For some reason, using reasoning, some people just absolutely insist on some artificial hierarchy. — Rich

Reason creates its own natural hierarchy. Cream floats to the top, cranks rant alone in the basement. What works, simply works. The rest is noise from off-stage.

So do the 3 different forms of reasoning have individual value, or are they dependant on eachother? — MonfortS26

They are three stages of the one process. So it is a natural sequence that leads from questions to answers.

The first one, abduction, is of course basically about intuition and inspiration. It is not easy to formalise as a method. You can't prescribe insight. But you can certainly create a culture and habits of work that support it.

What do you mean when you say philosophy splits off deduction? Didn't Aristotle create deductive reasoning before the scientific method? Is there a way to map out different "degrees of rigor" where science isn't applicable? — MonfortS26

The ancient Greeks were startled by the power of maths. They discovered the unreasonable effectiveness of axiom-based deductive arguments. So they were all about "the right way to reason". They didn't have to make a big deal about the right way to measure or confirm as they had enough to be getting on with just by using the confirmation possible by looking and seeing.

Amusingly, the famous slight against Aristotle by Bertrand Russell is that he typified the philosophical mindset by making wild claims about women having fewer teeth than men. "...although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.”

And yet Aristotle was a close observer of nature - for his time. What he actually wrote was: ”Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made.”

So Aristotle was wrong about the facts. More accurate data would have been available. And eventually Western history produced the kind of experimental mindset that forced folk to start checking their claims.

The fork between philosophy and science happened about there. But if we are talking about the big picture of reasoning as a method, Aristotle spelt out the principles of induction too.

Deductions are one of two species of argument recognized by Aristotle. The other species is induction (epagôgê). He has far less to say about this than deduction, doing little more than characterize it as “argument from the particular to the universal”. However, induction (or something very much like it) plays a crucial role in the theory of scientific knowledge in the Posterior Analytics: it is induction, or at any rate a cognitive process that moves from particulars to their generalizations, that is the basis of knowledge of the indemonstrable first principles of sciences.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/

Isn't that just the foundation of the scientific method though? — MonfortS26

Exactly. Science is what reasoning looks like at its most rigorous level of application.

This is the point made by CS Peirce, the guy who invented the philosophy of pragmatism. Reasoning - when considered in its full sense - is this three stage process of abduction, deduction and induction. That is, hypothesis, theory and test.

Now philosophy seems to split off deduction. Somehow the logical derivation of consequences from axioms or premisses feels the core action. It is the most mathematical part of the business of reasoning. Philosophy disconnects from the world to work with pure abstract argumentation. Then science is the rough trade, the uncouth element, that goes out into the world and fusses about with observations and measurements.

It is a nice conceit. But human reason is a method of induction that tries to guess the truth of the world and then seeks to cash that out in terms of predictive knowledge. It seeks intelligibility.

Deductive argument - the exercise of "pure reason" - is an important part of the process. It goes "beyond the evidence" by drawing out the detailed consequences of some set of "plausible" grounding assumptions. It enables us to reach further by framing our ideas in a definite or counterfactual fashion.

But those clear and reasonable ideas are nothing unless they check out against the reality they claim to represent.

The ideas can't just be true in themselves. They can only be logically "valid" in some tautological fashion - the closed circularity you were pointing out. To be true in the way we want to mean it, the ideas must prove themselves in the court of our interactions with the world.

And even then - a longer subject - they can only have pragmatic truth, not absolute Kantian thing-in-itself truth. We can't actually transcend the closed circularity of our reasoning about the world. But the scientific method is what it looks like to structure our thinking in the most rigorous, hierarchically-organised, fashion. The best way to "break out" is to create that sharp separation between the part of our thoughts which is a general theory, and the part which is its answering act of measurement or confirming observation.

Inductive reasoning is answered by the evidence. It leads to predictions. Those predictions either tell you the theory was true or not.

So circularity is solved by hierarchy. The logical circle is "broken" when it becomes a feedback loop connecting the general with the particular, the global with the local.

Deductive reasoning and predicate logic are rather stuck in a closed world if taken in isolation. But reasonable inquiry is founded in the larger practice of open-ended inductive argument. Deduction and predication are only particular tools we use to sharpen the derivation of predictions from theories.

They are tautologically circular. Or symmetric and closed. And that is its own strength.

But then reasoning more generally is about producing the asymmetry, the hierarchy, which is global theory that can be cashed out in terms of particular acts of measurement.

A full account of reasoning is three staged. First comes abduction or "a productive guess". Then comes the deduction needed to shape the guess into the formal hierarchical structure of a theory. Then comes the inductive confirmation - the acts of measurement which feed back to tell us the "truth" of the theory and its grounding assumptions.

It is estimated that in temperate latitudes an increase of 10% is achieved, freeing more land for wildlife. — tom

...just look it up in the climate denier's book of alternative facts.

Yes, I was aware that those were apokrisis's quotes, but I wanted to address my response to you, since this is your thread. — Bitter Crank

Sounds legit.

Would you agree that the major disagreement between our views comes from you leaning more relativist than me? — inquisitive

Probably it's rather that I expect morality to have an adaptive natural function. So I would critique it in terms of some objectively-supported notion of evolutionary optimality.

And thus the moral code that worked for humans as hunter/gathers would have objective differences to the ones that worked for grain-farming cultures, mountain-herding cultures, paddy field-cultures, etc. And then the industrial modern culture is its own story again - one where humankind is in fact re-making the ecology of the planet in its own image.

So what is right or optimal for a hunter/gatherer, with the lightest ecological footprint, may be different for Homo technologicus with a footprint so heavy that it means to actually reshape the planetary ecoystem, turn it into a giant managed private estate.

If we can clearly show that a certain thing creates the most well-being and well-being is the thing we optimize for, then we have established a moral truth. — inquisitive

Yep, that's the gist of what I've argued.

The key is that this is a "four causes" view which accepts a telos or purpose as a legitimate part of our description of the world.

Extreme relativism is usually based on the rejection of objective-strength telos. The world is taken as essentially meaningless, a blank canvas for our desires. But Natural Philosophy would see that position as reductionist and unreasonable.

So yes. This becomes an evidence-backed approach. We can identify some definition of what it is to be optimal, or flourishing, or balanced and healthy and enduring. Then we can work out the moral positions which target that generic goal. It is a scientific approach, a pragmatist ethics.

And it is quite a normal way to think in political theory these days. There are plenty of people promoting national happiness indexes as the right way to measure societies. Big corporations have started to believe in sustainability. The social enterprise model is terribly fashionable.

And it was the basis of the Enlightenment approach. The only difference was that the problems of their day were more social and economic than ecological.

