So, you mean to say, you've been arguing with (i think) three people about antinatalism across two threads, and you don't care about, or understand the concerns of antinatalists? — AmadeusD

I've had schop bleating in my ear for a decade. And you are not striking me as someone who is suddenly going to make it an interesting subject.

You're talking about living people dealing with their already-extant lives. Not. Relevant. — AmadeusD

It does not engage with AN concerns. — AmadeusD

Who could care about AN concerns? They are ridiculous given that there is plenty enough of pragmatic importance to be getting on with in our already extant lives.

A fashion statement and not a philosophical conundrum.

Objects that are similar fall into some category and it is only then that we can assert that there is a quantity of similar objects. — Harry Hindu

Object recognition thus parallels an entropic view of information. An equilibrium system like an ideal gas is defined by its macro properties - temperature and pressure - and not its micro properties. The actual position of a bunch of particles is an ensemble of differences that becomes merely the sameness of a statistical blur. And the global state of the ensemble is a sameness that can be now treated as a difference when comparing one thermal system to some other in terms of a pressure and temperature.

If I asked you to count the number of crows in a tree, the fact that some were rooks, some ravens, some magpies, would be differences you are being asked to ignore. They are all varieties of crow, but that is being treated as a difference that doesn’t make a difference for the purpose of counting crows.

So reality is like this. There are always further distinctions to be had. Even two electrons might be identical in every way, except they are in different places. But equally, the differences can cease to matter from a higher level that sees instead the sameness of a statistical regularity. Sameness and difference are connected by the third thing of where in scale we choose to stand in measuring the properties of a system.

Are we interested in the distinctions between types of crow. Or if it is birds we are counting, is a crow any different from an ostrich?

Why does 2+2=4? Some may say that this is logically sound statement, but why? What makes some string of scribbles true? — Harry Hindu

So reality is divided into sameness and difference by its hierarchical scale. There really is something to talk about at the level of statistical mechanics. But then our talking about it is done in a way that claims to talk past the third thing of a viewpoint where either the sameness or the difference is being ignored. Information and numbers are our means to talk about reality as if from some completely objective nowhere.

It matters in language whether I think I am being asked to count birds or ravens. I have to place myself at a certain interpretive level that matches your understanding about what you were asking. But then the number line is its own abstract thing where there is no physical scale involved. Space, time and energy are all generalised as differences to be ignored. Three ravens is equivalent to three birds, three apples or three spaghetti monsters. The focus is now on the arithmetic or algebraic operations that can be performed on an abstract number system.

We have shifted ourselves into a Platonia so far as reality is concerned. And that new mathematical level of semiosis or reality modelling offers a huge entropic payback for us humans in terms of technology, engineering, computation, and other ways of mechanistically controlling the world.

It makes the whole of reality look the same in our eyes. A mechanical device. A system of particles regulated by differential equations. A sameness of physical laws with a difference in initial conditions.

So numbers and information are part of a new way of speaking about the world that is very useful in proportion to the degree that it is also unreal. It is a language of atomised reductionism that places itself outside even space, time and energy as those are the physical generalities it now aspires to take algorithmic control over.

A modelling relation with the world coming from the God’s eye view. Just equations and variables. Absolute sameness coupled to absolute difference now.

For deontologists, it would be wrong to use people. — schopenhauer1

It might be relatively wrong but then also relatively right. You of course will do your usual mad thing of talking in exceptionless absolutes.

But the decision is not taken by 'humanity' but by individual human beings in their singularity. — boundless

Remember I have already agreed that one ought to make responsible choices. One can tell if one is really in a position to do a good job of it.

I’m not a natalist in the sense Schop pushes. I think it perfectly sensible not to have kids if you see a highly likelihood of things turning out bad. Climate change could be a good enough reason. Not liking responsibility could be another,

But antinatalism is claiming this transcendent principle that no chances should be taken at all. I don’t get to choose what is right for me in my circumstances. The antinatalist has assumed the ethical high ground that trumps any choice I might make. Which seems a little fascist.

There is still the 0,01%, however, that would prefer to 'have never been born'. Their perspective is not 'wrong' only because they are a minority. — boundless

So because of this round up error, humanity should end itself forthwith as some kind of supreme ethical act?

:chin:

You'll need to let me know what this has to do with AN first — AmadeusD

Checking your comments on the other AN thread, I can explain better. You were arguing as if the “higher consciousness” of humans were something neurobiological rather than sociocultural. This makes a difference.

If you believe that human self awareness - our feeling of being a self and thus able to suffer in an existential sense - is something neurobiological, then that is something that can’t be fixed by a psychological intervention. Therapy can’t address the source of the distress.

But if instead you understand human consciousness as a socially constructed habit of thought - one based on the narrative power of language and society’s need for us to be socially self-regulating - then you can see how the inner narrative is something that can quite authentically be rewritten.

This is the shift in mindset behind the positive psychology movement. A new style of therapy for helping people realise they have internalised certain scripts and, if they want, they can rewrite them to better suit their own lives.

This addresses the five death bed regrets I mentioned. The fact that people felt their life was alright but really they should have made it more their own life. They shouldn’t have lived it so much in terms of what their parents, peers, employers, etc, felt it should be.

So we are not rooted psychologically in the deeper soil of our emotions and values. These are often just attitudes and frames that we grew up surrounded by and thus became merely our unthinking habits.

This makes all the difference. If we have a negative mindset, why not learn instead to have a positive one.

It is not the “gift of life” that is our unconsented burden. It is the attitudes we were surrounded by that could be the reason for a life of burden and suffering. That which we could not help internalising as it was how we were treated, the circumstances of our early rearing. But that which we can grow out if we have a clearer idea about how the human mind is shaped.

i can save the time: It does not have more than an aesthetic resemblance to the issues AN wants to deal with — AmadeusD

AN would be the aesthetic pose in my book. I prefer to move on to the pragmatic meat of the issue of whether to have children. And how to approach life in general.

Having one's fate in one's own hands seems to overwhelm (literally) the majority of people to psychosis. — AmadeusD

Hyperbole.

Your position is that of most people, even one's aware of hte burden of living so there are no surprises here. — AmadeusD

Given you find yourself alive, is it then better to have a positive or a negative mindset about that fact? Regardless of the "truth" that you might hope to find by an exhaustive analysis.

We can argue about which position would be more an illusion later.

