Organismal immortality does not prevent evolution. — Akanthinos

You are talking right past my point again.

The immortality of the germ-line had to be physically separated from the mortality of the stem-line to achieve even basic multicellular complexity. And while stem cells can just keep growing - turning into whatever tissue they are being told to express by their surrounding mature cells - there is a general framework of regulation that is a kill switch on those possibilities.

The stem cells are stopped from producing the wrong tissues. They are told even when to stop producing. And then mature cells are regulated by similar collective signalling. You have apoptotic control.

So organismic-level immortality did prevent the evolution of complex structure. That is why a germ-line/stem-line dichotomy had to be evolved. The immortality had to be locked away in its own box. And then that made the soma disposable enough that it could become highly adapted as a system of specialised organs - none of which could survive on their own, but which might occasionally slip the leash of regulation to become cancers.

So it might not be the preordained death of an organism because some kind of genetic clock has ticked away the time to the appointed moment for a suicide. But the OP asked in what way might death be evolved as a practical advantage, and I was addressing the OP ... until you butted in.

These are the claims that you made in your post, and they were incorrect, and as usual you tried to deflect by writing a barely-related envolee lyrique. — Akanthinos

Since you had butted in, I thought I would cover off the senescence issue as well as regeneration/metamorphosis. It might have been of interest.

And your claims about what I claimed are plainly incorrect.

Bloody hell, how fucking otiose can someone be??? — Akanthinos

Yep. I was certainly wondering.

The point is that there is a colossal step between cell-suicide and programmed organismal death. — Akanthinos

Good job I didn't claim that then. That level of eugenic control has only really become possible for human society. ;)

I was talking about the death of possibilities, the termination of development - the positive step of making the soma disposable so as to make the germ-line evolvable.

If you want to make some more simplistic reading of what I wrote, I guess I can't stop you.

Another way of looking at it is the lifecycle model of development - the three natural stages of immaturity, maturity and senescence.

When you are young and stupid, you also have degrees of freedom to burn. You can recover quickly from mistakes, repair any damage, as the body and mind are still in learning mode, not yet established in strong habits.

When you are mature, you have a nice healthy balance of plasticity and stability. You can still recover from perturbations and mishaps, but also you are pretty well efficiently adapted to your environment. You are set up structurally to be doing mostly the right thing.

But this habit-forming - this burning off of the plasticity to lay down confirmed wise habit - keeps on going. Eventually we become so well adapted to our immediate environment - more efficient, less energy consuming, in meeting our survival goals - that we then become more prone to catastrophic breakdown when that environment changes. We have spent all our recovery powers, all our plasticity, to achieve a really good developmental fit with out world. And then it changes on us,

If the whole population becomes a collection of wonderfully adapted old farts - then that works super well until, suddenly, unpredictably, it doesn't.

So yeah. I started with the accidental nature of death. Mostly we would say it is the world that terminates our usefulness.

But then deliberate death also slips into the picture - as the basis for accessing a wider range of complexity-dependent evolutionary possibility. Scheduled, or just statistically reliable, terminations become a useful thing.

Work to do what? — Srap Tasmaner

In the context of what I said, it would be about working for those of us with the totalising metaphysical project of having a workable Theory of Everything.

Neither the goal nor the agent were concealed in what I wrote. I was arguing quite explicitly for the possibility of such a metaphysical ToE. I was dealing with the "paradox" of how we could advance a totalising scheme in such a way that it didn't then just blindly assimilate every possible fact to it.

It is a problem if a totalising metaphysics in fact offers no counter-factuals. It couldn't then discover itself to be wrong.

But I replied suck it and see. Pragmatism says "wrongness" is to be expected. The question then becomes whether the wrongness observed as the general is advanced to explain the particular is a case of signal or noise. Is there something significant not being explained? Or are all the inevitable exceptions to the rule just meaningless noise? A constraints-based ontology does give the grounds for making this very distinction. That is one of the key ways it is "better".

Well, yeah, but to be fair, so does all form of complex cellular life. — Akanthinos

Wasn't that my point? Structural complexity depends on controlled death. And hydra are already complex enough for that to be a factor.

This doesn't mean that organismal death is itself pre-programmed. — Akanthinos

Again, it is an evolutionary story. If complex structure depends on controlled death, then control over that death will become increasingly a feature.

The point was to show how the agent's judgment that what they did "works" could be faulty, unless some goal is taken as the goal relative to which a judgment of effectiveness is made. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't get you. Sure, the definition of an agent, of autonomy, would be the freedom to do something contrary or "other". But that freedom is still contextual. You still have people giving some kind of justification, as if that justification matters.

If they did the wrong thing by mistake or misunderstanding, that is one kind story - please ignore my accident. And if they did it for deliberate reason, then it becomes the something else of whose understanding is correct.

But what does any of that have to do with anything here? It certainly doesn't pose a problem for my holism.

If you want to judge what "works", you have to settle first what the goal is, and in many cases whose goal it is. — Srap Tasmaner

Again, so what? How does that change anything for my point of view?

That is what I've been asking you to clarify. How your occasional appeals to a pragmatic "this, because it works" slot into your system. Works to do what? To study effectively or to get a good grade? And whose goals are we talking about? — Srap Tasmaner

I am putting forward a completely general scheme. That was the whole point. I am defending a totalising metaphysics.

And you seem worried about the variety of possible particular expressions of that general semiotic machinery - even if every case might be an expression of those general principles.

I've said nature itself is irreducibly telic. There is always finality or a goal in play. And there will always then be some best route to the goal. Nature has no real choice but to follow the path of least action.

So that is the general scheme. And I've explained how it would apply in your various suggested examples.

What else is there to clarify?

But it is also true that hydra depend on apoptosis, or programmed cell death, to rein in what would otherwise become runaway tissue growth. So death in this form become a necessity of the most simple metazoans.

The highly conserved morphological features of apoptosis suggest that it is under genetic control...

[Hydra] budding is dependent on feeding: well-fed polyps produce roughly one bud per day; starved polyps cease to form buds after 1–2 days. This striking dependence of budding on feeding is not due to a change in cell proliferation, as initially anticipated, but rather to apoptosis...

In reflecting on possible scenarios which might have led to this close association of apoptosis with metazoan evolution, we are impressed by the need to reduce cell-cell competition in multicellular tissues....

https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/45/4/631/636419

So yes. Simpler animals can afford the luxury of regeneration and metamorphosis. They can recycle cells as the raw material to remodel their structure.

But it is genetically controlled death - the evolution of death as a further now conclusive stage to life - that shows its face even in hydra. Deliberate death was the step underpinning evolutionary access to greater structural complexity.

So, what does the Theory of Evolution say about death? — TheMadFool

Death has both genetic and environmental components. We die because it's programmed in our genes and also because we succumb to environmental stresses. — TheMadFool

Yes. The theory is that evolvability itself evolves. If you want to achieve greater biological complexity, there is an advantage in dividing things sharply between a mortal body and an immortal germ-line.

So the reason is to allow evolution to access the possibilities of greater structural complexity. Like sex, it had to happen to allow the step from simple bacteria to complex multicellular organisms.

So sex and death do go together.

Bacteria are messy analog creatures. They are promiscuously sexless - forever swapping gene kits even across so called species boundaries. And they are immortal - forever dividing unless hit by some external accident.

But eukaryotes had to create greater digital order. They had to make gene recombination a definite act - a sexual act that divided the flow of evolutionary history into a distinct before and after. And the same for death.

Or rather, it is more subtle. Multicellular organisms needed to separate their immortal germ-line from their developing bodies so that they could start to construct themselves from specialised tissues.

The germ-line - the connecting thread of evolutionary history - had to be tucked away in the gonads or ovaries to allow the other cells get on with their job of turning into lungs, kidneys, brain, muscle, or whatever kind of tissue was their developmental terminus.

So really, the death is the death of alternative developmental possibilities. You can't have lung tissue that wants the autonomy to breed more lungs. Lung tissue that does that is what we call cancer.

But then having specialist reproductive organs - the gonads and ovaries - introduces another problem. As they age, they do accumulate inevitable damage and become too prone to bad mutation.

Now germ-line and stem-line are separated so that one can produce variation while the other avoids it - the stem-line cells just continuing to express the programmed potential to be some kind of tissue like lung. But still, the variation via chromosome recombination is quite different - more tuned and selective in the traits that get exposed to the world - than the kind of brute damage that aging might cause.

So death is an evolved outcome, if a little more indirectly than sex. It is already a de facto presence in the very fact that stem cells are pre-programmed to undergo some certain number of cell-divisions and then - forever - stop. Once our lungs and brains and muscles achieve their proper developmental size, the body is already "dead" so far as its possibilities in that direction goes.

