned Karl Friston, certainly the smartest guy I came across when getting into functional neuroscience 25 years ago.

Apokrisis, if understanding Forms required tying them to some kind of "energetic change," wouldn't that make them physical in some weird way? — Uber

Of course. But are you prepared to enlarge your notion of physicalism to match?

Again, what is actually happening in physical theory? First biology realised that it is rooted in the informational regulation of material dynamics - the thermodynamical view where genes organise dissipative form. And now physics has been making the same information theoretic shift. As you say, suddenly the macro story of constraints has become basic as we take a condensed matter view of particles and states of materiality.

So this is what I recognise as semiotic - an ontology founded on the complementary reality of matter and information. This is not a dualism, but a dichotomy, as the two are formally reciprocal or inverse. They can be rotated into each other mathematically - the feature that blew everyone's mind about AdS/CFT correspondence.

There is big stuff going on here metaphysically. Action and direction must come to be seen as the two complementary halves of the one reciprocal relation. They must be the formal inverse of each other.

So time has to decide whether it stands on the side of action or direction. Or maybe it stands in the third place - as the manoeuvre which flips from one extreme to the other.

There is a really good post on how this connects with the three Planck constants - Okun's cube of physics - http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/physical_reality_less_more

But quickly, you can see how you need the three things of h (to scale local uncertainty or spontaneity), G (to scale global constraint, or energetic flatness), and then c as the speed of coherence (the rate at which quantum decoherence happens to relate the two opposing things of action and direction).

Then we grow up and our brains change, our knowledge of language increases, until the point where abstract thinking becomes possible around the early teen years (and even before to an extent). — Uber

I'd just mention that you are conflating two things. There is nothing that special about human brains when it comes to its neural architecture. It is a larger ape brain, with some greater capacity for visuospatial thinking and planning, probably due to the evolutionary demands of being tool-users as much as anything, but not radically different in a way that explains "reasoned thought".

It is the grammatical structure of speech itself that starts humans on the path to reasoned thinking. Speech demands that the world be broken down into tales of who did what to whom - some division into subject, object, verb. So it is the evolution of human culture - those grammatical habits - that sees us stumble into something (semiotically) new.

Our ape brain does not grow its syntactic structure genetically. It has to learn syntax by exposure to actual linguistic communities.

Of course, the human brain picks up those rules very easily. It has become adapted for that by - among other things - a prolonged period of brain plasticity in infancy. But still, the rules have to be learnt by exposure to cultural constraints.

And then a properly rational mindset - one organised by modern mathematical/logical syntax, the laws of thought - is the next step up. We must also grow up in that kind of world to wind up thinking in that kind of way.

Anthropologists find that native people react oddly to western IQ tests. They don't reason in the same abstract fashion. They seem to apply "magical thinking" - or a rationality that is very much based on the agential dynamics of ordinary human social interactions. At least that was the case 100 years ago. These days, everyone on the planet gets some education on how they should think to pass as properly "rational". :)

Anyway, @Wayfarer would be right that rationality is its own culturally discovered, or invented, thing.

The ape brain is great at induction, generalisation, prediction. That is what it evolved to do. And we just have a version with somewhat more horsepower.

But a logical mindset is usually defined by the further cultural thing of deductive thought. Some kind of grammatical or syntactic habit where chains of reasoning are produced for public consumption. We learn to explain ourselves in a rational cause and effect fashion.

Well, as I say, first came the "magical thinking" - the basic social style of speech - where everything is some combination of a subject, an object, and a causal action. The world is understood and communicated as some play of agents expressing their intentions in a way that caused events to happen.

Then later - around the time of Ancient Greece - we all took another big cultural step in objectifying and abstracting that agent-based causality. We discovered that reality is regulated by deep and impersonal forms. At that point, we started to loose our faith in an idealist reality - one where everything had an agential cause - and began to believe in an objective reality, where now nature became impersonal ... and eventually even mindless and computational. The semantics was washed away, leaving only the naked Platonic syntax.

A long-winded way of explaining how we have wound up so regularly split into the theists and the reductionists. Socially, we have one foot stuck in the past represented by magical thinking. All causality must have a moving mind at the back of it. The other foot is then stuck in the present with its mechanical or syntactical ontology. Reality is a fixed machine. Causation eventually becomes some kind of illusion as the Cosmos is a time-frozen logical block where nothing every really happens.

I advocate for the middle path that is Peircean pragmatism - the actual science of semiotics. Once you can see genes, neurons, words and numbers as a cascade of constraints, the same informational trick carried out in increasingly abstracted fashion, then you don't wind up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You can minimise the subjectivity of syntactical argument without pretending to have eliminated it.

The Cosmos can be agential and spontaneous in some fundamental way (agential when complex, spontaneous when simple) while also being mostly in a highly constrained and mechanistic condition in its current "2.725 degrees from its Heat Death" state.

And so the agential vs the machine models of reality - which themselves reflect a historic shift from a grammar of social relations to a grammar of grammatical relations(!) - can be resolved in the thirdness of a pragmatic relation.