But simply as pragmatics, is your situation going to be made better or worse if you believe your fate is in your own hands, or if you instead believe the hope has already gone?

Which ought to be our default mindset, all other things being equal?

Antinatalism's main gripes revolve around causing others unnecessary suffering and the fact that something as important a decision can never be consented. — schopenhauer1

Well these gripes are covered by it being a responsibly-informed decision. You have to catastrophise the average life to make life itself seem always an intolerable burden and thus never justified in its starting.

Your argument collapses right there. Exactly where there are those of us who are indeed quite glad to have had the chance to be born and live out a life even if we failed to sign the correct legal papers in advance of the fact.

Procreationists/natalists want to see a FORCED outcome for other people. — schopenhauer1

People can want to have children. It is perfectly natural. And they take responsibility for their choices. Or at least that is where their ethical duty lies.

But you want to invent some kind of monstrous fertility cult taking perverted pleasure in producing miserable souls. Weird.

I claim that procreation is a political move. It is VOTING on ANOTHER'S BEHALF that one must carry out X. — schopenhauer1

Your hysteria rises. You want to take what is just an everyday part of most lives – a pragmatic decision about what suits some couple – and turn it into a legalistic, and now politicised, burden. Some kind of ballot rigging or election fraud for which a couple must be charged. Or at least shouted at in capital letters.

Again, do you accept that people are allowed make their own informed risk-reward choices or not? Are they allowed to express the potentials of their own bodies or do their preferences require your consent as the fertility police. The fertility police who will anyway only ever say no.

So quite literally, antinatalists cause no FORCE, simply propose arguments while pro-procreation people quite literally FORCE situations upon others. — schopenhauer1

But why do they get so shouty when told their argument is based on the false premise that life is inherently only for the worse, never for the better? That they would deny as many good lives as the bad lives they might hope to prevent.

If you polled a 1000 people – a proper cross-section of society – how many would say it would have been just better never to have been born than to have lived at all?

I would expect an antinatalist to at least be able to offer this data to show there was any kind of genuine consent issue.

This is one list of death bed regrets.

1) “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
2) “I wish I hadn't worked so hard.”
3) “I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.”
4) “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
5) “I wish I had let myself be happier”

So at the end of the journey, the issue is not that the journey was started but that more could have been done in terms of personal growth.

If you want to have some grand position on ethics/politics/life, that seems a more fruitful focus for a conversation.

Using 'Natalism' as an ethical argument toward any small group, or individual is completely inapt and inhumane (largely). — AmadeusD

Any ethical argument that pushes for monistic absolutism is going to be inhumane just in denying that humans are organised by dialectical balances. We have to have complementary limits in mind so we can arrive at the choices that are the most optimal – the most win-win – that can be achieved.

@schopenhauer1 creates a caricature "natalist" to match his caricatured anti-natalism. He constantly encounters folk who indeed seem exactly like his imagined natalists as that is what anyone would be driven to by his monomaniac peddling of the an anti-natalist agenda.

To me, whether to have or not have kids was always in the balance. It was easy enough to see that it would be irresponsible of me to have them to the degree the risk was strongly in the direction of a lose-lose outcome. And so also perfectly responsible to the degree the chances were of a win-win outcome.

That's real life lived in an ethical and humane fashion where things happen. Not a life lived in terms of catastrophising absolutes.

I mean that at the end of the day antinatalists don’t force a way of life unto others. Natalists (or whatever term you’d like to use for it), de facto lead to forced outcomes for others. — schopenhauer1

So you positively want to stop me having babies and I don't feel particularly strongly about whether you do or not. I only feel strongly about you being suitably thoughtful about this important choice. I'm perfectly fine if you decide the proposition is a lose-lose in your circumstances.

And yet for some reason your feelings about my procreation are what must be the case here? You have decided that all births are only a losing story? And that is what must be forced on me? And now on my own children too? You will be chasing after my descendants til the end of time with your philosophy?

Natalism is a population ethic concern and has to do with population growth. — AmadeusD

In practice, societies sometimes want more kids, sometimes fewer. Not sure that any society was ever blindly natalist, or even anti-natalist, in the way schop requires. But certainly a society would want to send its people a clear signal about the average target number it is seeking for demographic reasons.

Turn the tap on. Turn the tap off. The current direction must be made clear even if aiming at a responsible balance is the ultimate goal.

Anyone birthed. — schopenhauer1

What does that mean? You were birthed. Does that force you to be a natalist?

Natalism advocates for forced conversion. — schopenhauer1

Source?

What could be more controlling and fundamentalist and "me-centric" than deciding for others what you deem to be the necessary way of life, that others simply must follow? :smirk: — schopenhauer1

So at what point does anti-natalism become just another social interest group telling me what I should think?

As an evangelist, do you believe you have “the truth” on your side? Yours is the view I simply must follow, and not some more generally held view in society?

If your point is that we don't doubt our conceptual frames, we only doubt within the constraints of those frames, then of course I agree.

And also, as humans, our conceptual frames are socioculturally expanded. We are involved in some grander language game. Joshs born Aztec is very different from Joshs born in, say, 1970s Ohio, or 12th Century India.

But do you now agree that sociocultural multiplicity – that pluralism, that degree of social freedom – is still the product of pragmatic constraints? That it is a way of life that works in the usual organismic sense of being able to repair and reproduce the fabric of its being over some longer run? As a set of habits, it has proven itself properly tested against a larger ecological reality?

So to claim plurality as itself "natural" can only be true within the framework of pragmatism.

One could of course claim that plurality is natural as there is something else that transcends the pragmatism of being an ecologically-constrained organism. For example, a target beyond "this world" in the shape of a divine imperative or some moral absolute.

But is this the argument you are making? And if not, are you content with an ecological constraint on the freedom of our language games and ways of life?

We can try stuff out within those limits? We can do our best to imagine ourselves a better world by more deeply understanding the world we were already thrust into with some set of genetic habits.

We probably do agree this far. Except a lot of those with a utopian concern for the current state of human society don't really seem to want to factor in the environmental constraints on the expression of our social freedoms.

I would argue for example that social justice becomes a nice to have when the question is how do we avoid ecological disaster.

That is why I focus on the "superorganism" analysis of the human condition. The one that places our collective trajectory in its larger thermodynamic context. Our everyday choices must be seen to be making pragmatic sense within that long-run conceptual frame.

Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world. — Joshs

So how does that impact my position given that I've already been explicit that I am rejecting Cartesian representationalism – the ontology that permits all representation to be misleading – and instead promoting a Kantian/Peircean enactivism? A modelling relation view where our beliefs only have to be "near enough for all practical purposes or observable consequences".

We are already intimately and actively embed with a world, which means that we are always thrown into beliefs, practical forms of meaningful engagements with our surrounds. — Joshs

And so? Didn't I say that Peirce started to get things right by beginning over from that givenness and then carefully examining its logical structure.

We don’t just test to confirm already anticipated events, we also anticipate beyond what is confirmed and true, in the direction of not already foreseen possibilities that may shift our conceptions. Reality isn’t something we simply aim to explain, but to participate in constructing in new directions. — Joshs

Again, I just shake my head as you describe the Bayesian Brain at work. We come at the world armed with all the habits of anticipation that were found to be required to cope with that world. As babes, our phenomenology is just a blooming, buzzing, confusion. From experience, we learnt to pragmatically organise this into a known world behaving in predictable ways. Like little scientists, we formed the stories and lived by their consequences, continually growing and learning, updating our habits of belief to the degree that practice required.

You are not saying anything I wouldn't say here. But you are avoiding the point I made. And that is that your pluralism relies on the claim all knowledge can be doubted, while my pragmatism says it is only unreliable belief that needs to be adjusted.

Your pluralist project appears to be reassert the very Cartesianism you would claim to reject as an enactivist. To retreat into the privilege of "personal phenomenal experience" at the expense of the broader social level enactivism offered by a pragmatist epistemology – Peirce's community of reason – seems a very backward move to me. Or certainly, self-contradicting.

Circular innit? — Lionino

Dialectic. Broad as opposed to narrow. Synthetic as opposed to analytic. Meta-theoretic as opposed to applied.

If we believe we can ground this reason in the sovereign epistemology of realism, — Joshs

But don’t we - even at the meta-epistemic level - ground it all in pragmatism? A chair is real enough to take my weight.

Your quote aims at the usual fashionable social “good” of pluralism. But that seems to be “reasonable” only as an epistemic claim based on an endless capacity to doubt. Pragmatism instead is a positive alternative in being based on a willingness to believe - and then test. Belief becomes an inveterate habit if it keeps passing the test. And that same evolutionary credo explains reality as a whole.

So all this talk about struggles and boundaries seems only to come from a presupposition about pluralism and its need to overcome totalising discourses, particularly ones such as pragmatism which seem intolerably successful. Just too good to be true.

But let’s first address the actual epistemic difference that separates those who claim there is always going to be a reason one can doubt - hence all possibilities remain forever in play - and those who instead say being reasonable has to be founded in a willingness to hazard a guess and live pragmatically with its consequences. That is the one best way to proceed when it comes to knowledge.

What are you an expert in? — Ludwig V

Synthesising expertise.

Yes, they are. — Ludwig V

It seems you think you are the expert after all. And you have only just heard of Turchin's work. Probably not even read the paper yet. :up:

Add a huge reservoir of data and progress depends upon interpreting what it all means. — jgill

And that is no different at the level of fundamental physics. Maths gives us the topological simplicity of particle physics as a SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) structure. And yet then we have to have all this other stuff going on to effectively break this symmetry.

Like strong force confinement to preserve some remnant of SU(3) from complete self-annihilation – quarks bound up into protons and neutrons. And a Higgs field to break the SU(2) electroweak symmetry in a way that leaves three massive gauge bosons, plus a massless U(1) photon that could spend the rest of eternity radiating and redshifting the Universe towards its eventual heat death.

So we can have the pure forms from the mathematical arguments. But if the maths is just geometry and topology – a mesh of spatial relations – then it already explicitly leaves out its "other" in terms of the time/energy that breathes life into its equations. It is no surprise that something extra – a little condensed matter physics – has to be added to the brew.

Cosmology had its fundamental symmetry models straight from Sophus Lie. But it took a lot of effort to figure out exactly how those symmetries got broken in the real world by emergent topological effects such as the asymptotic freedom of the strong force, or the way the electroweak force was cracked by "eating" the Higgs field.

Time and energy – the statistical thermodynamics of a cooling~expanding Big Bang – needed to be added to the story so as to deal with "a huge reservoir of data and interpreting what it all meant".

And I suspect Rouse would consider Peirce’s view of the scientific image as an epistemologically-based first philosophy: — Joshs

Of course. He wound things right back to raw phenomenology so as to get going again on a more solid epistemic basis. That is how he could then commit so wholeheartedly to an ontology where the Cosmos is the evolutionary product of "the universal growth of concrete reasonableness", its laws "the development of inveterate habit".

How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.

A reasonable person is going to find a reasonable universe – the Kantian point. But then also, a reasonable universe is going to eventually find itself inhabited by minds that can echo its reason. That is how Peirce closes the loop with his pragmatism.

This is a good summary....

Peirce’s cosmological metaphysics is perhaps the most interesting of his metaphysical writings. Where his general metaphysics discusses the reality of the phenomenological categories, his cosmological work studies the reality and relation to the universe of his work in the normative sciences. The cosmological metaphysics looks at the aesthetic ideal (the growth of concrete reasonableness) and its attainment through growth and habit in the universe at large.

In Peirce’s cosmology, the universe grows from a state of nothingness to chaos, or all pervasive firstness. From the state of chaos, it develops to a state in which time and space exist, or a state of secondness, and from there to a state where it is governed by habit and law, i.e. a state of thirdness. The universe does this, not in a mechanistic or deterministic way, but by tending towards habit and a law-like nature through chance and spontaneous transition. This chance-like transition towards thirdness is the growth of concrete reasonableness, i.e. the attainment of the aesthetic ideal through the spontaneous development of habit.

Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology has left many commentators uneasy about its relation to the rest of his work. His development of it during his own life time led some of his friends to fear for his sanity. Indeed, Peirce’s turn towards cosmological metaphysics is often attributed to a mystical experience and crisis of faith in the 1890’s. In truth, Peirce takes his cosmological work to be the logical upshot of the normative sciences and logic, which show the nature and desirability of the growth of reason. Cosmological metaphysics merely shows how the growth of concrete reasonableness occurs in the universe at large.

Actually, my main interest is philosophy, which involves being interested in everything and having limited expertise in anything. — Ludwig V

Not sure that is how it works. Seems it ought to require being expert across all fields.