Simpler animals like newts and worms can afford to regenerate limbs and tails. But that stem cell level freedom had to end for good evolutionary reason if nature wanted to access more complex structural possibilities.

So metabolic wearing out is a big reason for death. That is one consequence of achieving complexity - more stuff to go wrong. But also the division of labour - the split between immortal germ-line and disposable soma - is a necessity for achieving complexity of organismic structure.

The lungs can't be allowed to have the ability to live on - spawn away, reproducing themselves - even after the kidneys are shot. The genetics must remain a package deal, tucked away safely, as far from metabolic degradation as possible. The body must perish as a whole so that the immortal part of the business can do its thing of being the continuous historical thread.

The idea that substantial being requires both matter and form is derived from a materialist bias. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean that the idea that it doesn't is derived from theistic necessity. It is an article of faith that there are gods and souls, therefore Aristotle's hylomorphism must be scholastically rendered in a fashion that permits matter-less substantial form.

Materialism (or rather physicalism, if you accept hylomorphism) isn't a bias. It is a belief derived from rational theory and empirical evidence.

"Did you get a job?" is a yes-or-no question. Humans do highly artificial stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

I wish I could follow your leaps. You started making some kind of point about pragmatism’s notion of effectiveness. Now you are talking about mechanical constraints. Any chance of an explanation of the connection?

But yes. Constraints can approach the mechanical limit. We can construct bivalent switches - physically or logically. And that is really basic to semiosis too. It is significant that the digital lies at the terminus of the analog. In the end, dynamical gestures can be fixed and remembered as informational marks.

So in all your examples, there are laid out certain constraints - which presumably are meant to achieve some effective action. And yet the actions look to defy them. A "wrong" procedure is employed to reach the apparent goal.

But the point about constraints is that they don't need to specify the procedures - the precise path taken. This is the physical mystery of the least action principle. Nature manages to find that optimal path ... on the whole ... eventually ... to the degree it matters.

Humans of course do it differently. We construct mechanisms to achieve ends. We take constraint to the point where it becomes logically bivalent or counterfactual. Switch is either on or off. The gate to the paddock of sheep is either open or closed. We take informational steps to control nature.

And we kind of expect that mechanical causal paradigm to apply to nature itself. Hence reductionism. But we know it doesn't. Nature isn't actually a machine. Nature is constrained possibilities. It has an essential holism that our black and white logico-mechanical descriptions do not properly capture.

Here's another: A wedding planner tells one of the staff to put a certain flower arrangement on the dining table, and the ice sculpture on another table. The staff person decides to swap the indicated locations "because it looks better this way." Be that as it may, and whether the event planner agrees, the staff person cannot be said to have done what they were told. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. So in reply to me pointing out the contextual social nature of goal-setting, you keep cranking up the degree of constraint to try and close off the possibility of other routes to some goal. You want a path so fixed, so black and white, that there could be no deviation. But that just demonstrates that what I say is correct.

Now what if the staff person switched the flowers and sculpture, then switches them again.

Did this violate the procedure laid down by the planner? The outcome is the intended one. But the planner might feel a little perturbed about the path by which it was reached.

What if the staff person did this repeatedly a few dozen times? Such a procedure wasn't explicitly forbidden. But it might be considered as tacitly excluded for some more general socially constraining reason. The planner would "rightfully" say, mate, now you're just being weird.

So the point is that there is an unbridgable gap between these two causal views of the world - the mechanically absolute and the Peircean pragmatic. But also, it is not a problem that constraints can always be tightened by the addition of further information. Humans in particular have got very good at constructing machines in this fashion.

That is what semiotics is about - the informational machinery that can construct constraints to bind nature to purposes. And complexity arises by layering up this informational mechanism - the codes and memories that regulate physical dynamics. The evolution of life and mind is the story of a succession of ever more generalised and abstract encoding - from membranes to genes to neurons to words to numbers and variables.

Reread that last sentence — Thorongil

You seem more interested in word games than serious arguments.

Maybe you are making the point that all choices serve the interest of some ego - even the desire to be egoless. Ah, sweet paradox!

But remember my ultimate position is that the self itself is a social construct. So egotism - in the true sense - would extend to include the interests of our family, our community, our tribe and humanity in general, as it is that social context which produces the personal individuated "us" in the first place.

So now the issue is what level is egotism being served by a choice - the highly individual or the collectively general? And now a desire to become a better individual by being less egocentric can both serve an interest - as all reasoned action ought - and yet not be egotistical in the sense of having to serve the interests of "my self".

It is not beyond individual human reasonableness to frame a decision in these prosocial terms. And my original reply was highlighting your own apparent presumptions about the ego as something personal, not social.

Again, antinatalism requires theistic/romantic absolutism to get going. It must already believe we are born into the world as feeling souls.

But if instead you take a physicalist/naturalist view of human being, then attention goes to the merits and defects of actual social systems. The increase of reason and civility becomes the thing. It is a paradigm shift in which antinatalism looses all its force.

We could still decide not to have kids because social conditions are such that we are sure they would suffer too much for their existence to be worth it. But that would be a situational decision - one responding to the social context, not the kind of ontically absolute argument that antinatalists want to make about living and "being a self" just on its own.

My point was that effectiveness at achieving a goal at one level may not always count as effectiveness at achieving a goal on another level. — Srap Tasmaner

But you said it as if that was something I needed to give some counter to. So how exactly does that - as something particular - contradict the generality of the pragmatic view?

The very definition of hierarchical levels would require this to be the case. And yet - my earlier point - when we talk about hierarchical order in a fundamental fashion, there are no real internal levels. You have the kind of homogenous interior that is a fractal or scalefree structure.

So even the simplest world - the world without levels - is irreducibly triadic. It consists of its opposed limits, and then the generality that develops over all scales in-between.

That is foundational - Salthe's basic triadic system, Peirce's sign relation. And then complexity arises on that foundation by the marking off of levels by grades of semiosis. We get the kind of subsumptive hierarchies like {propensity {function {purpose}}}, which equates to the familiar divisions of matter, life and mind.

And the answer is "no", no matter what else we say about the situation. — Srap Tasmaner

It is the other way round. You are relying on a highly artificial demarcation that seeks to stop us saying anything else about the situation.

That is why I pointed to the strangeness of your scenario. You want to pretend that this could be a real world dilemma - the smartarse son offering a "re-interpretation" of his father's wishes.

We don't believe the son's rationale for a minute because we wouldn't believe that he believed it for a minute. Bullshit was already being called before it became a problem for pragmatism.

It's a question about how exactly you attach the pragmatist appeal to the effectiveness of a procedure to the hierarchical/holistic/systems science analysis. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. So the thing is that the systems view is constraints-based, and hence fundamentally permissive. If it ain't forbidden, it is not just allowed, it has to happen in the long run.

The other way of thinking about causality - the reductionist, materialist, deterministic, atomistic, etc one - would view things as procedures. There is a program, a sequence, a law, to be followed.

But a holistic approach talks of habits and limits. If there is a fence around the paddock, then the sheep will be found inside. But the sheep are not only then free to be anywhere inside, they must be everywhere inside at some time or other.

So the fence encodes a desire. And at the same time it encodes its own degree of indifference. It only has to be effective in confining the sheep in a way that makes a sharp hierarchical distinction between being inside vs being outside.

If the father's constraint is simply that the son must return with money, theft has yet to be ruled out. It thus becomes - by that definition - a matter of indifference to the dad. The son would be right to complain about being told off for robbing the store. That wasn't a no-no under the job description given him.

But if the father's constraint was to find paid labour, that is an entirely different story. Now the son might go out and be a rent boy - and again complain about being told off when his dad seems annoyed at this particular choice.

So that is how it works. If you pen sheep with a fence, they then fill that space with their motion in an essentially free and random fashion - at least from your established point of view. The field of sheep finds its own least action equilibrium state. If you measured some critical parameter, like the length of the grass, it would be trimmed at a steady rate across the whole paddock in an efficient fashion.

Reductionist metaphysics believes in worlds ruled by deterministic procedures. Holism believes in worlds that self-organise due to generalised constraints.

Think about the principle of least action (PLA). It really is the most profound of mysteries for the usual phyicalist view.

Nature has to know all the different ways of getting to wherever it wants to go to reliably find the shortest path possible. The very success of the PLA killed our normal notions of cauality and locality even before quantum mechanics hammered in the last nails of the coffin.