To be honest with you, I think we've reached the point where I've exhausted my current knowledge of the underlying philosophical concepts as well as my own beliefs and thoughts. — inquisitive

Hey, the thing is to be actually interested. These are fascinating times with fascinating dilemmas.

The ecological issue is more about stability. Rapid change is what causes "problems".

I don't believe complete moral relativism is a useful concept. Perhaps this is where our divide lies. I think there has to be a certain amount of moral realism in the world. — inquisitive

Hmm. The obvious reply is that you can't just claim an ad hoc mixture of moral relativism and moral realism. It has to be one or the other. Either morality has objective truth or its a subjective choice.

But then my own position is founded on a Naturalism, which does take a mixed view. It grants nature an objective telos. To describe nature properly, we must recognise in particular its global tendency to entropify. The "good" is defined in terms of physical concepts such as symmetry breaking and the least action principle. So nature does give our moral choices an objective basis in its own fundamental set-up.

We can see this showing in traditional moral codes. Morality normally encodes the habits that make for a healthy society. They are the ways to act that create organismic-level success for a culture. Morality is objectively adaptive behaviour.

And then the same organismic view allows for moral relativism. To the degree we are not constrained by nature - not constrained to act in adaptive fashion - we are free. What we choose to do makes no difference. We can invent silly rules if we like. Should we eat pork or not? Once we can farm pork cleanly, the choice makes no objective difference.

So my view does mix the objective and the subjective. A natural system is a mix of laws or constraints, and accidents or spontaneity. But that is very different from the usual claim of moral realism where some particular moral facts "just are". And why they are is either not explained, or explained via some transcendent mechanism.

Would you not agree that there are things that are objectively bad? I don't like to use extremes, but consider rape or genital mutilation. — inquisitive

Is this a good way to argue? Can you prove the objective case by choosing the most easily shared subjective reaction?

There are cultures where genital mutilation is considered a norm, a good thing, a cleansing act. Rape likewise has been socially licensed in various circumstances - even just in notions of being "a good wife".

Of course, subjectively, I find such cultural attitudes archaic and repellent. But then I'm likely a product of a very similar time and culture as you.

So simply feeling these things to be "automatically bad" is what needs to be questioned. And coming up with rational arguments why they just are "objectively immoral" is always going to be suspiciously easy. Arguing for what we want to believe is second nature for folk.

An honest approach to morality would have to be prepared to think more deeply. The question might be, what difference does rape or genital mutilation really make to Nature? Is it one of those meaningless cultural differences, like scarification or kilt-wearing? Or is it objectively mal-adaptive evolutionary behaviour?

It seems to me that one can reasonably argue that any moral framework which justifies these acts is not a moral framework that should be applied. — inquisitive

That's a philosophically shallow approach. It boils down to the view that others who didn't grow up my way, in my culture, are probably wrong when they seem to disagree with my socially inherited belief system. They are wrong because I am right.

It is the completely subjective view. Not at all an objective one.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but it seems that a sudden change of diet to exclude all animal products can be harmful to ones health because certain nutrients aren't present in a purely plant-based diet. — inquisitive

Veganism can be a healthy diet. But overall, we are evolved to eat like hunter/gatherers. Consuming wheat, or drinking animal milk, are more unnatural than boiling a squirrel so far as our digestive system is concerned.

However if we were actually talking about an objectively nature-honouring human diet, then every modern supermarket is the grossest abuse of that. There are immoral levels of sugar, bad fats, preservatives, colourings, etc, in what gets sold.

So which is the bigger social crime - factory farmed chicken or sponsorship of kid's soccer by "sports drink" manufacturers?

I'd admire any true vegan. So not one who lives on pasta and noodles. But really, given the way the food industry is set up, you would also have to have a crank's level of intensity to overcome all the obstacles put in the way of achieving that "perfect diet".

Maybe purely "ethical" pressure isn't enough though? It seems to me that government regulations are still too lax here. — inquisitive

Customer pull is more effective than government push. New Zealand is unusual though. For a start, most of the farming happens out in open fields still. As BitterCrank says, once you have production hidden away in big barns, its going to be a different story.

But to get back to the high level view, I think it is amazing just how much we have already changed the ecology of earth. When it comes to terrestrial mammalian ecosystems, it is now mostly a planet dominated by domestic animals.

Vaclav Smil has written great stuff on this like Harvesting the Biosphere.

So your OP was about the morality of what humans are doing to the planet. My reply is that we need to be careful about our definition of what is natural, and hence what might be objectively "good" about the way we are indeed transforming the planet.

And then to get anywhere on that question, we need to be aware of the real facts. So factory farming seems just the tiny tip of a much vaster iceberg of human-made nature.

If the domestication of the world's ecosystems is a moral dilemma, then vegans are ultimately just as caught up in that as meat eaters.

I may as well paste the relevant bits of an article I did on Smil a few year ago....

Smil says the human population has grown 20-fold in the last 1000 years and nearly quadruppled in just the past century. The numbers are still swelling by 230,000 every day.

So by his calculations, between 1900 and 2000 – allowing for the fact that humans have got on average somewhat taller and rather fatter – the global anthropomass has grown from 13 to 55 million tonnes of carbon (Mt C) by weight, or from 74Mt to 300Mt if you include the water and the body’s other mineral elements.

That is a lot of flesh to feed obviously. But Smil says bottom-line is what scientists call HANPP, or the human appropriation of net primary production – the amount of the planet’s total harvestable plant growth that this many humans now take as their share.

And Smil says it is about a quarter. That is, 25 per cent of the annual terrestrial phytomass production, the conversion of sunlight to plant material, winds up one way or another supporting the 55Mt of human carbon.

Hey yes, we rule!

The calculation is complicated of course. It includes not just the plant growth directly for food but also our take in fuel, fibre and timber.

And nearly half the HANPP figure represents the global loss of photosynthetic potential due to erosion, desertification, human created forest fires and the building over of good land – all the ways we have taken away from the Earth’s usual productivity.

Smil notes the world’s big cities now cover nearly 5 million square kilometers. In the last 2000 years, he says, with deforesting and other deprecations, humans have cut the total phytomass stocks from 1000 billion tonnes (Gt) of carbon to 550Gt.

But there is good news in the HANPP. At least farming efficiency has been keeping it somewhat under control.

Smil says it is estimated that a third of the Earth's ice-free surface has been taken over by human agriculture, some 12 per cent for crops and 22 per cent for pasture.

However because of the green revolution of the mid-20th Century – the switch to industrialised farming with diesel machinery, petroleum-based fertiliser, irrigation schemes and new crop strains – the figures have not blown out quite like they could have.