So thank you for drawing my attention to this. I did tell you that I am not in principle opposed to these approaches. This one is much better than the other one because it seems capable of dealing with the data without unduly distorting it. — Ludwig V

But they are not different approaches.

Nevertheless, theism tends to be averse to the notion of fundamental flux, — Leontiskos

Hence the “God of the gaps” issue. My position argues from the point of view that even chaos can’t help but self-organise itself into some form or order. Chaos negates itself. Therefore order emerges.

For this reason theistic semioticians like John Deely relate to Peirce in an entirely different way than they relate to scientists bound by modern thought. — Leontiskos

Yes. When learning about Peirce as a group of biologists and complexity theorists in the 1990s, the Peircean scholars making sense of his vast volume of unpublished work were mostly theology researchers. Deely was one.

But considering the idea that the most effective possibility will win out, are we saying that what is known in a prior way to be most effective will in fact win out, or is "most effective" being defined as whatever ends up winning out? — Leontiskos

It depends how much information we have about the situation. If you know that the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism is the simplest possible chiral form, then it is not a surprise that the Big Bang did not stop evolving until it arrived at that final simplicity.

If you know that the chemical reaction with the most bang for buck on the planet Earth is the redox reaction of carbon-oxygen bonds, then it is no surprise that life on Earth kept evolving until it not only could harness this reaction but even set up the planet to have its Gaian balance of oxygen and carbon.

So the basic entropic race drove the Cosmos towards an ultimate symmetry breaking simplicity, and Life, as the negentropic response, was driven towards its maximum negentropic advantage.

The goals existed in dialectical fashion. And they forced Nature through a whole set of unlikely hoops so as to arrive there.

Mechanistic science avoided the whole problem by turning a blind eye, but once teleology is admitted the idea of an ordering Intellect or Mover becomes more plausible. — Leontiskos

Science earnt its keep by being the epistemology that delivered a mechanised world. Teleology could take a back seat as technology was the pragmatic point. Humans existed to supply the point of a world of machines.

But when it comes to now incorporating telos into science, the mathematical inevitability of topological order or dissipative structure is how that is happening.

That could be seen as a thumbs up for Platonism, divine immanence, idealism, or whatever. Or it could be seen as the arrival of a structuralist understanding of Nature that rides on the back of stuff like Lie groups, thermodynamics, path integrals, and Darwinian selection.

His point is that a ‘best possible image’ is always going to be relative to commitments and material practices which are contingently formed through indissociable interaction between the world and our purposes. — Joshs

That’s still just epistemology.

[ It is hard to reply given you say nothing about your expertise or interests here. But if you want an example of what a mathematical and systems approach to history looks like, Peter Turchin’s group is a good example. He was an ecologist turned historian.

This is the recent summary paper of their work - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn3517

Here, we have proposed a general approach for studying historical processes that combines the use of nonlinear dynamical systems, large-scale historical datasets, and a systematic statistical testing of alternative causal hypotheses. Our approach has allowed us to compare quantitatively all major theoretical approaches to the evolution of human social complexity within a single framework and to lay the ground for more nuanced and precise theories to be rigorously tested in the future.

Our analysis confirms that increasing agricultural productivity is necessary but not sufficient to explain the growth in social complexity. Furthermore, analysis indicates that this increase was not driven by factors associated with either functionalist or internal conflict theories. Instead, external (interpolity) conflict and key technical innovations associated with increasing warfare intensity appear to be the primary drivers of state growth, along with the growing population and resource base provided by increasing agricultural productivity.

Our analyses help clarify why a mechanistic model that privileges warfare and military revolutions (63) and agriculture (64) has offered compelling, if provisional, interpretations for what drove the rise, spread, and equilibrium levels of social complexity in Afro-Eurasia in the ancient and medieval periods, as well as worldwide during the early modern period.

Although factors such as infrastructure provision, market and monetary exchange, and ideological developments do not appear to play a significant causal role in propelling subsequent advances in social scale, hierarchical complexity, or governance sophistication, they likely are integral elements that support and maintain the results of that growth, which would account for the relationship observed between these factors in previous scholarship.

Here is how I explained that in a similar thread using the reality of organising an actual army...

That's how hierarchy theory works. It is about the dialectical interaction between parts and wholes. And the two have to complement each other for the structure to persist.

So the whole - the global scale of the system - has to provide the constraints that shapes the right kind of parts. And the parts have to have the right kind of shape to meet the goals of the whole. The parts, in all their freedom, have to be acting in ways that re-construct that whole, in other words.

Think about an army. You need soldiers that act like soldiers and generals that act like generals.

That is the soldiers need to be good at acting on the ground in ways that produce a functional army. They must have the right habits to deal with the here and now of any combat situation.

Then the generals in their field headquarters need to be good at acting in ways that also produce a functional army. They must make the broad command decisions that shape the local combat situations as they will likely pop up during battle.

The hierarchical organisation works because it has a global view which gives shape to the local action. And the local action has enough of a view - enough of its own creative freedom - that on average it produces the kind of result which keeps the army rolling.

The notion of a hierarchy has gathered a lot of negative connotations. No one wants to get told what to do. No one wants to be on the bottom rung of anything.

But if you want a system that is intelligently adaptive, then it needs to have this kind of organisation. It needs to be able to apply its intelligence over multiple scales of being, multiple spatiotemporal horizons of action.

If the balance between the local and global scales are right, then the right outcomes will result. The local scale will continue to construct the whole, and the whole will continue to give coherent form its own parts. The system will survive and function, locked into a dynamic of mutual benefit.

And part of the dynamic is that there is internal mobility. Privates can get made generals. Generals can get busted to privates.

Or at least this is part of the democratic ideal we instinctively understand as being a smart way to operate.

Then further...

An army has to meet its purpose. So there is a Darwinian selection principle that produces the constraints which an army - as a human institution with regulations, history, a social memory - embodies.

The army exists as an idea in the minds of all its participants. So that makes it seem like an idealist fiction.

And yet every private quickly runs into the reality of the army way in a brute and direct fashion if they so much as twitch a nervous smile or leave a speck of dirt on their boots.

The mechanism that generates the constraints is the system as a whole in action over its long-run existence. Or what Salthe would call its cogent moment scale.

Constraint is the great weight of historical accident that builds in Darwinian fashion and acts on every local degree of freedom within a system. It represents the past in terms of what it intends to be its own future.