See for example -

Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf

I didn't give an argument, I made a distinction, one that refutes the alleged nonselfish reason for procreation you tried to give. — Thorongil

I don't understand how that is a refutation. Adoption might be less egotistical. But that doesn't mean procreation is consequently egotistical.

So you really didn't deal with my argument - that even pre-conception, a reason for having kids is that you could expect it would make you less egotistical as a result. The desire to be less selfish could be a valid reason.

Quality. And one is too many. It's an argument from principle, as I said. — Thorongil

Right. So antinatalism relies on moral absolutism as I said. It doesn't even leave room to value the possibility of a growth in civilised selfhood. It is monotonic and obsessive in its complaints.

It does follow its own particular logic to its end, but that remains - in my view, based on larger naturalistic arguments - a caricature of the rich world it pretends to represent.

Yes, but not metaphysical wounds! — Thorongil

Ah yes. The completely imaginary kind!

So again, if naturalism is true, antinatalism fails. Nothing has really changed. We just have to decide whose metaphysics we believe.

Poppycock, I say. But if you really believe this, then you implicitly allow antinatalism in through the backdoor, for if morality is inherently subjective, you have no means of disputing the antinatalist on moral grounds. — Thorongil

Huh? I'm not disputing your moral right to hold absolutist antinatalist beliefs. I'm saying such beliefs would be no better than faith based. They would be utterly subjective.

My view of morality is instead based on the objectivity of pragmatic naturalism. So sure, that is a metaphysical stance. But it is the product of theory and evidence, not faith. It is the objective view in exactly the way pragmatism defines that.

Remember what I said about necessity vs contingency. There is room in my naturalism for actions that make no essential difference. Objectively the world is divided in that fashion. And so yes, there is a cultural relativism that makes many things - like choice of sock colour - a "subjective" matter.

But pre-conception choices about whether or not to have kids is a bit more important than sock colours. There will always be pros and cons. And so the hope is that a civilised world will make civilised decisions.

Faith-based approaches can indeed enshrine social habits that represent good choices. Religions exist in human society for a reason. Their absolutism is useful - if the habits they dictate continue to be functional.

But strong conviction of itself is not a reliable guide to metaphysical-strength issues. We invented the rational collective method of philosophy and science for precisely that reason.

This is a post-natal contingency. I'm talking about the selfishness of procreation itself, not the possible lack thereof as a result of having children. Besides, if this is true, then one can simply adopt, so you still haven't said anything about procreation proper. — Thorongil

Not a good argument. To procreate is to have kids. But perhaps you are not seeing it from a mother's point of view. The male can pretend it is all rather more abstract.

And adoption might be even more selfless than procreation. But my argument did target procreation - actual "proper" procreation. So you are simply trying to divert.

But to paraphrase schopenhauer1, by having children you are creating a state of affairs whereby more people will need to be civilized, when they didn't need to be civilized in the first place by never having been born. — Thorongil

Is it quality or quantity that is the issue here? How many is too many? How few is enough?

Antinatalism has to be an argument about quality - absolute generality. Either there should be life (because it is in some sense generally good, or at least neutral), of there should not.

But if antinatalism is simply a wrangle about the pragmatics of how many lives can exist in a tolerable fashion, then it has completely lost any real force it thought it had. Once you say some number is acceptable, then we can all agree - nothing to see here.

To procreate for the sake of the band-aid is therefore irrational, as the band-aid only exists to heal the wound, which it can't ever completely do. — Thorongil

Now we are into the last resort - philosophical battle by dramatic rhetoric. Existence is the wound that can't be healed.

I dunno. Maybe I spend too much time on actual biology. In nature, wounds heal. And they are the exception rather than the rule. The functional autonomy of a working body comes first. You can't have a wound without there being the alternative of the healthy organism.

antinatalism tacitly assumes moral realism, for it regards procreation as immoral in principle — Thorongil

Well exactly. It requires the absolutism of moral realism, as I said.

And some folk believe that. Which makes antinatalism another religion. In the face of all the evidence to the contrary about nature, it requires an act of faith to sustain antinatalism as a system of belief.

Some religions like to be life-affirming. Others might not.

To the degree that any religion shapes a society, those beliefs get a good evolutionary work-out. Nature still gets the last say on human death cults.

none of it is relevant to this single question: did the son follow a procedure that is effective in achieving the goal of getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

You've lost me. How could that have been the gist of your argument?

Are you claiming convenience store robbery is another trade - an actual kind of job, a recognised way to earn money? If so, then - duh. The son is right ... if the social norm indeed doesn't make the distinction that theft is something different from other forms of earning a crust.

But the father wanted the son to earn some money by getting a job. (Well, I'm guessing that as you left it open - the father could have had the more general goal of his son being a responsible and self-sufficient citizen.)

And now the son is justifying his flouting of that norm - respectable paid labour. But is theft truly effective even if the goal is merely money?

Is theft effective simply if you don't get caught? Is theft effective to the degree society can afford to tolerate it as something that doesn't make a difference? Is theft effective in some generic pragmatic sense as your claim, or his justification, is that the only real constraint is some abstract morality that pretends to have an objective base ... and actually, there is no such morality?

...effectiveness at achieving the higher goal does not pass through to the lower. — Srap Tasmaner

That may or may not be the case. Hierarchy theory accounts for both the underlying spatiotemporal continuities and discontinuities here. I've already done a length post on the issue.

So for example, neither the father nor the son can invent perpetual motion machines. The second law prevails on that generic score. But in a complex modern society, living off the free lunch of fossil fuels, the son will have access to the combination of guns, cars and convenience stores.

Locally, the laws of thermodynamics will appear to have no constraint on the son's socially-situated freedoms - until climate change kicks in and collapses the little bubble of modern economic dilemmas that your morality tale is entirely predicated on.

The pattern here is similar: reinterpret the instruction to shelve everything as an instruction to leave nothing in the back. Reinterpret the instruction to get a job as an instruction to get money. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure. This is exactly how humans rationalise their moral choices. As if they were poorly programmed robots.

I will simply note how you were forced to admit to the role of interpretance by arguing for acts of re-interpretance.

Yes. Social engagement is all about this kind of semiotics. It is all about claiming the high moral ground to justify your particular choices of action. So there is negotiation and manoeuvring to create exactly what I have been describing - the larger contexts that frame the local particulars. Do that and the outcomes look natural, effective, optimal, legitimate, worthy, to all concerned.

So you are making my case for me.

The right way to think about all these situations is the natural one of a hierarchical order. We have to show how our individual behaviour - our personal degrees of freedom - fit naturally into a general social context. We have to show how in some generalised way, we are working within the constraints given by our worlds. And our actions are at their best when they can be shown to be a part of continually maintaining and reconstructing that said world.

Which doesn't meant that that also leaves considerable scope for personal actions which are simply contingent or accidental. If I wear red socks or blue socks is the kind of choice that doesn't matter - outside the constraints of a school uniform or other social norms of taste and convention.

So there is stuff we do because we believe it is part of the preservation of the very order that shapes us. We seek to be pro-social, being the products of sociality.

And there is stuff that we do that probably matters to no one because it doesn't matter to society in general. It becomes the random shit.

But your examples seem to want to confuse the two. Differences that matter - like paid labour vs theft - are treated as differences which don't.

And yes, they might not matter. They might be random shit according to social norms. But you haven't shown that in your examples.

Consequently, I want to understand what positive reasons there are to have children, specifically those that are not based in egotism. — Thorongil

Don't kids give you a reason not to be selfish? Aren't they an antidote to egotism?

So I don't think there needs to be moral grounds for procreation as such, any more than that it could be objectively or absolutely judged as immoral. If it works, it works. So really we are talking about the practicalities or optimalities, the degree of free choice involve.

But if your concern is primarily the "sin" of egotism, then having kids must be a major way of ensuring your life must be less self-centred.

Of course, the routine rejoinder is that kids are an expression of egotism in being an unwarranted extension of yourself.

But then I would counter-argue that selfhood is essentially social anyway. Humans evolved to be social creatures. It is always going to be the case that we find ourselves in others.

Or at least, it is a business of co-construction. And antinatalism's flaw is this mistaken understanding about the socially-constructed nature of selfhood.

But is civilization an end in itself? I think not. — Thorongil

Why not? If you are making moral arguments here, why isn't a civilised self a better self?

Now we can certainly say the current state of modern society has a bunch of problems. However that in turn means it is not yet properly civilised and so not at any kind of end.

So antinatalism would depend on being able to show that things can only get worse as the human story continues to evolve. But is that judgement factual?