The ultimate kind of rationality is the one that results in the view of the world with us in it. Subjectivity emerges alongside the objectivity it believes it observes. We arrive at the Kantian realisation that we exist in our own semiotic Umwelts. But that is all good. It is how "we" get to exist. And it is all thanks to some developmental journey in terms of constraints - an education that was plugged into the world as being functional.

So theism becomes fine, even if it is "magical thinking" ... at least in the kind of minds it constructs within certain kinds of worlds.

And scientism is fine too ... on the same kind of judgement.

The question becomes where is this really leading - which is what was being discussed earlier in regard to the fate of the planet in the next 50 years. My criticism is that we are living socially as agents according one grammar, and then trying to understand our situation philosophically according to another, the grammar of abstract grammatical relations. The machine model of reality which patently leaves "us" out of it (even though we are then clearly there as the "gods" that make that mechanistic world for our own now unmodelled, unconstrained, purposes).

Neither of these grammars of thought are actually the grammars of metaphysical naturalism - the semiotic approach which is about seeing a world with us in it.

Theism legitimated the notion of transcending godhood. Machine rationality gave us the technological means to pretend to be those gods. We could enact the new modern project of Romanticism. We could believe we were aiming at beautiful creations while exponentially shitting up the planet.

So between the rationality embodied in social grammar and that embodied in mathematical grammar, there has to be another grammar that is both larger than these, and yet resolves these as aspects of that larger whole.

I mean biologists (like Aristotle) already think in that ecological or systems fashion. Naturalism of the full four causes kind has ticked along at the back of things. But a forum like this really brings out the historic division between the idealists and the realists - those that tend towards agential thinking and those that insist on a machine model of rationality.

[Sorry Uber. This isn't all directed at you. I'm just letting a reaction to your post run for the fun of it.]

So throw out these, but keep his understanding of time right? — Uber

MU set you a good challenge relating to a physical understanding of time. Even if Aristotle could be considered wrong on other things, this was the thing you were questioned on.

And it is clearly right that there is some ambiguity about whether time is a something of which change is predicated, or whether change is the measurable differences of which we imagine a temporal flow to be composed.

Time and energy are clearly connected in physics - all change being energetic. But they also stand in an inverse relation to each other. In relativity for instance, the faster something goes, the slower it’s clock ticks.

Physics also seems to contradict itself on time with the reversibility issue. Our microphysics is modelled as time symmetric, while our macrophysics sees it as a flow with an energetic direction, a thermal arrow. And when we get down to the quantum physics, we have to make the unmodelled choice of whether to believe there is or isn't a physical collapse of the wavefunction to remove the ambiguity of whether the symmetry is broken, as we experience, or not.

And to take the next step, to reach a theory of quantum gravity that might account for time, the wheel looks likely to turn again towards a constraints-based view where the past is the actualised and the future is the potential. Having spatialised time for so long, we may have a QG theory based on reality's thermal history.

On this basis, I challenged the notion that Forms can somehow be active in time without being active in space as well. In other words, what does it mean for them to be active, if not in spacetime? — Uber

So here we now get to something interesting. The traditional notion of the Forms is rather spatial and geometric. They are static mathematical shapes that would have eternal rational existence.

Well in fact the ancient view was more than that. Horses and humans were forms that had a substantial thermal structure too - they acted energetically in pursuit of characteristic ends. They were organisations expressing energetic tendencies.

So how would we understand forms in modern physics, once we move away from the spatialised version that incorporates the local symmetry or reversibility of direction that space has, and understand time instead as the generalised irreversible constraint which is a thermalising flow?

Are we going back more clearly to Aristotle now? Are the forms to be understood as latencies waiting to be expressed through striving - the shape of the structure that will emerge to organise a flow?

Is the non-physical simply the unexpressed-as-yet future then? MU will want to be more scholastic and place the forms clearly in the past - prior to that which actually exists. And they might be prior in the sense of being latencies.

But when it comes to physics having all the answers, clearly physics knows that it has gone a long distance following a certain track - one based on microphysical time symmetry. It is assumed by the modelling that time is a spatialised dimension which exists - it has actuality. And so change or potentiality becomes reduced to being some kind of relativistic or epiphenomenal illusion.

Yet eventually we need to take the other view of time more seriously. It does seem better assimilated to our notions of energy and action. We have to do justice to that macroscopically obvious fact that it is an organised structure, a flow, with a direction. The past is a collective (thermally coherent) history that constrains the freedoms of the as-yet unlived future. In time, nature's latent forms and purpose will be expressed.

So how can forms be active if not in spacetime? The trick is to see that they are active in themselves once time is understood in terms of the very possibilities of the expressions of energetic change.

Physics boils down to action with direction. Time has been partnered in our microphysical models with direction for a long time. But it likely makes more sense being unified with the action in some way - the potential for change that remains despite the past being now concretely actual.

hat, that they're pointing at nothing. The alternative is, they're pointing at something you're not seeing. This is why, whenever I refer to idealist or Platonist elements in your purported philosophical source, C S Peirce, you will peremptorily dismiss them as being 'not essential'. — Wayfarer

I support the structuralism that is the essence of Peirce. He himself was dismissive of any aesthetic imperative - a good test of where he stood. And his idealism was of a general structural kind, not some claim about cosmic consciousness. That’s a really big difference.