And then to evolve - being a natural system - it must also be slowly changed by its experiences. So even in armies, the system of constraint gets modified to make it better adapted to its current environmental challenges.

One day you might find women, as well as men, being trained to be unthinking killing machines.

So general evolutionary principles generate the constraints. And at the simplest level, the Darwinian competition is to just exist as a stably persisting process or functional structure.

And more generally...

A telltale fact from hierarchy theory is how wholes act to simplify their parts. Wholes refine their components so as to make themselves ... even more easy to construct.

Take a human level example of an army. For an army to make itself constructible, it must take large numbers of young men and simplify their natures accordingly. It must turn people with many degrees of freedom (any variety of personal social histories) into simpler and more uniform components.

So wholes are more than just the sum of their parts ... in that wholes shape those parts to serve their higher order purposes. Wholes aren't accidental in nature. They produce their own raw materials by simplifying the messy world to a collection of parts with no choice but to construct the whole in question.

Even the Cosmos had to impose simplification on its parts so as to exist. To expand and cool, it needed particles to radiate and absorb. It need a pattern of events that would let a thermal unwinding happen.

That is why you get order out of chaos. Reality needs to form dissipative structure that has the organisation to turn a sloppy directionless mess into an efficient entropic gradient.

Turn a full soda bottle of water upside down and it glugs inefficiently until a vortex forms and the bottle can suddenly drain fast and efficient.

Wholes make their parts by reducing degrees of freedom and creating components with little choice but to eternally re-construct that which is their causal master.

Not to mention...

The systems view is a triadic logic in which you have a dichotomy or symmetry-breaking, and then the hierarchy or triadic state of organisation that fixes a stable relation between those two complementary poles of being.

So very simplistically, a rabble of warriors make a fighting mob. Then the organised thing of an army can develop as the mob starts to divide into leaders and followers. You get the emergence of the dichotomy of infantry and general. Each complements the other in that the infantry acts in the immediacy of the now - the best choices in the heat of battle. The general then acts with the long term view.

This local~global hierarchical division brings stability and coherence. We can speak of the army as an organism, and even an organ system as it develops specialised branches like a reconnaissance force, logistics, artillery.

You even get a thermodynamic divide. The soldiers are the entropy - the grunt energy. The general is the information - the abstract information.

Or alternatively...

Constraints would have to arise immanently from the world they also limit. So the constraints are what get constructed.

The obvious analogy is that armies need to be composed of soldiers to really exist. So armies recruit young people (those with the most degrees of behavioural freedom or plasticity) and mould them to fit. As a set up, the army exists because it has narrowed human variety to produce some interchangeable set of near identical military parts.

And then all those soldiers, acting together in ways that manifest their highly specific military properties, reconstruct the very system that made them. Good soldiers become drill sergeants, captains and generals. Good soldiers take their soldierly habits even back into civilian life. So soldiering perpetuates soldiering.

Thus there is a synergy of the local and global in which a limitation of variety creates the components that are then able to self assemble into systems that keep churning out said components.

Strong reductionism of course just presume components exist already formed. Thus anything they collectively construct is an accident without purpose. However a holist or systems view says components - the kind of regularity that gives us the many similar parts that could have a collective behaviour - must be deliberately shaped.

Contingency has to be limited for there to be these parts. So already their existence is dependent on the reality of some global reason for being, and even an idea of the form of the part that would be necessary to the job in mind.

Continuing the theme....

A key part of the holist position is that the top down causality is something real because it shapes the parts.

So where does sand get its shape so that it might compose a beach? How does it get roundish, smoothed and graded by size? What higher constraints lead to the formation of every particle of sand.

Holism stresses the hierarchical fact that parts are made to fit the whole via development, an approach to a common limit. Parts become in fact parts as their initial irregularity or degrees of freedom are regulated so that they become as identical as matters in the construction of the whole.

An army needs to take raw recruits and turn them into soldiers. Young men with irregular natures must be regularised so they can function as parts of a fighting machine. And once a soldier, always a soldier.

It is this fact about holism - the parts themselves get developed by the whole - that make supervenience and determinism bunk in a systems logic context. Or rather, the parts can be deterministic only to the degree the whole has an interest or concern in making them that.

Grains of sand are still irregular rather than exact spheres. They only need to be roughly spherical and reasonably small to meet the Second Law's goal of maximising erosion. To produce perfectly round and perfectly matched grains would require self-defeating care.

Same with soldiers. They only need to approach an acceptable average.

So because the parts must be shaped to fit, perfect determinism is an ideal and in fact there always remains an irreducible uncertainty or indeterminism at the local scale on which any system is being composed.

This has turned out to be true even of fundamental physics of course. The indeterminism of the quantum is irreducible. And that means everything that wants to build itself up from that ground can't be clockwork determinism. It can only be clockwork on average.

Well here again is your starter from your own source…

We have seen that anarchists abhor authoritarianism. But if one is an anti-authoritarian, one must oppose all hierarchical institutions, since they embody the principle of authority. For, as Emma Goldman argued, “it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretence, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination.” [Red Emma Speaks, p. 435] This means that “there is and will always be a need to discover and overcome structures of hierarchy, authority and domination and constraints on freedom: slavery, wage-slavery [i.e. capitalism], racism, sexism, authoritarian schools, etc.” [Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, p. 364]

Thus the consistent anarchist must oppose hierarchical relationships as well as the state. Whether economic, social or political, to be an anarchist means to oppose hierarchy. The argument for this (if anybody needs one) is as follows:

“All authoritarian institutions are organised as pyramids: the state, the private or public corporation, the army, the police, the church, the university, the hospital: they are all pyramidal structures with a small group of decision-makers at the top and a broad base of people whose decisions are made for them at the bottom. Anarchism does not demand the changing of labels on the layers, it doesn’t want different people on top, it wants us to clamber out from underneath.” [Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action, p. 22]
Hierarchies “share a common feature: they are organised systems of command and obedience” and so anarchists seek “to eliminate hierarchy per se, not simply replace one form of hierarchy with another.”

Etc, etc….

I will briefly note again why this is silly. Hierarchy theory in the systems science tradition is at pains to show how constraints are the reason there can even be freedoms.

Until you understand why this is, you just can’t understand what it means to be a self-organising natural system. You are stuck in some mechanical paradigm and not talking about nature as we find it in the real world.

Are you too disinterested to try to say what you mean in your own words? Or even cut and paste from your source?