Over the past century, the global HANPP has only doubled from the 13 per cent supporting 1.7b people in 1900 to the 25 per cent supporting 7.2b people now.

And looking ahead, even with the global population expected to hit 9b by 2050, the human share of the Earth’s photosynthetic bounty may only hit 30 per cent.

Well, that is unless biofuels are needed as an alternative energy source and the resulting agricultural expansion balloons HANPP out to 44 per cent, as some studies suggest.

...

From a New Zealand perspective, this is where Smil’s book gets especially thought provoking. Because as well as the anthropomass and the phytomass, there is also the story of the zoomass – the drastic shift from wild to domestic animals in terms of the planet’s mammal population.

Smil calculates that the agricultural revolution of the past century has seen a seven-fold increase in plant production. In 1900, humans grew 400Mt of dry matter a year. Now it is 2.7Gt. But because humans like meat on their plate, half this phytomass goes to feed our farm animals.

We know the equation of course. It takes about 10kg of grain to produce 1kg of burger meat. And Smil says the consumption of meat in developed countries has shot up from just a few kilos per person per year to over 100kg.

In 1900, the world had 1.6b large domestic animals including 450m head of cattle and water buffalo. Today, that number is 4.3b, with 1.7b cattle and buffalo, and nearly 1b pigs.

In terms of biomass, the increase is from 35Mt of carbon to 120Mt. So about double the 55Mt of humans treading the planet in fact.

Wild zoomass has naturally gone skidding in the other direction, halving from 10mt to 5Mt during the 20th Century. With large grazing animals, the drop has been especially severe says Smil. Elephants have gone from 3Mt to 0.3Mt, the American bison is right off the radar at 0.04Mt.

Tot it up and the numbers are a little bonkers. The combined weight of humanity is today ten times the weight of everything else running around wild – all the world’s different mammal species from wombats to wildebeest, marmosets to rhinos.

And then our livestock, the tame four legged meals soon to end up on our dinner table, outweigh that true wildlife by 24 to 1 all over again. Talk about transforming a planet within living memory. The world is now mostly constituted of people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs.

As Smil says, the balance has gone from 0.1 per cent 10,000 years ago, to about 10 per cent at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97 per cent today. There may still be tens of thousands of wild mammal species sharing our Earth, but really they don’t add up to much of any consequence.

Again, just think about it. We harvest a quarter of the biosphere now. Ourselves and our four legged meals outweigh other terrestrial mammals by a combined 34 to 1.

And no, I’m still not sure I can quite believe Smil’s numbers either. Sometimes in life you are left just shaking your head.

What sets us apart in a way that would grant us more rights over an animal? Do we not have the same right to the land and resources as them? Do they not have the same right to pursue their own interests as we do? Theirs may stem from a more instinctive place, but I don't see how the capability of rational thought grants us more rights. — inquisitive

What sets us apart is that we can make the choices, they can't. We can have rights because we can accept responsibilities in fair exchange.

Now we can decide to be the guardians of nature rather than the exploiters. There is that choice. But unless you can make some argument about morality being an objective fact of nature, or some divinely-ordained reality, then moral relativism applies. Our discussion of how things go for animals is going to be framed within that particular understanding of rights and responsibilities.

It is incoherent to claim that animals just have objective rights unless you can specify how those rights would arise as part of objective reality. It is easy enough to support the subjective possibility that we might chose to grant or withhold those rights just because we humans have some wish. Moral relativism doesn't have an ontological problem. But moral absolutism certainly does.

Well, I suppose that depends entirely of one's definition of nature's true self and whether this is a successful version of it. One could argue that it is the least successful, for example if you propose that a successful expression would be organisms living in relative balance to one another as they do in many ecosystems. Humans have clearly upset any such balance. — inquisitive

But what if we are evolving towards a new balance?

I've posted a ton on this issue - how modern technological humanity is a natural expression of nature's desire to entropify a vast amount of fossil fuel tucked away under the ground - so I won't go into that here. You can search my posts for "thermodynamic imperative" if you like. :)

Yes, it is only us that can act like that, but does that not put a great deal of responsibility on us that we are simply dismissing? — inquisitive

I agree that we are dismissing our responsibilities. We do have scientific foresight. So we are wrong not to be applying it. Just hoping for the best isn't the most moral course of action at all.

So I'm a big critic of the state of play. I am simply making the argument here that for these discussions to be effective, they have to be really honest about the moral realities. As you seem to agree, veganism could be considered a dangerous distraction in its irreality.

On the other hand, maybe veganism is required to really make people confront necessary change with an open mind. When I see vegans having an effective impact on the big issues, then I would take the view that it is not so irrelevant.

I think you are being too optimistic here. How many people really care about farming humanely? The president of the US is in the process of reducing the number and size of natural parks right now. Clearly there are a great number of people that still don't care. — inquisitive

The pace of change here is pretty fast. I've seen trendlines on veganism which would suggest the whole world converting in a generation or so at the rate it has become middleclass trendy.

Likewise, farming practices are changing at a gallop where I live - New Zealand. Cow sheds are now being built with cow back-scratchers. The cows choose when to come in and get milked by robotic milkers. Stuff that would be unthinkable ten years ago is becoming the norm, such is the pressure to be "ethical" when selling to an increasingly informed middleclass public.

So sure, humanity is going to make choices about how humane to be depending on economic trade-offs. There is no perfect world. But that may still be what is morally right if you are a moral relativist seeking to arrive at a rationally balanced view.

You have to establish your moral framework before you can work out its consequences. Are you guilty of having moral wishes before you have established the framework that could legitimate them?

Do infants? I am not sure I understand why the absence of responsibility precludes one from having significant rights. — inquisitive

Infants grow into adults. And they can't become well-formed moral beings unless they are treated as beings which can learn to grow into their responsibilities within a moral order.

Then more generally we extend rights to those who are dependent on us - the disabled, the simple, etc. Perhaps this is sentimental, perhaps it is rational. That is a matter for debate. An argument can be had both ways. Societies that can afford it, certainly do choose to care on the whole.

The points on carbon footprint through food and the mistreatment of animals combine for a shattering conclusion: we are both abusing these animals and destroying their habitat – which they have exactly the same right to as we do – in the process. — inquisitive

So this is where philosophy would start (as any intelligent person accepts the reality of climate change and ecological footprints). Do animals have "exactly the same" rights here? I don't see a good argument that they do.

Taking into account the points above one could argue then that this inevitable demise of our species may well be the only good thing to come out of this catastrophe (it is just a shame that most others will go down with us). — inquisitive

And you will find many expressing that sentiment via numerous posts on this forum. However, the philosophy will lie in making some more rigorous moral argument.