Meaning, we also need someone to build and maintain windmills. — Wayfarer

LOL. The windmills were Don Quixote's imaginary foe. "Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants?"

So no. The need is for a decent pair of glasses to see what is actually there.

I also think it is undesirable that individuals should be coerced by collective institutions. There's no harm in trying to convince someone that a particular view is the right, or the best, one; but the convincing should always be done by sound argument, and evidence and always by appealing to the other's own lived experience, and never by appealing to fear or guilt. All viewpoints and perspectives should be up for open and transparent analysis and critique. — Janus

But your language betrays the totalising framework that is in play for you. And that is what I would challenge.

You talk of coercion, institutions, fear and guilt as the things that any right-minded citizen among us (as near identical products of our moment in cultural history) would seek to be on the watch for when it came to what we collectively view to be clear signs of something that is wrong.

So you have already socially constructed the frame of discourse you expect me to operate under. That is where your open and transparent analysis and critique will take place.

My reply is that this is a very conventional and now rather dated frame. In sensitising you to the threat of social force, it blinds you to the essentiality of social constraint. I am not who I am - I am not an individual - except that I developed within my particular cultural context. There isn't even a "me" to speak of without the shaping "other" of the collective social order.

So my view would be that we are all rather good at doing the natural thing of arriving at an ongoing negotiation between our scope for creative free self expression and the complementary need to give a definite shape to our personal existence in terms of being rooted in the norms of some cultural context.

The problem of modernity is more the burden it places on many people. Too much individuality is expected of them. They are not allowed to feel comfortable living an "ordinary" life. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur shooting for the stars. And those that do think that is what they should want often seem not to be happy with that as a new cultural norm.

So I don't say things are perfect. Definitely not. But the diagnosis is not that we are seriously at risk of collective constraints in modern society. The existential threat has morphed into its opposite - the dread of having to be authentically unique in the manner that appears generally demanded.

That is why I prefer to start any philosophising from the solid basis of social psychology.

We have to learn to live within our (planetary) means, to treat life as sacred, and to develop an economic culture based on something other than endless growth and meaningless consumption. — Wayfarer

Or we can go extinct.

The issue here is that there may be a good reason why you are dreaming. Life is actually a manifestation of the second law and so humanity is responding to that thermal imperative.

So sure. I agree it would be nice if the world suddenly did go all eco. But arguing for the moral correctness of hippy values is pissing into the wind. There is a good reason why that is dreaming!

To have a choice, we would have to create a choice based on a realistic assessment of the human condition. That is why I would see it as indefensible to push cosy mythologies at this point in history.

The fact that spiritual philosophy is seen as 'old' or 'archaic' or 'out-moded' is one of the entailments of materialism. — Wayfarer

But if your foe of materialism has already out-moded itself so far as science is concerned, then you are merely tilting at the windmills of your youth.

And the totalitarian imposition of meaning by the collective on the individual is nihilism full-blown, at least in those cultures where individual creative aspirations have begun, or continue, to exist. — Janus

What is actually being protested here, I would say, is the machine model of constraints where our individuality would be completely suppressed by the collective psyche.

But actual societies ought to be understood as organisms, not machines. They are evolving and adaptive systems. Semiotic. And so they are founded on a complementary dynamic - competition and co-operation, local part and global whole.

In that view, what is natural is the striking of some balance between individuals expressing creative freedoms and collectives expressing constraining norms. Each is an action that shapes its "other". So each is symbiotically necessary to the other's being.

The only issue is what kind of balance is optimal given the wider context of some environment. Should things be tilted towards the free individual - technically, the immature stage of an ecosystem's lifecycle - or towards the collective norming, which is technically the senescent or habit-bound stage.

What could it mean for all individuals to honour a "higher truth"? Whose "higher truth" would they be honouring? I can't see how it could be anything but a retrogressive return to life "under the aegis of tutelage"*; a capitulation, a loss of nerve, a cowardly going back to a life which the spirit of the Enlightenment rightly sought to put behind it. — Janus

So as individuals, we would see our position as part of that collective balance. We are not ruled by some monadic over-riding concern. We want to express both natural aspects of our being - competition and cooperation, creative freedom and mastered habit - in a way that "works best".

The sticky point then becomes the clarity with which we can envision the general goal that all this organismic activity is meant to lead us towards.

Our first imperative is to attend to our own organismic flourishing. Which in turn depends on that of our ... community, race, nation, planet, noosphere, cosmos ... whatever level of embodied organismic being we can rightfully claimed to have achieved. :)

So that is where things break down. As simpler language-less organisms, we didn't have much choice but to get by as best we could in hunter/gatherer fashion. We had no particular say over nature.

And now we haven't quite got our heads around the next step of our evolution - the path that rationality has opened up.

Are we simply just Homo entropicus, the burner of a short-lived fossil fuel bonanza? Are we the forerunner of something Singulatarian and cyber-organismic?

The old theistic myths - the wisdom suited to an agrarian stage of human development - are no help at all on these questions. And even Enlightenment humanism, with its Romantic response, are not much of a signpost to our future.

As things stand, we don't know how the human experiment is about to turn out in the next 50 years. And to the degree we haven't thought the realistic choices through, we don't even have choices.