I might as well point to the internet and say my answer lies there. You make zero effort.

You might like to think about the history of economics. For a long time, it clung to mathematical rigour. But now the limitations are being recognized and different, more humanistic approaches are being developed. — Ludwig V

But that was because economics lacked the larger constraint of a historical perspective on social order. It was concerned with the plumbing of markets in a pure sense and not with why trading and debt systems are characteristic of Homo sapiens since we got going with the hierarchical tribal structures that turned landscapes into customary narratives of foraging.

Economics too is being pulled into this new cross-disciplinary exercise of applying the lens of dissipative structure to an understanding of why our historical arc of development has been what it is.

I simply point out this is something that is happening in current academia. If you want examples, they are abundant.

I think I'm qualified to talk about social structures, in a philosophical way. Is that not a basis for a conversation? — Ludwig V

The systems view is now moving from thermodynamics and biology to social science and human history. It claims to add mathematical rigour to the conversation. And I endorse this move.

See for example - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-47681-0

Not all naturalist thinking is limited in this way. Joseph Rouse’s radical naturalism is one example of alternative paths that are being taken by new materialists. — Joshs

But Rouse’s concern here appears epistemological whereas I was talking ontological commitments. Rouse wants to place the scientific image within some wider pluralistic space of materialistic images. I am instead asking about the best possible version of that scientific image. What would it be like to bring our scattered scientific understandings of the world into one coherent image of natural being?

A difference would likely be that the image in our minds has to be so abstracted and mathematical that it restructures our own habits of thought. We would be “picturing” a dynamical pattern of growth and symmetry breaking. Our understanding would be more kinesthetic in being about the movements of forms coalescing in spaces. A holistic geometry of relations rather than just some kind of cause and effect narrative.

If you are thinking in terms of pure structuralism, everything drops away except a stabilising architecture of relations - the constraints that produce the freedoms that compose the constraints in the one single triadic web of action.

And there you would have it. How reality hangs together according to what science has discovered. It’s deep structural logic. The symmetry that imposes itself on all possibility.

Getting to that level of the scientific image is what anyone who really “gets” the geometry of nature right in their heads is doing. But it is not then an easy thing for people to share and compare. That is one reason I would always offer Peircean semiotics as an anchor. And systems science in general. The dynamical structure of nature is a form not to be seen as if from the outside but something to become a lived and embodied experience.

It has to be an image in the internalist kinesthetic sense of always knowing which way to move so as to flow with the flow of the natural structure.

You are right that hierarchical structures can be found beyond the context of the social and indeed, the ethological. — Ludwig V

But I am talking about hierarchy theory as a branch of science and not in that everyday sense.

Hierarchical models have been appearing in increasing numbers in scientific papers in recent years, but without any fully developed reference on these forms. In this paper I aim to remedy this lacuna. My focus is on biology, where both forms of hierarchy have been used, but I have included references from all fields where I have discovered attempts to use these forms.

But I am more of a classical theist, and the classical theist won't generally address naturalism on its own terms. — Leontiskos

And maybe I am not your classical naturalist. If you take structuralism seriously, matter isn’t really very material when you get down to it. Even Aristotle’s prime matter or Anaximander’s Apeiron are a little too substantial. Plato’s Khôra isn’t right either but has something to recommend it. Somehow the material principle must be reduced to the purist notion of a potential. As in perhaps a Peircean vagueness or quantum foam.

Form is also only expressed as limitation. The inevitability of symmetrical simplicity. The standard model of particle physics keeps pushing until it finds someway to wind up at the ground zero of U(1). The universe in its final state as a bath of holographic blackbody radiation.

So as a metaphysics, neither matter nor form appear very “real” in any substantial sense. Reality seems derealised in a way that neither naturalists nor theists would think about things. It is all a lot more tantalising.

So then what is the counterfactual case for Tychism? For the idea that Logos is a byproduct of chance rather than a fundamental reality? — Leontiskos

Tychism pairs with synechism. So you have local fluctuations and global continuity. The systems science story of hierarchical order. Each of these conceptions grounds the other. They are really each other’s inverse by logical definition. Chance and necessity as the opposing limits defining the actuality we find sandwiched between these two limiting extremes.

Logos and flux would be another twist on the same thought.

As I read the Wikipedia article on Tychism I find that much of it seems to be in sync with theism and not opposed to it. — Leontiskos

Well Peirce lived in a very theistic times. There was plenty of social pressure, and advantage, to frame things in that light. And I don’t think a semiotic metaphysics in general could come across as clearly opposing an immanent kind of idealism or divine principle as - as I argued - it shouldn’t either stand for anything like an orthodox material account of Nature. It is poised in some metaphysical space of it own that sees both classical materialism and classical idealism as suffering from misplaced concretism and not tuned into the subtleties of Aristotelean hylomorphism as an argument.

In many ways Darwin has become our keystone to interpreting the world, and think this may be due more to a vacuum than to careful thinking or observation. — Leontiskos

Well evolution is a pretty robust logical concept. How would you even prevent it happening in the sense that given a variety of possibilities, the most effective - in what ever sense that means - is going to win out.

Why else is physics so tied to the principle of least action? The path integral says every quantum event is a sum over a whole universe of possibilities. That’s a pretty dramatic application of Darwinian competition in its physicalist sense.

Having lived there is about a fact. — Tarskian

No, I meant that you are delusional in claiming to be well travelled, unlike me.

I had lived in four countries and visited another twenty or so by 12. We used to visit a nice crab restaurant in Johor Bahru.

Unlike you, I have lived for some while in these countries. — Tarskian

Indulge your illusions if they give you comfort. :up:

Einstein had a great deal of difficulty doubting his own theory because his metaphysical parameters did not admit of the possibility that his theory could be wrong. — Leontiskos

But the facts forced him to change his mind. A cosmological constant was added to his equation of state. He remained uncomfortable, but so what.

The issue didn't really become a crisis until measurement showed the Universe lacked the critical mass to be in fact expanding. But then measurement also showed that there was then this "dark energy" as a new contribution to now guarantee its eternal expansion.

So whatever Einstein might have wanted to believe about anything was irrelevant as he had framed a theory with deductible consequences and thus inductively confirmable measurements. Pragmatism in action.

It is all the more impressive that such an epistemic method worked despite the deeper intuitions of one of the most brilliant ever thinkers. And that a "humble priest" could have played a part in correcting him.