Secular natalists and parents are therefore on the thinnest ice of all when it comes to reasons to procreate. — Thorongil

But then secular thinkers would have the least need of reasons here. They would just do what comes naturally - which includes making fairly rational choices about the situational pros and cons of having kids.

So to the degree that things like contraception, economics and social tolerance of diversity make procreation now an individual choice, people would exercise that choice.

Are there arguments - from a secular viewpoint - that would say the development of such a choice is wrong? It may indeed be a very difficult choice, given the uncertainties of modern life. But then that just emphasises the need for the kind of civilised rationality that would underpin such a choice.

So I would reply that a secular thinker - someone relying on rationality and evidence to make decisions about what is natural, even if just for themselves in some social context - is best placed to actually reason for or against having kids.

there's no such thing as generic effectiveness — Srap Tasmaner

Well there is in physics. You have the principle of least action which pretty much explains everything. Nature is ruled by optimality when it comes to the breaking of symmetries.

So natural selection is an expression of this at the level of biology. And the second law is its expression at the level of thermodynamics.

Along with its complementary causal principle - the principle of locality - it is as basic to the metaphysics of physics as you can get.

Example: father tells his son he needs to get a job; son goes out and robs a convenience store. When the father objects, the son's defence is that the whole point of getting a job was to get money, so he just got money a different way. Whatever the merits of that view, and they may be considerable, it cannot be said that he succeeded at getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

You are taking the Jamesian utilitarian view of Pragmatism it seems - the one Peirce had to disown.

But OK. We can zoom right in on some microcosmic example of exceptional complexity in this Universe. We can take some man, some son, at some arbitrary point in history where there are such things as convenience stores to rob when a desirable job appears hard to find.

Are you saying that I couldn't find any grand metaphysical narrative that would show this to be a particular example of a general principle? Is there something that just rules off this episode from the greater history of the Comos? Or are you too invoking exactly the semiotic/hierarchical distancing effects that I myself have already outlined?

Semiotically, what is going on between father and son - given that this could even be a realistic conversation out in the actual world?

On your version - when forced to provide an intelligible rationale of the context in play - the son says it is all about the least action path to get that money. Jobs and robbery are not meaningfully distinct ... despite social norms that exist because of a larger scale social effectiveness. In the son's view, the father's attempt to draw a distinction is a quite arbitrary one on his own personal scale of being. Jobs or robbery is being claimed as a difference that should make no difference.

So there is nothing about your example that doesn't directly relate to the systems approach I've been taking.

Complexity wants to build up critical distinctions or constraints to provide globally effective order. Simplicity wants to break down any such distinctions that instead stand in the way of a maximal flow.

These kinds of tensions or dynamics are the bread and butter of modern complexity modelling. Stewart and Cohen did a nice little book on it - The Collapse of Chaos - that highlighted the dichotomous or complementary nature of this kind of thing. They said it was about the opposition of simplexity and complicity. These days, for the real maths, you have stuff like constructal theory.

So you could model the prevalence of employment vs crime in terms of global social efficiencies. Why not? Cheaters vs co-operators is a huge field in evolutionary biology. It is an obvious thing that the issue in play is the cost of preventing system "friction" vs that of building the distinctions that would prevent it.

So I'm wondering what task you have in mind when you reference this pragmatic sense of effectiveness, and whose task it is. Does this task belong to the "we" you reference, or to the cosmos? — Srap Tasmaner

Well I am taking the pan-semiotic view that does treat the second law as an expression of cosmic purpose. Or more strictly speaking, I would argue for Stan Salthe's tripartite nested hierarchy of
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.

Or in more regular language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.

So the "we" that is the global constraint being expressed by the Cosmos is the teleomatic level thing of a generalised propensity or tendency. There is both finality in play - entropification as a "desire" is fundamental. But also the telos is appropriately watered down. The mind that has it as a goal is the very least kind of mind with a goal that we can physically imagine. Nothing weird is being claimed. All that is being asserted is a unity of nature where purpose can be expressed over every scale of being.

Then the "we" that should apply in your example becomes the social norms in play. A son that robs convenience stores is far more likely to come from a family and neighbourhood that robs convenience stores. The choice of a least action path to a goal would not really need much further justification.

But given your scenario, the father would be asserting some larger social norm as the "we" with the view on what is effective for that "we". We are law abiding and employed as that is a desire embedded at a cultural level, representing whatever happens to be functionally effective as a generalised habit.

Having developed your system, the only thing you seem to be able to do with it is find it in everything.

But it is a system derived from the evidence. It is a system derived by others. It is a system with a pedigree as old as metaphysics itself. It is a system derived as a challenge to the now mainstream system.

You are anti systems. And that has become your system. You certainly haven’t offered any critique of my system as a system.

So you are no longer content with the idea that substantial being is definitely both material cause and formal cause? It would have to be now either the one or the other?

Curious.

so let me be cheeky, then: I do believe I've touched a chord. — csalisbury

I can see you hoped to, but honestly I was hoping for a better organised challenge to my position.

Again, you didn't make an argument against a triadic metaphysics in terms of some definite alternative. You didn't make an argument against my version of anti-foundationalism - one that founds itself on the commonality of a core (semiotic) structure or relation. Etc, etc.

Finally, the engine quote. I was clearly, I thought, suggesting that the search for a foundation is flawed, substrate or engine. I wasn't avoiding responding. — csalisbury

Yeah. So I replied that "engine" is right in the sense that semiotics is a core structural relation. And then I was waiting for the argument of why something I claim makes a metaphysical difference, doesn't in your view make a difference.

We can both agree that there ain't the kind of material foundation that reductionism/atomism needs to presume. But if everything is bound and totalised by something as "insubstantial" as a common emergent structure, then how does your pluralism - in all its ill-defined glory, of course - fare against my totalising project there?

Where did semiotics and its triadic sign relation fail precisely? You never said.

What you did repeat was that any bid at abstract totalising must by its own lights fail to capture the wholeness of an actual world.

Well again, I made the arguments on that. I agreed that modelling is modelling. But then the larger Peircean story is that modelling constructs its own world. And so the actualised wholeness is itself an emergent from the core semiotic process that is the engine producing any reality.

It should be a familiar line - Plato's allegory of the cave. But rather more sophisicated - not least in taking quantum mechanics seriously. The Cosmos only appears to be solidly there because it is - in some literal sense - observing itself. It exists as a globalised matrix of constraints on undirected local possibility.

Now the rejoinder is obvious. Quantum mechanics doesn't account for human feelings.

But I made the argument there too. Semiotics originated in phenomenology. It is rooted in the mechanics of human intelligibility. So it doesn't exactly leave the phenomenal out of it. Instead it accepts the full Kantian force of that and then builds back out so as to recover the noumenal - rescuing it via this idea of a core relational structure that acconts for intelligibility itself.

I can see the vulnerability that creates. Yes, we are projecting a view of ourselves as rational beings on to the apparent rational structure we see in the world. That is quite a leap of faith.

However - pragmatism again - suck it and see. Leaps of faith become justified to the extent they appear to work.

So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.

Your reply again may be that it is unwarranted for me to expect you to frame your response in terms that might appear to legitimate my framing of the issues in that fashion. Your actual position here is the position against all positions.

But I pointed out that is itself still a position. So why even pretend to engage if you want to be self-consistent to your position of not holding a position?

(Prediction: by now your position has become that you don't have a position on whether you do or don't hold positions ... and so we have arrived at the utter vagueness that is also foundational to my anti-foundationalist position.)

((Yes, in all earnestness, I really am having a laugh by now.))

You're ad homing me again rather than addressing my arguments.

These are the direct questions which you failed to respond to....

Do you accept that it is right in seeking a foundation in an "engine" - a core relational structure?

Do you accept that the very thing of a core relational structure must be - in its simplest possible form - a triadic and hierarchical organisation?

Is this relationship still "weird"? Well why? — apokrisis

So first you diverted to the old switcheroo - I have to characterize my position in terms of yours ... to the degree that you do or don't have an expressed position.

And then you retreated to the comfortable histrionics of playing the victim.

What you didn't do was take the opportunity to show where this supposed agreement between us has emerged.

I mean the personal comments are fun and all. They spice it up. But they are not the main dish are they?

Do you see that right now you’re asking me to characterize my position in terms of yours? — csalisbury

LOL.

What you need to do now is show why my consideration was wrong — csalisbury

Double LOL.

As far as I can make out, your position is that you have no position. Hence pluralism is your position.

And that somehow makes this gambit of a position that ain't a position somehow unassailable by the very fact I take a position on position-taking as an epistemic process.