So it is weird to be wasting too much time with the mythologies of a past that has gone when we need to have answers about future social myths it would be sensible to be motivated by.

One of their fundamental criticisms is that string theory doesn't make testable predictions at all, and nor can the proposed multiverses or 'the landscape' ever be empirically demonstrated. So they are arguing that it doesn't pass muster as science. — Wayfarer

So isn't there some irony here that string theory is good evidence that science is Platonistic enough to bend its own alleged empirical rules when the mathematics seems so reasonable that it must be true?

If string theory had a single calculational outcome, then it would be game over. But it turned out to have a "landscape" of possible solutions.

If you then look at most of the critics of string theory you cited, they are then pushing their own particular Platonistic barrows. They have some alternative "reasonable" mathematical model, like loop quantum gravity.

So a cynical reading of the situation is that you are hearing from the experimental physicists getting concerned that the theoretical physicists were getting to much attention for just doing mathematics. They need those guys to produce "testable models" - preferably models like the Higgs particle which are bang in the energy range of the next generation collider they want funded. And then the other critics were the various mathematical physics wanting oxygen for their own Platonistic theories.

So, the nature of 'naturalism' is well and truly an open question. You can't sanguinely gesture at science as if we have it all worked out, we're just waiting for some additional details to flesh out the whole picture. We could well be on the cusp of a much greater revolution than the Copernican. — Wayfarer

Again, is this evidence that science is getting it wrong, or getting it right?

If you are wanting science - at the grand level of cosmological speculation - to be more Platonistic, well it is more Platonistic. It treats mathematical structure as being real.

And if you want science at that level to be less Materialistic, well it is that too. Atoms have dissolved into particles, which have dissolved into excitations, which have dissolved into informational degrees of freedom. The physicists don't believe in matter as the kind of substantial material stuff you criticise them for believing in.

So as the Platonic structure has become more real, the material stuff has become matchingly less real.

And that just happens to be exactly the kind of Naturalism you would find in the metaphysical tradition that connects Anaximander to Aristotle to Peirce.

I am having a hard time seeing how stasis, non-existence, the so-called ‘Heat Death’, comprises ‘a purpose’, any more than the purpose of an individual life is to be cremated. — Wayfarer

Again, this is something I have replied on multiple times. The answer is the same. Life and mind - as natural systems - can be understood to have a purpose that is orthogonal to this baseline entropic tendency. It is all a point of view.

So the second law prevails in the cosmological long-run. It is the baked-in tendency. But shit happens along the way. The Big Bang "wanted" to be a simple spreading~cooling radiation bath, but then it cooled to a degree that massive gravitating particles condensed out of this general smooth flow. The breaking of the electroweak symmetry by the Higgs field created a sudden clutter of hydrogen and other simple atoms. The smooth entropification was interrupted by a sudden production of negentropic matter.

That led to planets and stars. Stars are one way all that negentropy is being fizzled back into radiation. But stars leave a heavy atom residue. So now we have the conditions where life and mind could arise as further re-entropifying systems. It is part of nature's global desire that if anything could accelerate the return of that residual negentropy to the general entropic flow, then that kind of dissipative structure must inevitably develop.

So it is completely reasonable that life and mind should conceive of their reason for existing as being some kind of cosmic necessity. The Universe needs us organisms to break down the negentropic lumps that have developed in its entropic flow.

Humans are the most amazing dissipative structures in known creation. We can heat up entire planets in about a century. Our second law awesomeness in this regard is easy to quantify.

So yes. You do look at humans and think we must be really special. But the reason we are so focused on our own personal negentropic development is because our resulting entropy production is so matchingly spectacular.

We have developed mythologies - cultural, political, economic - that enable us to pursue the Universe's central goal by apparently aiming our lives at the very opposite of what it is doing. It is entropifying, but we are negentropifying.

But look closer. All that negentropic structure is what is managing to burn the millennia of trapped fossil carbon that "fell out of the entropic flow" by getting buried under rock. We are doing an amazing job of eating up all the coal and petroleum.

Pay attention to what we are actually achieving. Don't get fooled by the mythologies we spin around the social structure and cultural attitudes needed to pursue the Cosmos's grand plan.

Surely it must be the opposite to believe nature is imbued with an over arching purpose?

You say you accept a ‘four-causes’ cosmology - material, efficient, formal and final - but here the ‘ultimate Heat Death’ represents ‘the final cause’, in the sense of ‘that to which all things are directed’. Does it not? — Wayfarer

Yes. I’ve said exactly that plenty of times surely? That is the most fundamental global cosmic tendency.

That doesn’t stop complexity arising along the way. But it is the final game that underlies all others.

You seem to be obsessed with the ontological nature of constraints. ... Maybe God set them there. Maybe they are eternal and fundamental conditions of reality. Perhaps the most basic ones did not come from anywhere; they are just the default states of reality. — Uber

The simple answer is that constraints develop. They are the historical breaking of physical symmetries. The past gets fixed as the result of an accumulation of such constraints. A complex world arises as one breaking creates the ground for some further breaking in a hierarchically cascading fashion.

So to believe in a constraints-based ontology is to believe in existence as a product of development - the regulation of instabilty.

The ontology of constraints is not a great mystery. It is the ontology of a developmental, evolutionary or process view of metaphysics. That brand of naturalism, in other words.