Similarly, if the naturalist thinks that the only possible argument for theism is a god of the gaps argument, then it seems to me that it is the paradigm that is controlling his conclusion more than the data. — Leontiskos

Again, a pragmatist asks only what use is this belief? Does the belief have observable consequences? If not, it is not even a theory capable of being wrong. So it is up to the theist to deduce the consequences of their theory such that they stand counterfactually opposed to some clear alternative and so measureable on that explicit basis.

Even the null hypothesis would do as that alternative – the statistical case that there is some effect to be discussed rather than just some random noise in the data. So what difference does your version of a God make in this natural world? What difference would His absence make? What effect are you making claims for in a suitably counterfactual fashion? Where is then the evidence in terms of at least some statistical reason for a pause for thought?

The (classical) theist responds that this is a fine argument except for the fact that God is not and has never been conceived as an object within the universe. Internalism is a non-starter for the theist. It's not a matter of adjusting supernatural claims, but rather of attending to the actual claims that have been with us for thousands of years. — Leontiskos

Of course the theist might take refuge in transcendence. But why would any rigorous epistemology go along with that? Once isn't a pragmatist because one dislikes truth. One is accepting – as this thread underlines – that we are epistemically bounded in being that kind of creature which models its reality rather than "experiences" its reality in some kind of direct and brute fact fashion. Internalism just is our epistemic reality.

Which is why Peirce's arguments for also an ontological internalism – a pansemiotic metaphysics of immanent creation – becomes such an appealing alternative.

And that seemingly wild proposition has become only ever more believable as the facts in favour of ontic structural realism, topological order, dissipative structure, quantum field theory, etc, keep spilling out of the scientific mainstream as its latest "well no-one saw that one coming, did they?" surprise.

More pointedly, the question of whether the metaphysical structure is or is not a brute fact is not adjudicable within a naturalistic paradigm, but it does not thereby follow that it is not adjudicable. — Leontiskos

When one metaphysics endlessly has to retreat in the face of scientific advance, and the other metaphysics instead keeps looking scientifically sounder by the day, I would say history is indeed passing its judgement on the beliefs of humans.

And because of this the god-of-the-gaps paradigm of the modern naturalist matches the theological paradigm of the modern fundamentalist, which ensures that these two camps seldom talk past each other. Both are working with a similar conception of God. — Leontiskos

Am I operating in that paradigm? As a pragmatist, I would say not. If you can show me the effect in some controlled fashion – show it isn't just nature being random – then I would say, well let's start investigating that as a class of cause.

So Peirce of course had to presume something as a starting point. He "believed" nature is essentially tychic. Rooted in true spontaneity.

But then the logic of that is that absolute spontaneity can't help become what is now thought of as "order out of chaos". The pansemiosis of dissipative structure theory. Or the path integral of quantum field theory.

If everything is striving to be the case, not everything can then be the case as most of it becomes self-cancelling. Order emerges in topological fashion as all that cannot in fact self-cancel away.

This is a summary of ontic structural realism. This is how relativity comes to encode spacetime as global Poincare invariance and quantum theory comes to encode spacetime's material contents as local "chiralised" gauge invariance.

The Big Bang is the tale of infinite dimensional possibility being broken by its own dimensional symmetry breaking. Absolute spontaneity reducing itself to a Planckian residue of just three spatial directions organised by exactly those global and local symmetries that could not in the end be completely cancelled out of existence.

The Big Bang starts at the point where nearly all free possibility was wiped out. And that then resulted in a hot seed of dimensional structure – a fleck of energetic order – which took off towards its own form of self-cancellation or temporal inversion in expanding and cooling its way to its own Heat Death.

So as a cosmology that provides a metaphysical alternative to transcendent theism, it is pretty detailed. It relies on mathematical strength arguments about Lorentz boosts and Lie groups. It demands all the mathematical machinery of general relativity and quantum field theory. It raises a whole set of factual issues about "the missing critical mass" or "quantum weirdness".

As I say, one metaphysics runs to escaped being eaten up by scientific advance. The other is instead the product of that scientific advance. What Peirce proposed as an epistemic logic is also indeed panning out as an ontological logic. Both in the science of mind and the science of the cosmos.

Welcome to the real world! — Tarskian

But it is perfectly clear how little idea you have about what that is. You are just babbling in the fashion expected of the standard crypto bro digital nomad. Not an original thought in your head apparently. Just going with the latest meme lifestyle. Fitting in with your chosen crowd. :up:

The idea that a program or system has hierarchies, for example, isn't the same as social hierarchy. — Moliere

You can see I did in fact reply to @Ludwig V on this. So I might as well expand on where I suspect you are going wrong.

You have this notion of "power" as the social good to be distribute. And you mean power in the restricted sense of the power to dominate (as opposed to the power to submit I guess). This everyday kind of ethological hierarchical organisation – the one discussed in its genetic and evolutionary sense of the dominance-submission hierarchies found in social animals – is then sort of hand-wavingly exported to the contests of nations, the contests between capital and labour, the contests between road-hogging cyclists and cycle-dominating road-ragers.

You praise "amiability" as that expresses your distaste for being dominated, and also as a way to bypass the issue of whether you thus have submitted. The good society on this view – which seems where you are tracking – would be the hierarchical order that could deliver this "amiability" across all scales of social being. Everywhere at every level in life, the question of who won and who lost could be considered moot. Politely unmentioned. Imagined never to have been a social dynamic in play.

Well you can see the issue if humans are social animals and have evolved some version of the dominance~submission behaviours that are the "how" of how non-linguistic social animals organise their adaptively hierarchical worlds. We can't help but tell a difference between a soft smile and a stern gaze. It is in our genes. And a natural conflict arises when we live all day pretending outwardly to be smiling while inwardly frowning because serving burgers at McDonalds is after all a pretty shit occupation.

The social game there becomes trading amiability with respect. You tack on the corporate welcome, they act with the respect suited to the financial occasion.

OK. But onwards to the political science of how modern society needs to be understood. What is the social good that is actually being plumbed to deliver? How can we define that in terms that are both personally meaningful and collectively measurable?

No one really talks of society as an amiability~respect distribution system. But that is not a bad kind of balancing act. And then those who think of it in wolf pack terms as a dominance~submission distribution system seem not to have noticed that we have collectively evolved way beyond that point. Sure those instinctive behaviours are still ever present as the fabric of our lives. But the point of the Enlightenment – of a civilising and rational social philosophy – was not to amplify this genetic trait but instead suppress it, or at least harness it to its best advantage, in a new scheme of civilised life.