So you get to curl up tight like a hedgehog and complain that I won't come out to play.

Probably run its course then?

I wasn't doing that. I'm trying to understand why you think I'm doing that. It feels, frankly, weird to be accused of all these binary either/or things when the explicit triple-underlined purpose of my posts has been to find a way around them. — csalisbury

Well, tell me what it is that you accept about a global, triapartite, holism exactly. Give an example of how it applies here.

What I've been addressing is this:

So, for instance, the whole Pierce triadic thing .... what stops me from saying this procedure is as infected, at heart, as the atomist thing? It wants to find the base of everything - then it thought a while and said, well, not the base, but the engine. But it still is driven toward the central thing, even if the central thing is a weird triadic relationship. — csalisbury

Do you accept that it is right in seeking a foundation in an "engine" - a core relational structure?

Do you accept that the very thing of a core relational structure must be - in its simplest possible form - a triadic and hierarchical organisation?

Is this relationship still "weird"? Well why?

So again: "What you have here is a prediction that can't fail, structurally. What would it mean for this prediction to fail?" — csalisbury

Huh? A generality is a constraint - that which defines a level of indifference to exceptions. So what Pragmatism says is not this atomistic notion - a single exception breaks the rule. Instead it says that exceptions are going to be the case. They are indeed ... predicted. But the prediction is about significance. A good generalisation is fault tolerant as it knows how to write off variability as accidents or contingencies. Stuff that doesn't matter in the bigger picture. Noise rather than signal.

So the falsification is about creating a state of expectation which is then alert to what would be a significant failure of deterministic prediction. What kind of exceptions are just the expected statistical noise and what would be in fact paradigm-shifting level failures.

So now the falsification lifts to a meta-evidential level. Does reductionism let us down enough to worry? Is holism a better kind of generalisation - and what could then rightfully challenge it?

Well holism would be challenged by the success of reductionism for a start. And that is how history went. Holism has been around from the start of metaphysics (see Anaximander or Heraclitus). But it lost out for a long time to atomism and reductionism.

However now the limits of a reductionist metaphysics are clearly being reached. See quantum mechanics especially. And so we are getting the resurgence of a full-blown holism - starting in biology and the social sciences back in the 1950s, becoming the norm through the more recent rapid advances in the physics of complexity and self-organising systems.

Then even within holism or systems science - which are actually very diverse fields when viewed from the inside - there is a contest of ideas or paradigms.

For example, what I've called SX out on is that he is on the side of the holists with things like dynamical systems theory or autopoiesis, but then there is the more encompassing holism of Peircean sign relations and infodynamics/hierarchy theory.

So as a contest of ideas, holism has many camps. And it is a frontier field only to the degree it has that dynamical uncertainty. And it can be criticised for being insufficiently general in its mathematical structures. It is still rather a rag-bag collection of mathematical-strength models. Although, having been through a few convulsions like cybernetics, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, holography, etc, etc, all the particular models are becoming more recognisable by the generality of what connects them. It is now much clearer how systems modellers are all feeling parts of the same elephant.

But again, the very way you frame your demand for falsification speaks to your essentially atomistic outlook.

Pragmatism - of the Peircean kind - stresses that not all exceptions are equal. Some are meaningful, some merely accidents. So as an epistemology, the ability to know the difference is something itself that has to be built into the totalising model.

Now mostly the deciding line is treated as an issue of heuristics. Every discipline learns to make is historically conditioned judgements.

But I have been arguing for a larger model - one based on the triadicism of hierarchy theory. So if we can produce a mathematical model of generality vs particularity itself, then we are getting somewhere.

Again, in previous posts, I highlighted the essential flip in mindset this requires.

The old epistemic question was what fluctuation would be sufficient to disrupt my general paradigm? That was how Popperian falsification was understood. What kind of exception would it take to break your stable belief (about a stable world)?

But the new science of complexity sees reality the other way round. Now the question is what generality can survive the relentless instability of fluctuations? What kind of exceptions can your generality tolerate by ignoring them as meaningless noise ... just as reality itself would have to be able to achieve a dynamical equilibrium by no longer being disrupted by its constant disruptions.

So you keep attacking me for forcing an organising viewpoint on a highly various and contingent social reality. It is obviously bad practice - from your chosen metaphysical paradigm.

But what I am doing is saying that reality itself is organised by its generalities. And so organising our conceptions of the world in this fashion - finding the logic that organises everything to the point of treating exceptions as noise - is in fact simply the epistemology accurately tracking the ontology.

Our minds should work that way, as that is the way reality works.

The species casts us off in different directions, and some of us do what we can to assimilate as many fragments of this splintered god as we can. But even this goal is a 'fragmentary.' — syntax

Yes, society is now large enough that we must all become some kind of specialist. We must all inhabit niches.

This is in fact another direct prediction of the hierarchy theory approach I take - my earlier posts on Stan Salthe's work.

Simultaneously we become both more general and more particular as culturally individuated beings. Everyone knows far more about the Kardashian clan than makes social sense. And every one of us also has narrower interests than can be shared with our immediate social group.

So increasingly, exponentially, we all diverge in these opposing directions as individuals. We have more in common with the world and less in common with each other. We go hard out in both ways - leaving us wondering about the "me" who has to be found in the middle, still holding the extremes of selfhood together in some coherent, integrative, fashion.

Well, again this speaks to the essential differences in viewpoint being expressed here.

Personally, I want to be integrated and whole. I don't want to become a pluralistic bricolage of conceptual fragments and varied impulse.

And that sets me against the kind of PoMo celebration of foundational diversity which doesn't, in turn, recognise its own roots in a totalising notion of humanity - the highly questionable foundation provided by a "one world" Romanticism.

As a psychological model, it just doesn't fly. Instead, my holist approach takes you to places like positive psychology that understand the socially constructed nature of "the self".

The only way to be integrated as a self is to understand the disintegrative forces at work.

Thousands of years ago, poetry and improv were at the heart of personal identity within a tribal social setting. They were the right technology for an oral tradition.

But thousands of years on and we are not in Kansas anymore. That is why I find them inauthentic if taken out of that tribal context and advanced as a viable modern mode of analysis.

Marxism had its analytic moment. Post-modernism had its analytical moment. So lets keep moving right along swiftly.

Sociology now roots itself in biology, and biology in thermodynamics. It is the new ontic structural realism - the theology of dissipative structures. :)

It may be too sciencey for many. But science has only really cracked the back of complexity in the past 30 years or so. So it will be another generation of philosophy perhaps before there is that general catch-up.

I know. An acute sense of ridiculousness and softness and disgust seems like it underlies your whole approach. You systematically bleed things of those features, to find the skeleton, again and again and again. — csalisbury

Wrong analogy. I did biology and found the dissecting of dead things a chore. I stopped going down the psychology/neuroscience path once I found what was expected in an animal lab. My natural interest was in understanding the living and dynamic - the ecological and anthropological story.

So yes, that is about seeing through to the hidden structure. But - to draw attention to your cheap rhetorical devices - the opposite of thinking the structure that matters is the dead and lifeless anatomy of the bled corpse. The structure I am interested in - the semiotic/systems one - is the "mathematical-strength" one that animates even physical existence itself.

It gets tiring that you keep trying for these cheap oppositions - you fun-loving artistic type, me sterile reductionist - no matter how many times I explain how that is not it.

But as I say, you need me to be that other here to justify your own contrasting "metaphysics of value". I have to be as simplistic as you to make your simplicism admissible.

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. — csalisbury

Hence the self-conscious quotes. That was the point I was making about authenticity.

To the realist, the pragmatist points out that all scientific belief rests on the reading of dials. Numbers replace the thing-in-itself.

And to the idealist, the pragmatist points out that science does read dials. It is materialist only in that semiotic sense of fully cashing out the phenomenality involved in being in a knowing relation with the world.

So here, the pragmatist does say that all phenomenology is simply a play of signs of this kind. It is all an umwelt. And that then becomes the new triadic relation (of interpretant, sign and world) that becomes the generic departure point for our pluralistic metaphysical excursions.

What I'm saying is that the 'lived level' is hyper-varied and composed of all sorts of things, including Big Concepts. — csalisbury

So it is still "composed"? We are thus still in the land of the reductionist, the atomist.

My argument has been the systems' one of constraints matched by degrees of freedom - so constraints and constructions.

Our lived level is not hyper-varied, as that is just going back to the pluralism that is the direct consequence of atomistic contingency - the world constructed by degrees of freedom. Our lived whole is triadically structured. It divides dialectially into the globally generic constraints and the locally particular accidents.