Maybe we should let nature remove the worst parasite she has ever known? — inquisitive

Or Nature's most successful expression of its true self? So far at least?

The problem you have is that only humanity has any moral choice here. It is only us who can act according to some agreed insight.

Now it could be the case that we are unthinking enough - for perfectly natural reasons - that we can't in fact make a moral choice about the state of the planet we are creating. We are institutionally wedded to a particular evolved lifestyle and are just not that intelligently adaptive.

Or it could be the case we are weighing up a couple of big decisions on which way to go.

Largely we are comfortable with an anthropomorphised planet - one where all wildlife has been domesticated or put in a reserve. We can love our pets. We can farm our meat humanely. We can have a few wildlife parks to preserve a tamed version of the untamed past. And that is what would make the majority of the world's population happy enough. So a new morality could be built around fostering those objectives. And that has already been happening.

Then when it comes to planetary climate change and ecocide, we could either vote for a drastic end to growth and a shrinking of the world population, or gamble on our ingenuity to save us. We could place our bets on nuclear fusion, nanotech, geo-engineering - all the usual technology get-out clauses. And if those dreams come true, would that be immoral?

If we instead vote for voluntary suicide of some sort, then is the sum total of human misery going to be less? The unwinding of the global social system could be spectacularly nasty, as we see in any failed nation state. How moral is it to suggest just letting go of the steering wheel until the car crashes off the road? Only a planned wind-down seems moral. And then we have to make a judgement about that human capacity to entertain and execute any such plan.

So examine your presumptions here.

Can humans be unnatural in the way you argue? Even parasites are a universal aspect of nature.

Do animals have rights if they don't have responsibilities? Morality hinges on the actual possibility of making a reasoned choice.

Is it wrong that humans might anthropomorphise nature? Is that against nature, or simply the next stage of its development. Cows, dogs and chickens fit into the modern world better than bison, wolverines and dodos. That is just evolution at work - now that evolution has taken on a further cultural-level dimension in the humancentric era of the anthropocene.

I mean I agree that the world is going to shit in plenty of ways. We can see a host of challenges converging that will make 2030 to 2050 a close run thing for civilisation.

But that is why philosophical clarity is paramount. We have to know what to actually worry about as our priorities. Cruelty to farm animals might be way down that moral list, for example.

Yes, I would agree that farming ought to be as kind as possible - given we've made these animals our moral dependents. That is the good middleclass view. But then how fast is artificial meat developing as the alternative? Maybe the real dilemma is what to do about all the soon to be struggling ranchers - the human cost of what could be a technologically-produced social shift. So in that view, we can shelve a problem soon to become a historic one so as to focus on the next issue which is quite liable to follow in its wake.

And again, letting civilisation collapse will surely only ensure great animal suffering, vast ecological damage. The dwindling band of survivors are not going to have many compunctions about exactly how they survive.

What we call the present--Isn't it really just the recent past and immediate future? No point trying to quantify its duration, as if it were a real distinct division into actual different periods.. — Michael Ossipoff

If you take the question to be about the maximum rate of change, then it makes sense.

So the present is commonly understood as the extent of the moment between the past and future. It is the instant when everything actually "exists" in some non-changed fashion. Things are momentarily fixed, suspended between a past that is some evolving history that is the causes of the events happening in the present, and the future where there are further possible changes, but those have yet to be actualised.

The present is thus our measure of actualisation or realisation. And it is imagined as being rather statically existent. There is a duration in which the actual is what is, and nothing else is changing. Then this actuality gets swept out of the present and into history once it itself becomes a cause of further actualities, the cause of further possibilities becoming realised.

So the question is really about how long does actuality endure in that present tense gap between first becoming stably real as an effect, a crystalisation of what had been a future possibility, and then stably real as itself a cause, or the now historic reason for further actualities.

Hierarchy theorist Stan Salthe dubs this the "cogent moment". Henri Bergson had a similar idea.

If the world is understood in terms of a hierarchy of processes, then they all will have their own characteristic integration times. Time for the Cosmos is not some Newtonian dimension. It is an emergent feature of being a process as every process will have a rate at which it moves from being just starting to form a settled state - reaching some sort of cogent equilibrium which defines it as having "happened" - and then being in fact settled enough to become the departure point, the cause, for further acts of integration or equilibration.

So this view of time sees it not as a spatial line to be divided in two - past and future - with the present being some instant or zero-d point marking a separation. Instead, time is an emergent product of how long it takes causes to become effects that are then able to be causes. For every kind of process, there is going to be a characteristic duration when it comes to how long it takes for integration or equilibration to occur across the span of the activity in question.

We can appreciate this in speeded up film of landscapes in which clouds or glaciers now look to flow like rivers. What seemed like static objects - changing too slowly to make a difference to our impatient eye - now turn into fluid processes. They looked like chunks of history. Now we see them as things very much still in the middle of their actualisation. They will be history only after they have passed, either massing and dropping their rain, or melting and leaving behind great trenches etched in the countryside.

So the present is our intuitive account of the fact that causes must be separated from their effects, and the effects then separated from what they might then cause. There is some kind of causal turnaround time or duration - a momentary suspension of change - that is going to be a physical characteristic of every real world process. Thus there is some rate of change, some further "time frame" or cogent moment, that gets associated with every kind of natural system.

At the level of fundamental physics, this turns out to be the Planckscale limit. Time gets "grainy" at around 10^-44 seconds. The Planck distance is 10^-35m. So the Planck time represents the maximum action that can be packed into such a tiny space - the single beat of a wavelength. That primal act of integrated change - a single oscillation - then also defines the maximum possible energy density, as the shortest wavelength is the highest frequency, and the highest frequency is the hottest possible radiation.

So the shortest time, the smallest space, and the most energetic event, all define each other in a neat little package. Actuality is based on the rate at which a thermal event can come together and count as a "first happening" - a concrete Big Bang act of starting to cool and expand enough to stand as a first moment in a cosmic thermal history.

Then psychological time for us humans is all about neural integration speed. It takes time for nerve signals to move about. The maximum conduction speed in a well-insulated nerve, like the ones connecting your foot to your brain is about 240 mph. But inside the brain, speeds can slow to a 20 mph crawl. To form the kind of whole brain integrated states needed by attentional awareness involves developing a collective state - a "resonance" - that can take up to half a second because of all the spread-out activity to become fully synchronised.