So states of constraint become fixed in place in a historical fashion. The material organisation of the world instantiates them. The material world becomes a structure that is stable enough to remember its past and can enforce that as the persisting context which is shaping its remaining uncertainties or freedoms.

As an ontology, it contrasts with Platonism, Computationalism, and other essentially timeless views of the Cosmos. That is because constraints develop. Structure is that which emerges as a cascade of symmetry breakings.

And it contrasts with Atomism as well. Matter is regulated instability. So in the beginning, there was only instability or unregulated fluctuation. Atoms are the result of global historical contexts having developed and become relatively fixed.

So we exist because of the development of constraints. And to understand that history of symmetry-breakings, we have to melt the rather frozen block of constraints that now compose the structure of a Cosmos which is only a few fractions from its ultimate Heat Death.

Physics understands this is how it works as a practical matter. But oddly, the public metaphysics seems to have got stuck on the Platonism vs the Atomism.

We seem to have to make a choice of which team to follow - that of the timeless structures or the moving parts. Yet both are simply the complementary aspects of a Cosmos that has managed to lock in a complex state of self-regulation by growing so cold and large.

So to be clear, you mean to deny that the block universe was already a consequence of SR? We had to wait for GR?

The block universe was consequence of Minkowski space, so no idea what you are on about in emphasising GR as your speculative basis here.

I am saying that reason is always involved in this activity as a constituent of the process of cognition. How could it not be? That is how discursive thinking operates. So it can't be understood as the attribute of the brain as it transcends such objectification. — Wayfarer

Well induction or generalisation may be fundamental to all animal cognition, but deduction would seem to be something secondary that it rather special to linguistically and culturally constrained cognition. It is a further habit that us humans learn to apply and so not fundamental to the mind, or consciousness, itself.

It is an attribute of humans being language-using socialised creatures living in a modern world, post the Ancient Greek development as rationalisation as a general population skill. It is part of the brain's evolutionary wiring only in the sense that the brain has become more hierarchically organised in a fashion that action and behaviour can be constrained in a "deductive" way. The higher brain can form the general goals and leave it to a cascade of increasingly more specified habits to execute the particular actions need to achieve those goals.

But running a hierarchy of control from the top-down - reversing inductive learning to produce retroductive sensorimotor predictions - is still different from the brain implementing the laws of thought. Those are the product of cultural learning.

And that is important to any notion of subjectivity. Culture and language are the constraints that produce that kind of human psychology - the one with a private sense of self. Humans learn to feel like perceiving essences standing apart from an objective world as part of what it means to be a (modern) human.

I am saying that the naive scientific attitude is that there is an observer apart from the thing observed. Is that not the case? And isn't it the case that it was the 'observer problem' that came up in the early twentieth century that challenged that understanding? — Wayfarer

I agree there. That was what reductionism was about.

Well, what you're describing as 'a proper naturalism' might not be the mainstream view, which I think is considerably more 'mechanistic' than yours. — Wayfarer

Again true. I'm not mainstream I guess. :)

You keep saying this, but what does it mean, in practice? Where does intention or intentionality enter the picture? Is that part of the schema at the outset, or does it only arise at the point where there are conscious agents? — Wayfarer

Naturalism would recognise finality as something that is itself dichotomised. There is the most general kind of finality - the kind of universal tendency encoded in the second law of thermodynamics in particular. And then there is the highly complex kind of finality which it the intentional and autonomous type of being enjoyed by humans as linguist/social creatures.

So for the project of naturalism to be successful, it would have to be able to see how these two poles of finality are essentially the same while also being essentially different.

A tendency and a purpose are the same in that a system has to be guided by an idea that works. Given a presumption that chance, chaos or instability is fundamental, Being can only persist if it is functional, or tellic. It has to be a structure "wanting" to rebuild itself continually.

But a tendency and a purpose are different - as different as they can be - in that the Cosmos could only reflect the most generic of all purposes (to exist by encoding whatever tendency leads to persistence), and the Mind would be an expression of the most subjective or self-interested kind of goals and purposes (as they are the levels of goal or purpose that subserve the persistence of a complex and individual selfhood).

I wasn't really focusing on the burden of proof question. The problem there is that naturalism takes on that burden as epistemically foundational - nature is defined in terms of the observable. And supernaturalism has a history of equivocating.

Either it presents "evidence" (like the existence of miracles), or it argues from "reason" (the need for a first cause, a prime mover), or it argues from one of the supposed failures of naturalism (an inability to explain freewill, goodness, whatever).

So the dichotomy there is that naturalists expect empirical validation, supernaturalists show they aren't that bothered.

...but I think this approach can at least put to rest the interminable controversy over whether ontological priority belongs to mind or to matter, and leaves the way open for more interesting investigations. — Janus

So are we agreeing that a semiotic naturalism has the advantage of being triadic and so able to include both matter and mind in its one scheme?

True, but in a like sense naturalists could also be wrong in arguing immanence over transcendence or unity over duality (or plurality), since just as there is no transcendence without immanence and no plurality without unity, there is no immanence without transcendence or unity without plurality.