If you just want to talk about concepts, they would still have this triadic structure - coming in various shades of the three basic dimensions, the general, the particular, and the vague. So there are our most general organising ideas (like reductionism, or holism). There are our vast variety of particular impressions - our concept of what is significantly different or indifferent about some passing conscious moment. And then there is also the vagueness where the lived experience is ambiguous, confused, or otherwise ill-developed and ill-defined. Neither general nor particular, as yet.

Yes buttttt. Didn't I address exactly this in my earlier post? — csalisbury

I'm really not sure if you just can't see how your writing keeps trying to manifest a standard issue reductionist account.

Maybe you are thinking it is enough to accept the logic of the dialectic as a qualification to the simple basic approach of atomism/compositionalism, whereas I am arguing for its upfront replacement by a causal holism?

Exactly the opposite! I'm trying to indicate that I have problem with 'foundations' in general, not trying to usurp the throne of the-one-who-has-the-right-foundations. — csalisbury

Again, I don't see how this can be your position if you are arguing so hard against the kind of holistic foundationalism I am advancing.

So there are foundationalists. Then there are anti-foundationalists. But where is your own next move to the synthesis - the one that puts the totalisers and the pluralists accurately on complementary ends of the larger thing of a connected spectrum?

The Peircean point is that this can only be done triadically - as in the form of a hierarchical relation.

So if you reject triadicism, then you still haven't transcended the simple opposition of totalisers and pluralisers. You don't have an actual metaphysical model that speaks to this situation in a manner that is a mathematical theory that could make specific predictions.

The only way I can make sense of someone who approaches art (or other stuff) as something involving 'mindless immersion' is someone who can't think out of triadicism. — csalisbury

So are you taking proper note of the quote marks here? Remember this is a meta-theoretic account now.

Whatever "mindless immersion" could mean would of course be culturally and historically conditioned. And so of course the analysis - at the meta-social level of the anthropologist - would be triadic.

Fer fucks sakes, who else first embraced structuralism as a mode of analysis? Although I agree that the sad history is folk went for the dyadic semiotics of Saussure over the triadic semiotics of Peirce. Or alternatively, the half-baked material dialectics of Marxism.

But my argument is that a holistic view of sign relations has to be triadic - for all the reasons Peirce pointed out.

So it is not that I can't escape the pit of my own triadic presumptions. I can think like a reductionist as good as anyone else. It is that I chose this triadicism as the best explanation following a pretty exhaustive search.

And if you mention any human cultural activity - poetry, coin-collecting, tennis - then I would consciously apply this particular theory of semiosis to the analysis.

It is not because I don't have other choices. It is not because I am trapped in an unthinking habit. It is because a triadic structuralism is the best way to be a holist. It is as simple as possible, without being too simple.

I don't see how you can 'predict' something that you hold to be necessary for the existence of the prediction itself. — csalisbury

Jeez. It's basic pragmatism. There is no choice but to have a belief that you can then test. So you induce from the particular to the general, and then discover how successful that generality is at predicting new particulars.

Can nothing shake the hold that foundationalism has on your habits of thought?

(Of course not. You need the failure of foundationalism as your justification for a totalising pluralism!)

Look up, not down. — Wayfarer

Or move up to discover that there was the down, and vice versa.

The metaphysician may lay down his metaphysics from time to time in order to engage in life. Yet, when he takes it up again, he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. — csalisbury

As usual, I would point out that you are treating as a bug the exact thing I would call the feature.

So for you, there is an obvious problem if one or the other is not defended as the foundational (making the other epiphenomenal or otherwise "illusory").

But I am saying that ideally, the two activities would be complementary extremes. The "doing well" would be doing both well in a reciprocally-defining fashion. So one doesn't ever have to lose sight of the other. Indeed, both knows what it is by keeping its "other" squarely in its sights.

Practically speaking, this might mean being conscious of how a learnt habit of analysis or critique can interfere with "just living life". So when one goes on holiday or to an art gallery, does one document everything with a camera, try to relate it to some wider metaphysical theme. Or instead, is there a fruitfully contrary mode of simply becoming as mindlessly immersed in the sensual experience as possible?

Can becoming more analytic foster its corollary? Or must it simply replace it?

A balanced life would be where you can live the contrasting extremes of being both on the inside and the outside in a fully expressed fashion. The best choice is always both ... to their extremes ... in an overall resulting balance.

The easy trick is to make the irreducible stuff the 'other' which is always-already included as other. However this stroke already misses the varied texture which is experienced as that textured variety. — csalisbury

Again, you have this fixation for either/or and missing my point - it is the dialectic of "possibly either/or" that leads you to the resolution, the synthesis, that is "definitely both".

So if the metaphysical pole speaks of the generality, the necessity, then its opposite pole is that of the particular and the contingent. And that is not an invalid pole of being. It is the "other" pole which gives the metaphysical pole any meaning.

What I am pointing out to you is your fixed habits of thoughts. If you hear someone totalising, then out you dash with your counter of pluralism.

And that is fine. There is always that corollary. But my argument is that my brand of systems metaphysics incorporates the reaction to every action. I am already including the pluralism that makes my totality the complete one. In Peircean fashion, I am saying contingency and particularity are basic ... and that makes no difference. Even the contingent and the particular - the individuated - makes no sense except in the context of necessary and the general.

Pluralism depends on unity and couldn't just exist on its own. (Or the other way around.)

I can express these in poems and literature, through playing with friends etc etc. I *can't* do that with the other-oriented third of a triadic metaphysics. All I can do is apply that metaphysics to this or that thing where all I find is repetitions of the same pattern. — csalisbury

Poems and literature can be a way to distance yourself from lived reality. They can be bad metaphysics.

Even at school I told my teacher I wasn't going to analyse the set texts as it would spoil any enjoyment they might have. I rejected the idea of creating a critical distance.

Of course, I just wanted to avoid any homework. But still, I really do believe if that an author has an important point to make, poetry is the least efficient way to make it.

I love Tarkovsky's films. However I won't waste time trying to extract a concrete message from them.

But what it will lose, if it pretends to be a Literary Theory of Everything, is the poem itself. — csalisbury

As I say, I tend to agree that poetry or art doesn't really need any overarching theory if the issue is finding "raw sensual impressionistic" pleasure in it.

However, what you frame as either/or, I say has triadic unity. If you have a reason for stepping back from the local level of folk enjoying their culture, then you can start to see the production of meaning in terms of some theory. And that theory will be useful - meaningful at its own meta-level. It will reveal the patterns underlying the mechanics of the human response, the methods used to create.

Yes, if you are operating at the level of an art critic or social anthropologist, you might "lose something" by working at the level of generalised necessity - you will lose precisely the contingent particulars. But why would you lose the complete ability to move between the two levels of experiencing the world?

The Romantic misstep you may be making is thinking that the lived level is foundational, the metaphysical level is somehow fake and inauthentic. My semiotic argument is that both are naturalistic and authentic. Or to put it the other way, the lived level is just as socially constructed.

The Romantics qua Romantics were thoroughly infected and inflected by the dialectical. — csalisbury

Why would that surprise me, given my particular totaliser scheme here?

Romanticism set itself up as the other of the reductionist/materialist Enlightenment. And so it tried to express that otherness in every possible way.

If the Enlightenment said humans are naturally socially constructed creatures, then the Romantics wanted to get outside of that with both more extreme views of nature (the innocent savage) and of spirit (the sublime self).

So the dialectical manoeuvres of Romanticism are exactly what my systems logic would predict. Everything semiotic always works like that - creating itself by find its otherness to the other.

But Now if I ask you to write a poem in response, or if I ask you do some improv with me etc. — csalisbury

I would gag. I couldn't fake that "encounter group" level of earnestness. :)

What do you mean by prediction? — csalisbury

It is a general prediction of a dichotomistic or dialectical view. Things that start with the initial thing of a symmetry-breaking then proceed towards their completely broken state ... which is a state of extreme asymmetry or hierarchical organisation.

So think of this as a story of mutual repulsion that drives two things towards their opposing limits. And it is the story of all metaphysical-strength dichotomies. That is why I say it is a prediction.

My interest here is that the problem of the evolution of language was about the first big question I worked on. And it was a huge chicken and egg dilemma to say which could have evolved first - semantics or syntax, the thoughts or the speech machinery with which to express them.

You had an academic divide as it seemed either one or the other had to be foundational, the other a consequence.

Eventually I came to understand a systems science way of looking at these kinds of things (long even before I got to Peirce). And so what became obvious was how words and rules were reciprocally related. If you started to get a little bit of one, you also started to get a little bit of its other. So a little bit of tipping and the system would bifurcate towards its latent extremes.