So there is a characteristic duration for the time it takes for causes to become the effects that are then themselves causes. Input takes time to process and become the outputs that drive further behaviour. Which is why I mention also the importance of bridging this processing gap by anticipation. The brain shortcuts itself as much as it can by creating a running expectation of the future. It produces an output before the input so that it can just very quickly ignore the arriving information - treat it as "already seen". It is only the bit that is surprising that then takes that further split second to register and get your head around.

But between this physical Planckscale integration time and this neural human information processing time are a whole host of other characteristic timescales for the processes of nature.

Geology has its own extremely long "present tense". Stresses and strains can slowly build for decades or centuries before suddenly relaxing in abrupt events like earthquakes or volcanoes.

Here is a good visual chart of the integration time issue in biology - http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(16)30208-2.pdf?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867416302082%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

The philosophy of time is still very much hung up on the old Newtonian model, where time is some global spatialised dimension, and St Augustine's psychological model of time, where it is now somehow all a subjectively-projected illusion.

There is some truth in both these views. The brain does have to construct duration. The Cosmos does have a characteristic global rate in terms of its thermal relaxation - the one described by c as a Planck constant.

But a process view explains time in a more general fashion by relating it to the causal structure of events. Every system has some characteristic rate of change. There is a cogent moment graininess or scale created by the fact that not everything can be integrated all at once. It requires "time" to go from being caused to being a cause. There is a real transition involved. And that happens within what we normally regard as the frozen instant when things are instead finally just "actual". That is, brutely existent and lacking change, not being in fact a transition from being caused to being a cause in terms of our multi-scale accounts of causal flows.

I didn't stress it, but I include the failure of the body in the problem of death. We don't usually just drop dead. Things fall apart first. The vitality we took for granted seeps away. — ff0

I agree. Getting old, it is decrepitude and its many indignities that are the live issue. Death becomes a solution more than a threat.

But then unnecessary longevity is such a recent thing too. A relatively new topic for the philosophisers. At least I've not yet noticed any modern Heidegger making a thing of humans being the only animals conscious of their own imminent gerontocracy.

Decay lacks the profundity, the finality, which we are so quick to grant death.

Some of life's beauty lies in the death of all things. — ff0

The biological perspective is my thing. So I really like the idea that life is like riding a bicycle, or the tilt of the sprinter.

We hang together on the edge of falling apart by flinging ourselves constantly forward. The beauty of living lies in this constant mastery over a sustaining instability. We stay in motion to keep upright. Then eventually we slow and it all falls apart.

So there is a self-making pattern. Individuals come and go, but the pattern always renews. And it is the possibility of the material instability that is the basis for the possibility of the formal control. Life is falling apart given a sustaining direction for a while.

But we might also speak of attaining a kind of emotional equilibrium, of making peace with death or 'evil,' etc. Of living and dying well. — ff0

I'm thinking of those as applied philosophy. So the answers are not so much to be found as invented. And a science - like positive psychology - is the place to be watching the technology coming through.

So the practical issue is that religious teachings and philosophical wisdom did try to create good life advice. But it was advice for a different world, a different time. A lot of it may have been particular to life as most people might have lived it 2000 years ago. Some deep principles may still apply. But also, a scientific, evidence-backed and conjectural approach, might be the better way to philosophise about "living well" today.

So the modern way of thinking recognises that the human project is subject to nature's constraints. We are evolved and that shapes our ideas about any personal or collective purpose. It is foolish now to believe that we are either radically free of this biological conditioning, or that alternatively, we are conditioned by some divine telos.

Of course, both those comments will be immediately disputed. But that's my position here. Philosophy is wasting its time - in terms of deliverables - if it is still seeking answers on the moral, the aesthetic, the human, in terms that either deny a biological history or claim a divine basis. So what philosophy would focus on productively is how to make sense of the freedoms we discover, given a history of natural constraints.

We've still got lots of choices. And we are so busy doing stuff, changing things, that we need to get scientific about the ultimate goals we might be wanting to achieve. We need to investigate our psychology well enough to have a credible story about what actually makes us happy, allows us to flourish, leads us towards the nirvana of self-actualisation - if that is indeed all the things we would freely choose for ourselves in the long run.

In short, between the moral absolutism and the moral relativism that is the polar dichotomy characterising most people's understanding of the philosophical choices, I am arguing for the moral pragmatism which takes the middle course of recognising reality to be historically conditioned, yet also semiotically open-ended. There is a practical balance of opposing tensions waiting to be struck. And the scientific method is what you apply once you start to zero in on a fully account of anything.

But perhaps you neglect the position of the mortal individual with a particular history. You mention the individual pole in passing, but don't have much to say about it, which is fine. But what of the individual who comes to term with his smallness on the world stage? With the impotence of his notion of the way the world ought to be? Born into a kind of chaos, he will die in it. Also it seems fair to expect the species itself to go extinct. — ff0

Is mortality more something you worry about when you are old or when you are young? Life seems to provide its own perspective on these things.

On their deathbed, most people regret not spending more quality time with family, friends and passions. A life devoted to striving and achievement seems unbalanced in retrospect. The cultivation of the individuated self - the idea of making one big difference to society rather than a lot of small differences for those closest at hand - seems overblown at the far end of life. For quite natural reasons. Just as it seems the most important thing of all back at the start of adult life.

So should the futility of life, the inevitability of death, be the final philosophy of "a good life"? The evidence of living suggests that what looms large at the beginning becomes naturally more inconsequential towards the end.

In short, we operate within a sort of finitude and absurdity, granting these assumptions. We are future-oriented beings with long-term projects and social hopes. Yet projecting far enough ahead reveals a kind of futility. This is a fascinating situation. — ff0

I've got to agree as I've felt it too. And I think finding it "fascinating" speaks to a suitably balanced assessment.

Life is both futile and worthwhile, both absurd and meaningful. And this isn't paradoxical, just an expression of the range of possible philosophical reactions we have learnt to manifest. We feel the full space of the possible - in a way that a lack of philosophy would render inarticulate.

And that in itself is both fascinating and unsettling.

So the only problem with philosophy is that once you have habituated its dialectical tendencies, they infect everything you could think about. Once you create range, you always then have the dilemma of locating yourself at some definite point on the spectrum you've just made.

The alternative to that is to float above your own spectrum of possibilities in some detached and free-floating manner. Which is where "you" start becoming a highly abstract kind of creature even to "yourself".

Do I care? Do I not care? At every moment I could just as easily make a different choice on that.

Thank goodness life provides its social scripts that "one" can always grab hold of, so as to decide the matter for the passing moment, eh? Ah, the existentialism of being an existentialist. ;)

Ufology seems just so ... 1990s. Contemporary conspiracy theory is focused on the Deep State or Hollywood's bearding phenomenon.