So...Hegelian sublation? — Janus

Peircean semiosis is better as it resolves itself into a hierarchical relation - global constraints of local freedoms.

So an Aristotelian/Peircean naturalist could not be wrong as they are arguing for a transcendence that is "merely" the kind of transcendence that is a development of hierarchical complexity. And with complexity comes a greater degree of locally meaningful individuation or plurality.

So immanence goes with emergence. A system that is closed for causation and yet also capable of open-ended complexification ... at least up until the time it runs out of sustaining resources. (ie: It is, in the end, a system closed for causation.)

Transcendence generally tries to deny that thesis so it presents a genuinely opposed ontology. Although of course - like Hegel, like NaturPhilosophie, or even Peirce in his cranky old age - theism can try to work its way back to an immanent ontology, one where the divine is self-causing.

But still, equivocation has to be in operation. My brand of naturalism says that "the mind" is a complex particular rather than a simple general. That is why it sits within the world as modelled by physicalism. Physicalism can understand what that means.

A naturalism that wants to embrace the supernatural elements of the "spiritual" or the "divine" have to talk about those as simple generals - basic universal essences or substances. So in that way, a (super)naturalism could be distinguished still from a physicalist naturalism based on semiotics, pragmatism, information theory and complexity theory.

Immanence is the claim that reality is self-organising or bootstrapping. And science is cashing that out in terms of models that work.

Theists can also be attracted to immanence as the rationally best ontological story in being a causally closed ontological story. But then the other half of that - the empirical evidence - is at best equivocated. Well also, the theoretical half is equivocal as it lacks the necessary mathematical framing. There aren't the definite ideas to be definitely tested.

Naturalism and ant-naturalism are just the dialectical poles that present two possible, or imaginable, perspectives. — Janus

Or instead, dialectics is itself dichotomous in a fashion that sometimes you have a unitary dichotomy - one in which the two poles are simply opposite ways of saying the same essential thing - and sometimes they are the "other" thing of two actually opposing generalisations.

Once a generality is itself made particular in this fashion - a choice of two generalities - then the either/or of the LEM does apply. So supernaturalists can be wrong in arguing transcendence over immanence, duality over unity. :)

The reason I wanted to say mind is what 'grasps meaning' — Wayfarer

Note how you are privileging perception over action. You are defining the dichotomy of subjective~objective in terms of an observer standing apart from the observable. So there is a representational paradigm at work here. And that is where the anti-naturalistic dualism stems from - this built-in sense that the mind stands apart from the world.

So your language assumes its premises.

Pragmatism and semiotics were the effort to naturalise "the mind" by switching to an embodied and enactive description of the essential relation. Meaning becomes use, as they say. We don't just grasp meaning. We exist as useful habits of interpretation. We know what to do when faced with a world composed of marks or signs.

You are thinking always from the point of view of the observer who stands outside nature. Your ontology is based on a transcending disconnect between the perceiving self and the actual world.

But a proper naturalist sees consciousness in terms of habits of interpretance, embodied actions. The self and its world (or umwelt) emerge as triadic relation. That is the way to bridge a dualistic disconnect.

Thus a physical thing is anything that has constrained states of motion. — Uber

That is as nice a summary as any.

But to build on that, I would generalise it to "constraints on instability or uncertainty" so as to better pick up an information theoretic perspective on the physics, as well as make a clearer connection to the science of life and mind.

The problem with materialism was that it reduced an Aristotelian naturalism - the full four causes kind - to just bottom-up construction. Nature became a cause and effect tale of material/efficient causation. The physical was defined by what was atomistic, mechanical, local, deterministic, monadic, etc.

But a full four causes physicalism would include the idea of causation via top-down constraints. That is, formal and final cause as well. And a constraints-based metaphysics indeed goes further in making constraints primary. The structure is what produces the material contents. The constraints are the global limits that produce the locally individuated features - the particles, the events, the excitations, the degrees of freedom, or however else we are currently conceiving of the material/efficient causes of Being.

Even Newtonian physics depended on global constraints in the form of laws, global symmetries or boundary conditions. And now - through the information theoretic turn of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics - constraints are being explicitly modelled as "material objects" like event horizons or holographic bounds. There are exact mathematical relations emerging between spatiotemporal extent and the number of local degrees of freedom that such a volume can contain.

So spacetime as a container, and states of motion or action as the contents, have a constant balance. They are two faces of the same coin. And we see all that coming together nicely now in a general shift to an entropy-based accounting system that unifies all our descriptions of nature.

The best general theories of brain function are the ones that emphasise a global minimisation of system uncertainty. The brain is a "machine" that learns to predict the future by minimising its uncertainty about what is likely to be the case.

And the cosmos is also a "machine" that has constructed itself by thermalising away its quantum uncertainty as much as possible. At its Heat Death, its states of motion will be as minimal as could be imagined. All that will be left is a homogenous sizzle of blackbody radiation emitted by cosmological event horizons.

So in dealing with the OP, I am saying that physicalism has been through its arch-materialist phase and is coming back around to a grander constraints-based physics that incorporates an appropriate understanding of top-down formal/final causation. We are cashing out naturalism as it was originally envisaged. Reality is the emergent thing of an intelligible structure imposed on brute uncertainty.