So a system science/hierarchy theory approach in general predicts that system organisation emerges in this kind of dialectical or symmetry-breaking fashion. And that then made sense of how language and thought, as syntax and semantics, could co-emerge as a rapid evolutionary shift in humans.

If you shift from a reductionist to a holist view of causality, the whole world looks different in this fashion.

There are all kinds of Hegelian games to be played here, but the key is in recognising that (1) token and type are reversible roles/promiscuous, and (2) that every token implies a type. If you take (1) and (2) together, the only conclusion to draw is that even a single item, if it is understood to be a token ('of an apple', say), already brings with it considerations of 'type'. — StreetlightX

I would draw attention to the deeper structural aspect of a dialectical or dichotomistic symmetry-breaking here.

The animal mind is smart, but stuck in the moment. To break out of that involves not simply a displaced play of tokens - the emergence of symbolic reference - but the complementary division of words and rules.

The usual way of thinking about these evolutionary issues is chicken and egg. It always seems to be a question of what came first - the first referential words or the first grammatical rules. And that becomes a hard one to answer as language appears to require both if it is to work.

However a symmetry breaking approach predicts that words and rules will co-emerge as each other's other. The division itself is the thing which is the seed that grows by the feedback of its own synergistic success.

So what tokens imply is the possibility of syntactical organisation. The less the meaning of a word is bound up in the rich contextuality of some embodied state of mind, the more it consequently encourages the rise of syntactical habits that replace that lived, in-the-moment, contextuality with an abstract one produced by grammatical rules.

It is a shift from analogue to digital. The rise of tokens - words which concentrate meaning by contracting it into a habit of association - then also creates an empty space which rules are naturally going to fill.

So yes. The rise of words leads to a natural abstraction of semantics. This is a hierarchical thing. The great variability of everyday experience becomes itself divided - dialectically/dichotomously - between the contingent and the necessary, the particular and the general. Words anchor a symmetry-breaking contrast between what is semantically general about "an apple" and what is by instead "the differences that don't make an essential difference" when it comes to apples.

But the even larger division is between words and rules - semantics and syntax. The more wordy we become, the more rule using we can also become.

And that semiotic symmetry-breaking is still unfolding as we evolve from everyday language through to the most abstract mathematical and logical languages. We can see the complete divorce that is the final conclusion.

The "abstract" triangle is still a particular, the one you imagine, the one printed in the book or drawn on the blackboard. The difference is in how you handle it. If you ignore none of its particularity, that might be taking it, say, as a work of art. But if you ignore many of its particular features -- its particular materiality, the thickness of its lines, etc. -- then you can treat it as an abstract triangle. — Srap Tasmaner

If you step back from things, you can see that much of this comes down to maths targeting form - structure, constraints, etc - and energy, or material cause, being left out of the picture.

So that is why a pragmatist/semiotic approach wants to tie conception to action, to behaviour, to embodiment. It is a way to get energy back into the picture. Rational structures have to be re-connected to material actions to be fully real.

This is why we need a triadic metaphysics like hylomorphism. We need a division or dichotomy - such as matter understood as opposite to form - which can then explain the emergent substantial actuality that then becomes our world of individuated objects.

So when it comes to Platonism, structuralism, universals, etc, the surprise is that a pure energy-less account can even be given. Every substantial triangle is messed up in its imperfect materiality. Yet we can discern the perfect geometric triangle that stands as the ontic limit to all actual triangles. The goal of an ideal triangle exists - in a spacetime beyond energy.

But puzzles are created because folk don't analyse the material or energetic half of the story the same way - as the complementary ideal limit. Instead, energy is treated as actuality. Matter is taken for granted as having enduring fixed existence. It is the brute stuff that doesn't get metaphysically questioned.

However if we do analyse the material half of the story like we do the formal half, it does dissolve into a primal notion of fluctuation or potency. We wind up with nothing solid at all, just whatever unformed action would seem like at the limit of being. Pure contingency. Directionless impulse.

It is only when you have the third thing of material cause and formal cause combining in interaction - as constraints organising degrees of freedom - that actual substantial being arises. You get the kind of individuation that is a triangle - that someone expended energy to construct. And so a triangle with all its material imperfections - all the fluctuations or historical contingencies that represent both the imposed necessities of a form, and also some pragmatic fact of indifference, a point at which the suppression of any material raggedness in shape ceased to matter in practice. The triangle was triangular enough to fit its contextual purpose.

So this pragmatic/hylomorphic view of the actual world is inherently dichotomistic. The paradoxes are removed by accepting that forms are imposed on material possibility, and also in matching fashion, energetic exceptions or fluctuations are only ever suppressed towards some practical limit. Substantial reality then becomes the third thing of the resulting equilibrium balance - the point where individuation survives and persists as any fluctuations have been reduced to the point they are differences that no longer make an overall difference.

The imperfections are a noise. But the form and purpose of the whole is clearly apparent to be seen. A triangle is easy to recognise.

And so this is the triadic reality that our language and logic would want to target in turn if we are going to carve nature at its joints.

Meaning holism would get this. Language use is about formal constraints on energetic (ie: behavioural) fluctuations.

When we talk - even logically - it sounds like we are referring to Platonic objects. We are pointing towards the ideal triangles, horses, bald heads and Socrates that our words name. But pragmatically, the words are meant to act as constraints on behavioural variability. They should narrow our scope of action - our substantial and individuated expressions - to some point where any remaining uncertainty or contingency is simply a tolerable noise. Differences that make no difference.

So nominalism is deeply flawed. It points at universals and say they can't be real as clearly they are only transcendental limits. Nominalism can see the pragmatic trick that is going on there.

But nominalism is then bad at turning around to see that it does the same thing in presuming that it is the foundationally real - that the world is a sum of substantial particular, a merological state of affairs.

The material, the concrete, does dissolve if you turn the spotlight on it. It does proved to be simply energy, potential, fluctuation corralled by a context of imposed structure. Matter is as insubstantial as form.

Then the third thing of substantial actuality - the actual ground of being - is itself merely emergent. It is energy or fluctuation corralled by imposed constraints to the degree something or other had reason to care. Close enough was good enough.

Language and logic want to gets its teeth into something firm and definite. It targets this notion of the real, the foundational, the monadically essential.

And it always comes up disappointed. And that is because the reality is the whole of a triadic or hylomorphic relation.

Substantial being is what you get emergently once the opposed tensions of energetic fluctuation and structural organisation have played themselves out to some stable persisting balance. A language of objects with properties can sum it all up - especially in a Universe grown so large and cold, near the end of its own history. But that can't be the foundational view, the true view, of what has gone on.

But just, like, hanging out a cocktail party (or looking at a good painting, or reading a good novel) if you bring it back....you lose something. — csalisbury

Aren’t you confusing life and metaphysics? I don’t lose one by doing the other. They get to take turns.

All literature is three part: It's the struggle against the father (the canonical author who precedes you), the refusal to struggle with the father (a rejection of the struggle), and the underlying thing (where the struggle comes from, what causes us to either struggle or refuse to struggle. ) (this isn't just metaphoric, this is Bloomian criticism, a real school) — csalisbury

Surely Bloom is working at the dialectical level - the production of individuation - rather than seeking the final triadic or hierarchical state of stable resolution?

So he is in the ballpark in being dialectical. But it is different in a key fashion. The assumption is that individuation - the young poet managing to be seen as original and distinct from what has gone before - is the terminal goal. And Bloom lists six dialectical manoeuvres to achieve such individuation.

But my hierarchy story is about the final overall resolution of a dialectic. It is about the further thing of a dichotomy going to equilibrium in being expressed evenly, homogenously, fractally, over all possible scales of being.

Hence in this case, it is the view of the whole poetic system as it develops in time. Thus if the point of individuation is to disturb - actually disrupt the old order - then equilibrium becomes the state of development where new poets no longer really disturb much by their presence.

One way of doing that is if all potential poets - that is every person in a population - is trying to be a poet. And modern civilisation, with its universal literary education and self publishing, goes along way towards that. There are so many individuals trying to individuate in Bloomian fashion that you wind up with the scalefree statistics of a hierarchically organised statistical equilibrium.

They call it the fat tail effect in publishing. Tons of individual authors with tiny readerships and a few with truly outsized success.

So a hierarchy theory/dissipative structure theory analysis makes specific statistical predictions of the world. Literature output looks to conform. Once you have a crowd trying to individuate, you get a world where success has the characteristics that the maths of a triadic metaphysics predicts.