It also seems foundational to clarify the goal. — ff0

Of course. And the general goal of philosophy or critical thinking would be something along the lines of "arriving at the truth of reality". But even that could be disputed by those who claim it to be akin to an exercise in poetry or whatever.

Yet also, I was talking about productive agreement as being the general social goal. And society seems an exercise in creativity.

A society's goals are founded in nature - the demands of evolutionary fitness and thermodynamical imperative. Or at least those are nature's constraints on our being. They set the general limits, and within that scope, we are free to play. We can set our own goals from there on. Nature is in agreement with whatever we choose to do from the point where it thinks that any differences don't make a difference.

And so the goal of the human project is reasonably open-ended and emergent within those physical limits. Our job is make sense of the freedoms we find. Or at least that is one possible philosophical view of the foundational goals of a social creature.

But even outright war can inspire innovation. So there's that. — ff0

Yep. It is standard social science to point out that a flourishing social system depends on both competition and co-operation. So striving leads to creative advance.

But also, it is a balance. The implicit question here is whether a good war creates more than it destructs in terms of long-run social and intellectual capital?

So it is not a paradox that conflict is productive. It is the balance of strife to harmony that gets judged in the long-run as both are forms of productivity. Stability must be tempered by plasticity, etc. It's all part of nature's dialectic.

What is ideological about causation? About the laws of thermodynamics? What is ideological about "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." or Darwin's finches? or the first through fifth extinctions, now heading into the sixth? or the San Andreas or Madrid fault? or is this squirrel a hybrid or a separate species? Or climate change? What are the genes that contribute to invincible stupidity? — Bitter Crank

What could be more ideological than claiming that the facts of the world are not subject to ideology?

Such absoluteness is the very hallmark of the ideal.

Seems like total agreement has no need for creative compromise. — ff0

Total agreement rules out any scope for differences of opinion, hence freedom and creativity. So that is why I would stress productive agreement - the kind of agreement that pragmatist philosophy would have in mind.

The foundation of productive agreement would be agreeing about what kind of differences don't in fact matter. And that approach to discovering truth is the opposite of seeking agreement based on starting definitionally with the essence of things - the differences that make a difference.

So I am advocating an emergent or apophatic approach to arriving at agreement. As we agree about what doesn't change things, then what does change things will emerge into view with any luck.

What may be usefully found in a philosophy text, though... — ff0

Hah. Philosophy in a nutshell - the art of productive disagreement. Everything said becomes the departure point of its own possible contradictions. :)

Whereas living a life as a social creature is mostly about productive agreements....

So, how are those countries pulling these enviable things off, of spending large sums of money on social welfare programs and at the same time maintaining their high HDI and low Gini coefficients? — Posty McPostface

If you invest in your people, then you will prosper as a nation. Seems obvious. And universal health care and education are the most basic of those investments.

As a nation, your problem then is the competition. So if you are taking the long term view of your social capital - investing in it - and your competition is simply happy to strip-mine its social capital, then your "economic system" can seem ... uncompetitive.

As a welfare nation, you would have to find ways to avoid becoming too globalised - too exposed to those competitive forces happy to indulge in a race to the sweatshop bottom. And also seek to take advantage of your greater social capital by moving upstream in terms of the products and services you then export.

So rather than selling junk goods, the Danes or Germans are particularly good at making premium stuff.

An alternative is to be a historically wealthy country like the UK or France. Assets acquired in colonial times keep the wheels greased.

My question, I suppose, was more to do with where we find ourselves when the philosophy runs out. — Oliver Purvis

Would it make a difference if philosophy were simply renamed "critical thinking"? Folk may make the mistake of wanting answers when what it mostly teaches is a structure of good thought habits. By applying thinking to really extreme problems, dealing with everyday problems ought to be made easier.

More generally, if philosophy is functioning well, it ought to be the engine room of culture. So we might study it to learn its skills. And then as a social institution doing a job, it should be generating the wider view that defines the space of possibilities for society. It should articulate the alternatives rather than aim to solve the problems as such.

You seem to suggest that philosophy ought to be more like science - an evolving story of ever better theories. While philosophy ought to keep "improving", it is a more consciously historic exercise for good reason. Bad ideas and wrong turns are worth keeping alive in the institutional memory if the focus is on learning critical thinking skills and enlarging the space of the possible for cultural-level thought.

Then on the question of how philosophy relates to everyday living, I don't think it is that great as either some general life pursuit or self-help manual.

If you have some kind of deep curiosity about existence, then you are going to wind up wanting to scratch that itch. But also, there is a consequence. The cost of a critical thinking mindset is that living a life can become quite an abstract exercise. It can divert you away from actually living that life in a usefully balanced fashion. It can become an excuse not to properly engage. So if "living a good life" is the primary goal, then positive psychology or something more applied - even religion - is a better thing to invest your effort in.

Philosophy can take you out of yourself, propel you into the absolutely abstract. But I wouldn't rely on it to bring you back to yourself. We are social creatures, formed by our cultural actions. So we only find ourselves through the negotiations of actually living a life, not by chancing upon the right recipe in some philosophy text.

So short answer is that philosophy is absolutely central to cultural development. It was the institutionalised habit of critical thought that created the space of possibilities which then underwrote 2500 years of rapid social evolution.

And if you have a curiosity about existence bordering on the obsessive, then philosophy is the base camp for that expedition into the abstract.

But if you are troubled by life, then doing philosophy is not itself an answer. It could end up more isolating than helpful, unless it is balanced by some social and cultural actions as a result. The question is does it return you to the world in some useful fashion? If it is being used as a refuge from the world, then it is not in fact functioning very usefully.

It's weird, I experience a thudding sound, but I know it's not coming from my ears. — Marchesk

Do we experience any sounds coming from our ears? Our ears are a stereo system that help place sounds appropriately in space. So we hear sounds coming from the place they are likely being made.

With a gif, we are imagining the thudding sound. And the kinesthetic vibration in this case. So the stereo locatiing information is missing. But if you start focusing on the question of "where is the sound coming from", doesn't it start to come from the gif?

Maybe turn your head and look at the gif out of the corner of your eye. Doesn't it start to seem located?

In other words, what is the smallest amount of present time that can exist in order to differentiate the past and future? — JohnLocke

Time has a physical limit in that nothing could happen in less than the Planck time - 10^-44 seconds.

But then even physically to differentiate past and future gets complicated. You would have to start factoring in the time it takes light to travel and so bring news of a difference. It takes about 8 minutes for the light (and gravity) of the sun to affect the earth. So if the sun went supernova, our present wouldn't change until 8 minutes later.