So dominance (and submission) is not what is being hierarchically distributed, even if it might seem like it from a narrow genetic view of a social system as a hierarchy still organised by systems principles. I.e.: still organised as a system of top-down constraints in balance with their bottom-up degrees of freedom.

A better word than amiability could be agency. Western social democracy had this vision of self-actualisation as a cultural good to be distributed evenly to all. Creating a social safety net was what ensured that every person had the same opportunities, if not the same outcomes.

Obviously then along came neo-liberalism as a corruption of that approach. Agency became such a one-sided concept that the social safety net could just be abandoned. A cost to strike off the balance sheet and so leave "everyone richer".

Social democracy of course was a little short-sighted as it never quite expanded its hierarchical reach to include the wider environmental reality of a planet taking off towards 10 billion souls who all also hoped to enjoy their new civilised agency, with its social safety net.

And neo-liberalism very quickly decided that ecological and climate concerns were yet another kind of friction on their shiny entrepreneurial schemes. The quest to monetise, and even financialise, everything. Turn the social world into a pure capital world without any accounting line for "a work force" because fossil fuels were an infinite form of manpower and AI was coming to replace even the white collar back office.

If you had to still have some dark satanic mill of slave labour and stinking pollution, well as @Tarskian keeps reminding us, there are plenty of third world countries where you can just lose these things from sight. They can't even enforce their own laws on itinerant passport holders from developed nations. If they can't clean up their beach resort nightlife, there is no way they can say no to Foxconn or ExxonMobil.

But anyway, that is how to start thinking about hierarchies as the natural blueprint for any system of disspative flow. There will always seem to be some conflict going on – as between the top-down contraints and the bottom-up freedoms. But this is just the dynamical balancing act by which the two things of stability and creativity can live together in a fruitful complementary fashion. Complexity can be constructed because it can be afforded.

The issue is to properly frame the dynamical balance that you want to apply evenly over all the levels of your hierarchy. For actual natural systems such as rivers or plate tectonics, the good is simply "maximum entropy". But for organismic systems, the good becomes some notion of "flourishing". The ability to repair and reproduce and so continue the journey towards some personal future.

Human civilisation has raised the game still higher as we now can aspire to delivering "civilisation" as the scalefree good. But then we have to start digging into that to discover what it really means to us.

Amiability sort of touches on it. Agency does too. Social capital is another term. Living as nature intends might be another slogan. We sort of know what we mean in terms of "the good life".

At least until someone comes along with another dumb one-note "good" such as happiness, or virtuousness, or being ethical, or whatever else tends to crop up in utopian fantasies of how a society ought to be run if only they were its dictator.

You really don't know Indonesia, do you? — Tarskian

So when bar owners are paying off or intimidating the local police so as to be able to fleece the rich tourists, suddenly this becomes evidence for your narrative that some societies just have laws that they can’t be bother policing. And yet the facts seem better suited to your other narrative that all the world is run by corrupt oligarchs.

I’m confused. :razz:

Are you referring to "The End of History"? — Ludwig V

No. The Origins of Political Order, Political Order and Political Decay, and the postscript, Identity, are a really great trilogy.

Are you saying that power is equally distributed in a hierarchy? Had you thought to ask those at the bottom of the heap what they think? What happens if I'm at the top and don't want to distribute power in an evenly balanced fashion? — Ludwig V

No. I am pointing out that hierarchies are the hallmark of nature. Flows are fractally distributed. Even earthquakes fall into this inevitable statistical pattern. So hierarchies don’t need to be explained. It would be deviations from hierarchies that would seem immediately unnatural - in need of some further causal inquiry.

Then I made the point that this is also true of organisms - semiotically-organised systems. Systems which add encoded information to shaping of distributed flows. If a landscape offers society a river, society can start damming it, regulating it, turning it into a system of canals, ditches, sluice gates and water wheels.

But even this mechanical constraint of nature evolves towards the same natural logic of a hierarchical organisation. If water for irrigation or hydrogeneration is the social good to be dispensed, then the fair approach is to be able to do so over all scales. Every farmer ought to be able to turn on a tap and pay the same price. Every householder should have an electric socket and pay the same fee.

In a normal world, we just unthinkingly build infrastructure in this natural way. It is clearly logical once we have reached a level of civilisation where we think of ourselves as the larger collective that is a nation. We want to be part of a society that can act as if it is indeed a single giant organism with all the organ systems of such an organism. A nervous system, a circulation system, an energy system, an immune system, etc.

This doesn’t seem overtly political. But organising a crowd into a nation is hugely political. That is what Fukuyama is good at showing. That is what political science is properly about.

Once you have this civilised framework in place, then you can start to get into the usual bunfights over the actual health of your national plumbing. Does everyone have an electric socket and a tap that works. Can everyone afford the electricity and water or has wealth become siphoned off at the top in a way that it too needs to be redistributed to the lower levels.

If the state paid for the waterworks and power stations, the accounting is pretty easy. Taxes can be used to ensure a nation’s assets flow freely in some lower bounded way. A top and bottom get - somewhat artificially now - placed on the hierarchical flows.

But once a state’s assets are privatised, the assets hocked off to predatory capitalists, then that thermostatic regulation - that wealth constraining feedback loop - is removed. You get the predictable consequences of that.

Of course there are always the arguments. Trickle down theory. The philanthropic instincts of the super wealthy. The innate inefficiencies of any state bureaucracy. One can make a case for just about anything one likes. Folk are easily bamboozled.

But if you step back like a political scientist or systems thinker, the basics are clear enough. Nature is hierarchical in its organisation for good reason. And organisms exist by echoing that in constructing their own logically coherent state of being. An organism is a distributed flow where “life and mind” is the good being dispersed with a scalefree fairness to all parts of the one collective body. All 30 trillion cells or so, not including the further 100 trillion cells of our gut biome.

So politics is about the building of hierarchically organised sovereign nations. Civilisation is the good that is meant to flow freely through them over all scales. A well plumbed society will have an optimised distribution of civilised life and mind.

It is just weird how hierarchy is a term of abuse in the anglophone world. Everyone wants to be free. No one want to be constrained. There is somehow an expectation that civilisation appears as some kind of magical good rather than as a good being delivered by a long term social investment in really smart social plumbing.