Which makes it as much mind-like as matter-like in our physicalist descriptions.

General relativity tells us that reality is a static 4D block - quite a feat for a mere calculating machine, I think you'll agree. — tom

You mean SR? And you mean that SR is a physical model that hardwires in a global time symmetry by treating time as a spatialised dimension? So having made this big metaphysical presumption - time being a direction in which you can go backwards and forwards just as happily as any of the three spatial dimensions - you then have this extraordinary metaphysical consequence of a block universe when you extrapolate the said model beyond its limits of usefulness?

This seems to be the same mindset in which you approach all your physics. If some bit of calculational convenience works for certain modelling purposes, you then happily believe whatever ridiculous scenario appears to be the case if the model is extrapolated to be the whole ontic story.

But the map is not the territory. It's just the map.

Linguistic structure does tend to account for the thinking that is linguistically structured.

Your problem then is defining thought in a more general fashion. That is where folk struggle.

Russell gave two main reasons for rejecting the causal interpretation of the dynamical laws:

1. Causal relations incorporate temporal asymmetry - dynamical laws do not.
2. Causal beliefs relate to localised events - dynamical laws relate global system states. — tom

Yes, but "laws" are a calculational machinery and so they have to represent the holism of nature indirectly. You get time-reversal because time itself has to be taken for granted as a backdrop dimension not accounted for by law.

So in QM, you almost have a time~energy complementarity, but not quite as QM still needs to presume time as background dimension. And to get to quantum gravity, that is why we would need an emergent story on time - one that explains its irreversibility in first principles fashion. We kind of have that already with statistical mechanical models of thermal time, but that too has to presume a fixed basis rather than being a fully emergent story. Somehow a state of low entropy must be rigged to create a start point down which time then flows.

So the story is just that time - representing change itself - has eluded its own fundamental theory. We need it as a globally fixed backdrop to make a local calculational approach possible. But we also know that time must be an emergent property of the cosmological system.

It is right to say a certain understanding of causality - as localised/deterministic chains of cause and effect - is thus an over-idealisation. Newtonian mechanics is certainly a powerful calculational framework despite its time-symmetry. Likewise SR, GR, QM and even statistical mechanics. But the metaphysics of physics already tells us that something bigger has to be going on. We know we can't just believe time-symmetry applies in the global fashion that is implied by its local presence.

Physics is founded on three general principles - the principles of locality, cosmology and least action. So standard "causation" is represented in the principle of locality. But then the cosmological principle speaks to a global symmetry - the rules of physics are the same everywhere. And the principle of least action then wires in a directionality - events take the energetically shortest path. You thus now have a holistic or systems metaphysics where there is a global tendency or finality. Everything is constrained to head in the direction that expresses the least action.

So we are working our way back towards the fuller four causes view of causality set out by Aristotle. Causality became closely identified with local chains of cause and effect through Newtonian mechanics. In taking space and time for granted as fixed backdrop dimensions, that seemed to confirm local determinism. But there was a price paid for that helpful calculational shortcut. Space and time fell outside the material dynamics being measured. They became the a-causal void, a simple unexplained stage for all the action.

That really works for us humans, living in an era when the Universe is so cold and large and classical. But as we work our way to more fundamental theories, we have to make sense of the other two principles - the cosmological and least action. And while quantum theories can make space and emergent feature, they have not yet managed to absorb time as a further emergent property of the collective. That has to be the next step.

Well at least we know who George Cobau is I guess - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-better-philosophy-george-cobau/

Good luck with your book.

This is where I disagree with Chalmers, as I noted above. He actually makes it too easy on the physicalist. Everything going on in the mind is problematic for the materialist or physicalist, not just subjective experience. — George Cobau

These are not arguments. They barely qualify as assertions.

So, sure, the mind is like a computer in some respects, but what does that prove, beyond the fact that humans are clever enough to invent such devices. It really says nothing about the nature of mind per se. — Wayfarer

Huh? It says that information processing or computation is metaphysically general as a form of "mind-like" organisation.

Now you can say the initial analogy is a weak one. And I would agree. Especially if we are talking about Turing Machines or other complicated abacuses.

That is why I take a semiotic position on the issue. Syntax alone - rule-based symbol shuffling - can't cut it. You have to have a model that is semantically embedded in the world it is hoping to regulate in pursuance of some autonomously evolved goal.

If we are talking computer architecture, that is now some kind of neural network story. Funny that. A computer that looks more like an actual living brain.

So that is why I was careful to talk about "information processing" in a loose sense. I've already said often enough that we have to move quickly from the notion of a calculating machine to an autonomous organic system doing meaningful sign processing.

So we can have a naturalism that is a sophisticated naturalism. That is perfectly possible here.

I think you are overly optimistic about what science has already achieved. — George Cobau

And is your own pessimism based on any actual familiarity with the subject? Have you studied the issues enough to have a right to an opinion?

Sorry to be harsh. But if you are going to disagree, you need to supply the argument that would go with that.

Of course, you can reply that I need to defend my own statement with an argument. But the fact you don't even recognise it as a standard position is then a problem here.