So Bloom was on to something. But like Hegel needed to be completed by Peirce - oh how Bloomian! - Bloom is only talking about the first step of individuation. The second part of the story is how disruption itself gets homogenised and normed.

We all end up thinking we could be young gun poets, or instagram stars, or scriptwriters, or whatever. But unlike the first Romantic poets, any actual disruption these days has a truly vast legacy of influence to overturn. Individuation has become both more equal opportunity, and also way more challenging due to the weight of all that has already been achieved.

My triadic approach predicts this. It’s maths has arise out of observation of the way the entirety of nature must work.

Self driving cars were science fiction a decade ago. Now they are killing people.

Check out Rifkin’s the third industrial revolution documentary for an overview of the comprehensive change, based on an internet of things and a sharing economy, that is possibly happening.

So I got salty, apo, and I hope you'll forgive me that. — csalisbury

Never a problem.

But stilll. I mean if i see your name pop on on any thread, despite the subject, I'll have a hunch about what you'll say, — csalisbury

Of course. I have a TOE - a holistic one. And it stands in opposition to other TOEs - like standard issue reductionism and standard issue pluralism (which are essentially the same thing anyway).

So yes, the same basic battle repeats. Why not?

You never come out and play - you always bring it back to peirce. — csalisbury

That is ridiculous. I will always come out and play if people can muster their own moves.

And Peirce just happens to have done a surprisingly thorough job of tying it all up in a bow. There are hundreds of others I can cite on a systems approach to metaphysics, and indeed do cite. But why shouldn't I choose a pivotal modern philosopher as the anchor for discussions? Be reasonable.

The scope is limited, I mean. If the whole world is an x-partite thing, why are you always leaving out the non-peirce part. — csalisbury

What is this non-Peirce part then? What is being left out exactly?

Remember that the triadicism incorporates dualism (as the dialectical or the dichotomous) and the monadic (as the vagueness which is the pure potential, the ground of being).

So it is holistic in that it incorporates all the standard arities of metaphysics. If you can show that reality is quadratic, or polyadic, or whatever, then go for it. But there are good arguments for why three dimensions are both the irreducible minimum for analysing reality, and also thus the most you need.

The simplest possible world has to be triadic or hierarchical - that is complex enough to be contextual, relational, or constraints-based. But then also, those three dimensions are enough. Four or five would be unstable.

Its a mathematical fact. You can tie a knot in three dimensions, but it will unravel in four.

Whereas its more like - come out here and tussle man! — csalisbury

I'm baffled. Having worked so long and hard to achieve some clarity, you think I should abandon it? You are saying perhaps I would make more friends that way. But what if I'm actually really lazy and I need that hostility to motivate me to keep working on the arguments long after I am already satisfied with them? :)

My general position is the dichotomy between Philosophy and Science has been exaggerated. — Kym

That is true. But if that is your main point, the problem would be that your OP didn't advance some particular argument.

P1: I mean... the escape velocity of a black hole exceeds the escape velocity of light, so even light can't escape. (Wow)
P2: Gravity propagates via gravitational waves which have been shown to travel at light speed
C1: Even gravity can't move fast enough to escape a black hole!
C2: Black holes do not suck — Kym

It is easy to google the answer and see that you have set up the science wrong and so not established a paradox.

The mass doing all the gravitating and spacetime bending takes forever falling into the hole. So yes, the in-falling light or electromagnetic radiation is trapped in the hole, but the historical gravitational effect of that matter - or rather that distortion it all makes in the general spacetime metric surrounding the hole - is not. So if the hole bobs about, it would make gravitational ripples in the surrounding spacetime that propagate outwards at c. And just standing still, the hole would radiate a steady gravitational attraction which propagates at c due to the general warpage it creates in the larger fabric of the surrounding spacetime.

So you have confused in-falling light (a source of gravitating matter) with the gravitational effect of all the matter being concentrated at a point on the surrounding universe.

Now philosophically, or metaphysically, we can then start to question the presumptions of this successful scientific account.

For instance, we might note how there are two actual competing paradigms in play here. Is gravity "actually" general relativity's curvature in spacetime, or is it "actually" itself a radiating force -a quantum flux of gravitons?

And that could get us back to the issue of whether the divide between science and philosophy is much exaggerated.

Science would say its all just models, so the paradigms only need to work. One view can only be better than another view in that pragmatic sense. Philosophy might then say it cares about what is actually the case. Which is where the two would be very strongly divided as practices.

But then a further argument is that philosophy also is just reality modelling. As critical thinking, it is about questioning paradigms so that better paradigms can be imagined. Then science would be a principle way of exploring the rational consequences of alternative paradigms, (although there might be others, perhaps).

Anyway, that is the direction my own thoughts would go on the "exaggerated divide" issue, starting with what is actually a little bit paradoxical or self-contradictory about our contrasting general relativity and quantum mechanical models of gravity.

There's a difference, though, between works-because-it-establishes-some-relation-with-the-outside and works-because-it-totally-captures-the-outside. — csalisbury

Well doesn't regular logic depend on the commitments of an object-oriented ontology? Don't the laws of thought seem to work because they get something unarguably right - if you believe in the counterfactual definiteness of individuated objects that possess sets of properties?

Reductionism believes it describes a reductionist reality.

And remember that Pragmatism accepts upfront that it is only telling stories about the world. That is why I said it can only then minimise our uncertainty about our models of reality. It is totalising only in Pragmatism's usual falsification-seeking fashion. We are setting things up so that we could know that we were wrong.

Does he or does he not edge the fragments of the world he experiences toward this or that aspect of his solitude-won system? — csalisbury

Yes. But experimentally verified.

After all, Peirce said reality is propensity-based, for instance. Chance is fundamental. And then shortly after, along came quantum mechanics.

He also proposed experiments to see if space was curved before general relativity came along. He wasn't just some armchair metaphysician. He had a day job with the US Coast and Geodetic Survey working on the actual basics of scientific measurement, like defining the standard metre.

It was more like: its sad to drink alone, at the end of the world. — csalisbury

It's true of Peirce that he was very much drinking alone. Most of his writings were never published. Although CI Lewis sat in a pile of them and Peirce's influence seeped through Ramsey to Wittgenstein and others in ways only recently reconstructed.

I don't want to drag you into tawdry battles you'd normally avoid, but these kinds of metaphors....How do we fold peirce upon himself, in order to talk about unlocking everything or expressing everything through reference to one thing? — csalisbury

My point was that metaphors do nothing here. I am happy just to stick to actual arguments.

And yes, my argument is that a triadic relational logic is a universal mechanism. It unfolds every complexity into its greatest possible simplicity ... which is still always complex in being relational and hence triadic.

You seem to think we can get somewhere discussing the sadness or brilliance of Peirce rather than the validity of semiotic structuralism. I am always happy to discuss his character. But also, it is irrelevant to the argument. I wasn't arguing from authority, just citing my sources.

The full version is: "If you don't know that's red, either you don't speak English or there's something wrong with you." — Srap Tasmaner

Being pedantic, is that the fullest version? It could be the case that you both don't speak English and you are also not neurotypical.

So I prefer my: "If you know that's red, you both speak English and there's nothing wrong with you in the neurotypical sense."

That better reflects the holism of what I mean - the fact that this is semiosis doubled up.

tldr: if you have a peircian hammer, everything looks like a perician nail — csalisbury

Your view. My view was formed by encountering the fundamental problems of neurocognition and philosophy of mind, then finding Peirce sorted out the epistemology/ontology for life and mind in general. And for 20 years, biosemiosis has been roaring away.

So if we must do battle by cheap metaphor, why not say Peirce is the key that unlocks every door, or the language that expresses every thought? Who said rhetoric was dead.

So my reasonable sentence above ("This is red to speakers of English") turns out to be an explanation of how the word "red" is used, not an explanation of how perception works. — Srap Tasmaner

But you added here the constraint of a particular language. And there is no warrant for it's addition - given you agree about the evidence from anthropology.

So if we say speakers of a shared language with a shared neurology, that would cover off both the cultural and biological factors involved here. We wouldn't get hung up on either distinction by becoming overly specific and thus nonsensical.

But Whorfianism does still apply. Redecorating our house, I discovered the infinite number of shades of white. I learnt a language that did anchor the memories that allows me to make more reliable hue discriminations.

So that was a controversy presented as a black and white story (by Whorf, not Sapir). Either social constructionism was the case, or biological determinism. And the actual story is that both levels of semiosis are constraints on our habits of interpretance. Quite a different psychological model - like a Vygotskian sociocultural one - is needed to capture the connection between nature and nurture.