Then if you are talking about psychological time, it takes about half a second to consciously integrate a change and so update our running image of "the present".

We don't really notice that processing lag because we can respond to quite complex events in a faster habitual fashion within a fifth of a second. And what smooths out our experience of "the present" even more is that we build an anticipatory sensory expectation ahead of every coming moment. So half a second out, we are already forming a prediction of what "the present" should feel like.

For instance, we know we are about to turn our head to look towards something. So already we are subtracting away the motion to our view that we are about to cause - it feels like we are turning rather than that the world is spinning. And we have an expectation of the general scene we should discover due to our familiarity through memory.

So the psychological present moment is not some instant snapshot deal but a complex neural construction that starts by us "peering into the future" and then "working out a settled interpretation of what just happened". It spreads itself out over at least a second and then "the present" is however it washed up according to our memory.

The smallest temporal discrimination we can make is much finer grain - down to 20ths of a second for sharp onset/offset stimuli where we are focused and know what to expect. Attention can do "post-processing" to identify a particular brief signal, but at the expense of then losing sight of whatever else was going on in that half second or so "frame".

A good example of just how grainy our time perception actually is, and how much it is dependent on interpretation or expectation, is the cutaneous rabbit experiment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaneous_rabbit_illusion

Hah. Your OP is flawed in taking it as intuitively obvious that we would want to be spacefaring. That’s hippie thinking. But it’s funny to see the same old dickheads still police physics forum. Russ and Evo are just deeply unhappy people. Intellectual wannabes. Laugh and move on.

I’m questioning your apparent assumption that it would be an attractive enough proposition for people to pay their way there. Even if commercialisation lowered the price, why would anyone choose to go there as a place to live?

Just list the advantages you are imagining. What are they?

Yeah, and if everything comes down to a matter of what provides the most amount of utility to me, we would all be heroin addicts, yeah? — Posty McPostface

I have no interest in being a heroin addict. But if I had to choose that or being shipped out to a Mars colony for life, then heroin does seem the rosier option.

I think you’ve fallen for some romantic notion about space travel - that it somehow represents humanity’s best side. But exploration is just the precursor to exploitation. It isn’t noble even if it makes sense to big up those willing to take a risk on behalf of the masses.

[edit: On second thoughts I’d rather be on Mars than be a heroin addict. The idea of being slave to an addiction that leaves you befuddled in fact has less than zero appeal. Your claim that heroin has any utility, except as pain relief, doesn’t fly with me personally.]

Governments represent national interests. Commerce cashes in on individual desires. The real question is why the heck would anyone want to live on the Moon, or Mars, or anywhere remote and inhospitable? Is there either some national interest or some individual desire?

The moon race was a result of military self interest and the assertion of national dominance. The US had every reason to plant its flag in the sea of tranquility. But as soon as it had done that, the value of the gesture was over. The US didn’t need a single further Apollo mission. Rocketry had been perfected to the point needed to rain nuclear warheads down on any point of the planet. Colonising the Moon, or heading on to Mars, was a crazy waste of money from the point of view of furthering any national interest. And still is.

Then private space travel may be a rich person’s thrill ride. But rich people aren’t normally explorers or hermits. They would want to get home to their luxuries after a few weeks. You’d have to be an oddball to want to live on another planet. It’d be the same as living in the middle of a desert or top of a mountain or down in Antarctica. All those are fun to visit. But hardly desirable residences. The commercial real estate opportunities of the Moon or Mars would be even less. So unless it was all about mining, what could pay for it as more than a token kind of business?

So I can add to my apokrisis dictionary: what's a vague-crisp distinction when it's at home? And what's the epistemic cut? — fdrake

Vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to obtain. It is ultimate ambiguity in that it is neither a something nor nothing. It is a state of radical indeterminism. The crisp would then be its matching complementary opposite. It would be the absolute determinate, the definite and certain. The PNC would be in full effect.

Imagine being in a boat on a lake drifting in a fog. Whether you were moving somewhere or going nowhere would be indeterminable. There just wouldn’t be a definite answer either way. But then you suddenly bump the shore. Now you definitely know. Well, either it is now definitely the case you drifted in the shore’s direction or the shore moved and managed to bump into you.

The epistemic cut is Howard Pattee’s term for the semiotic modelling relation that is the basis of life and mind. He was drawing on von Neuman’s theory of self reproducing automata to talk about the necessary division between a dynamical system and its symbolically-encoded self-description.

So it is about the separation between observer and observables, laws and initial conditions, software and hardware, genes and metabolism, etc. Or in general, our metaphysical distinction between rate dependent dynamics and rate independent information.

See - https://www.informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html and
http://www.academia.edu/863864/The_physics_of_symbols_and_the_evolution_of_semiotic_controls

For instance, Pattee captures the strangely hybrid metaphysics of the statistical view rather nicely....

There has always been an apparent paradox between the concept of universal physical laws and semiotic controls. Physical laws describe the dynamics of inexorable events, or as Wigner
expresses it, physical explanations give us the impression that events ". . . could not be otherwise." By contrast, the concepts of information and control give us the impression that events could be otherwise, and the well-known Shannon measure of information is just the logarithm of the number of other ways.

One root of this paradox is the fact that the formulation of physical laws depends fundamentally on the concepts of energy, time, and rates of change, whereas information measures and the syntax of formal languages and semiotic controls are independent of energy, time, and rates of change. A second root of the paradox is that fundamental physical laws, as they are described mathematically, are deterministic and time-symmetric (reversible), whereas informational concepts like detection, observation, measurement, and control are described as statistical and irreversible.

Perhaps the deepest root of the problem, however, is the conceptual incompatibility of the concepts of determinism and choice, a paradox that has existed since the earliest philosophers. The modern attempts in physics to live with this paradox require introducing statistical concepts that allow alternatives into the framework of physical laws by reinterpreting the essential distinction between the laws themselves that describe all possible alternatives and the initial conditions that determine one particular case. Statistical physics accepts the inexorability of the laws, but assumes that virtual alternatives can exist in the microscopic initial conditions.

One measure of the alternatives is the entropy. Thus, we create imaginary statistical ensembles of systems which all follow the same dynamical laws, but that have different sets of initial conditions. These virtual microscopic states are restricted only by statistical postulates and their consistency with macroscopic state variables.

A modification of this classical view by Born points out that initial conditions of even one particle can never be measured with formal precision, and therefore even the classical laws of motion can predict only probability distributions for trajectories. Only when a new measurement is made can this distribution be altered.