Did you realise that Chalmers did explore this question with his good mate, Andy Clark? So he said it was one of the easy questions having actually given the matter some consideration.

https://www.ida.liu.se/~729G12/mtrl/clark_chalmers_extended_mind.pdf

That's because of the obvious comparison with computation. But this overlooks the fact that computers are, in fact, extensions of the human faculties, and would not exist without them. — Wayfarer

So are you now switching into anti-Platonism mode and saying that mathematical theorems, like Turing Universal Computation, are just arbitrary stories humans made up for fun? Or did we instead actually discover some kind of universal truth there?

If computers, or information processing in some semiotically general sense, were merely human constructs, then yes, they might not carry much metaphysical impact. However, plenty of folk seem to agree there is something Platonically real about computation.

For the same reason, many are prepared to entertain the possibility that the Universe could be a computer simulation because it sounds like a scientifically reasonable thing to believe - except for the fact that all the computers that are known to us, are manufactured artefacts and don't occur naturally. — Wayfarer

You mean that all computation has to exist within the material constraints of the laws of thermodynamics?

Yep. That more naturalistic view is coming to the fore in the physics of information.

We're indeed getting pretty good at physicalism these days.

Also, I don't really like the term, substance, which appears to be vague and not well defined. — George Cobau

LOL. Aristotle did a decent job surely?

(I wouldn't rely on neuroscientists. To me, they appear to be very biased and confused.) — George Cobau

OK George. It's great that you might be interested in these issues. But it is really lame that you seem to think you have something new to tell everyone when you have next to no background in everything that has already been said.

The replies here should have given you some quick pointers as to what you need to explore. It's over to you now to get up to speed.

Thus, in all likelihood, the brain causes, creates, produces, and generates conscious mental experience. — George Cobau

How is this not a general physicalist presumption? The only real dualism here is a certain semantic slipperiness that arises in the gap between some notion of the nature of the cause and some notion of the nature of the effect.

Which is basically what materialism says. — Wayfarer

Yep. George, your problem is that you are speaking dualistically of two kinds of substances - Descartes res cogitans and res extensa. Or mental substance and corporeal substance. And yet then accepting some type of material connection between the two - the corporeal substance of brain "somehow" creating the mental substance of experience.

So you are giving a confused presentation of the familiar explanatory issues. This is not a new dualism but a mash-up.

As I say, the reasonable working hypothesis of neuroscience is then that it is the structure of the brain - its information processing structure - that is going to be the cause of minds with experiential states. And this hypothesis stands against some actually materialist account, such as would see the mind as some kind of emergent macro-property - like liquidity or superconductivity. Or even - another popular one - that the brain is a complex antenna for tuning into a universal mind field.

So if you accept that brains create minds, that is not dualism, except to the extent that it tries to make some explanatory separation in terms of causes and their effects.

It is the next step of "how" brains could create minds that is the usual problem for a naturalistic and physicalist account. And information processing seems a reasonable starting point for most physicalists.

Materialism - as more strictly defined by emergentists - would be the other naturalistic-seeming alternative. But there is no good evidence for it. Whereas there is a ton of evidence for some form of information processing paradigm.

Emphatically not. Animals are sentient, but not rational — Wayfarer

Yeah. And isn't the physicalist problem allegedly to do with that sentience rather than that rationality?

I agree that there are coherent evolutionary accounts of how linguistic capacity and reason evolved, but that doesn't explain the horizons that these faculties open up — Wayfarer

So you are saying that consciousness isn't an issue. What is causally surprising is that reality has an intelligible structure?

Can't you see that you are mixing up two questions in your haste to make this about Platonic form?

I think you misunderstand my position. ... I believe in naturalism but not materialism ... I don't get how Uber cannot understand this, but that's his problem. — George Cobau

Maybe you haven't presented a position that is understandable as yet.

You said your naturalism is dualistic in terms of believing in two kinds of substance - material substance and ... immaterial substance???

You also said you have ruled out some kind of panpsychism or dual aspect monism.

So I struggle to see what is "new" about your new dualism. It seems the regular kind so far.

You say the brain does information processing. How could it do that without a mind? — George Cobau

Are you claiming that the brain doesn't do information processing? On what grounds? Why did neuroscience look and find this going on?

Sure, you can be an old school dualist and say this ain't enough for you. But you can't question that information processing happens, and so mainstream science is already "dualistic" in accepting that physicalism includes more than just materialism. It now includes information as a second kind of thing.

My argument against materialism is traditionalist: that the nature of meaning, and therefore reason, inference, mathematics and so even science itself, cannot be understood as a consequence of the kinds of forces and empirically observable entities that naturalism studies, because reason, meaning, intentionality, and so forth, are required and assumed, before science itself can even be established. This is the sense in which reason (and so on) transcends the naturalist description, as reason is essentially prior to the empirical sciences as such. Reason dictates what to consider, what to study, and so on, prior to any actual observation being made — Wayfarer

You seem to be conflating reason and sentience here.

The Hard Problem is that thinking should feel like something (when allegedly it could feel like nothing). How humans can develop the linguistic habits involved in reasoning would be one of those "easy problems" already answered by neurobiology, social science and philosophy of science.

So you want to focus on the mystery of "creative insight". But what part of that is not explained by neurobiological habits of induction and generalisation? Where is the evidence that there is something else going on beyond some kind of materially-grounded information process?