The fact remains, however, that all our formal semiotic descriptions and computations, whether we interpret them as probabilistic, statistical, or fuzzy, are in practice assumed to be manipulated by crisp, strictly deterministic rules, even though physical laws require the execution of semiotic rules to be stochastic events.

The physics of symbols and the evolution of semiotic controls - 1996

Here is a more recent quote where Pattee makes a full-fledged connection to Peircean semiotics...

A description requires a symbol system or a language. Functionally, description and construction correspond to the biologists’ distinction between the genotype and phenotype. My biosemiotic view is that self-replication is also the origin of semiosis.

I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image.

This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.

I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world.

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/

It still has to start off homogenous and thermalised at the small scale of the initial conditions. If it was patchy at the start, it couldn’t be now nearly flat. The CMB would not look homogenous and isotropic.

The cosmological principle states that each constant-time hypersurface of the universe ('this spacetime') is homogeneous and isotropic at the large scale. — andrewk

Aren't you neglecting that the matter density must be uniform? You have to count the contents too. Spacetime won't be flat unless the matter is presumed to be evenly spread.

.The Wiki article on the cosmo principle does note that the sun is different from the earth, so that the cosmo principle doesn't apply at such small scales. — fishfry

And remember that Linde's eternal inflation would presume that each bubble universe would start off at a planckscale energy density and so the initial state would be a relativistic gas, a quark-gluon hot soup. So the material content would be at thermal equilibrium. The only fluctuations - the seed forming inhomogeneities that result in the later gravitational/material structure - would be thermal quantum ones.

So both protons and electrons, stars and galaxies, are local inhomogeneities that pop out way after any such structure has been washed clean by an initial thermal equilbration.

Of course that then is a constraint on the odds of the history of a universe actually repeating "particle for particle". However no one wants to talk about the real combinatorial issues here. :)

Sorry fdrake, but I don't get where this is going. Your responses are vague as if you are only intent on creating some endless descent into technicalities with no finishing line. If you don't signal what you agree with, then I'm just guessing at where any useful disagreement lies.

Do you want to have a go at summing up what you think has been revealed to be essentially wrong about my general metaphysical approach here? What would be the core disagreement in terms of orientation?

I explained for instance that a degree of freedom is a placeholder for the brute claim to be able to measure "actions with directions". You replied, hurrah, you were right that it is a placeholder. But then didn't comment at all on the kind of placeholder I said it was.

Then again, I specified that we find various notions of "actions with directions" being counted. Degrees of freedoms can be decomposed into various more qualitative or contextual notions, like "work", "disorder", "uncertainty". Once more, no comment whether you either agree or disagree.

Nor will you tie anything back to my original reply to the OP - my mention of Salthe/Ulanowicz's lifecycle analysis and its applicability to political theory. A metric like ascendency tries to pick up on something even more subtle than the usual dissipative structure story.

Degrees of freedom in this context are the reserve, the overhead, that a living system needs to keep in reserve so as to be able to adapt to perturbation. An organism (or society) can't afford to spend all its entropic "income" on here and now maximal growth. It wants a reserve of fat, a reserve of degrees of freedom, to deal with unexpected challenges.

My point is that "degrees of freedom" is a useful generic term because it is dichotomous to "constraints", it signals "whatever is definitely countable in terms of some parameterised theory", and it is undefined enough to encompass an ever branching family of thermodynamically related thought - as in capturing this notion of a reserve of adaptive capacity. So I don't use terminology in some unthinking handwaving fashion, as has been your repeated accusation. There is a proper metaphysical structure that organises my ideas. And it is a way of looking at the issues which I learnt firsthand from folk like Salthe and Ulanowicz.

So again, is there anything more here than you want me to break a still-developing metaphysics of a pansemiotic Cosmos down into everyday measures you can employ to do a better job of modelling some ecosystem with?

Sum it up. What do you agree with and what is any core disagreement or vital question that remains to be tackled?

Is that a zizek sweater from 2006? — csalisbury

Ed Gein was (literally) a bricoleur — csalisbury

Glad to see you around again. And in inspired form. Zing!

(Empiricism and Subjectivity); I think this is exactly the model that ought to be adopted. — StreetlightX

Why adopt the sterile old approach where one side of a dialectical relation must be “wrong” so the other can be “rightl?

Functional systems - as in political, economic, social, ecological - are the product of their complementary tensions. Both defining aspects of their dynamics are “right” - at least to the degree that they are together in a functional balance.

So with a social system, that is why both localised or bottom up competition is to be encouraged as much as global top down cooperation. Both need to be vigourous actions even if also then in some mutually beneficial balance.

You lapse into an us vs them rhetorical mode without even thinking. So that leaves you unable to put something like individualism - localised competitive striving - in its appropriate context. One minute you are against neoliberal selfishness, the next pro PC pluralism. Hence your political position ends up radically confused.

So yeah, it would be a problem if the institutional level of social order were somehow taken as the positive, the social or personal as the negative. But then the reversal of this prioritisation is just as bad.

The trick is to see the positive aspect in both the global constraints, the social instinct towards cooperativity, and the local degrees of freedom, the social instinct that celebrates individuality, spontaneity and general striving.

Well, I say trick. It could also be said to be the bleeding obvious.

I wanted you to be technically precise with your use of terms - good that you did this. — fdrake

Great that you think that. But again, my goal is to be technically precise at the most general metaphysical or qualitative level. If you don't yet accept the validity of that, then I don't care. However, just as you insist I cash out my generality in terms of your particular paradigmatic specificity, I only wish you would make an effort to ground your demand for specificity in some more considered ontic basis in fair exchange.

Why do I have to come all the way over to you? Why do you get to be the judge of "what's good enough" here? And don't pretend that this isn't the rhetorical trap you have sought to establish in this thread.

I'm familiar with all those kinds of tricks, so if you truly want a deeper level of mutual engagement, you might want to reconsider. I'm not sure that you actually have that much to offer me in return. But we will see if you can eventually pull some metaphysical insights out of the bag with a high surprisal.

Which possibilities are closed? — fdrake

The possibility of something else having happened. The existence of the oak is a constraint on the existence of other trees, shrubs, weeds, that might have been the case without its shade. Without the oak, those other entropifiers were possible.

In what sense was that a mysterious statement? I'd just said "Canopy succession is an example. Once a mighty oak has grown to fill a gap, it shades out the competition."

So excuse me for being baffled at your professed bafflements in this discussion. I mean, really?

What degrees of freedom does this create? — fdrake

Again, you claim that I'm hand-waving and opaque, but just read the damn words and understand them in a normal fashion.

"The mighty oak then itself becomes a stable context for a host of smaller stable niches. The crumbs off its feeding table are a rain of degrees of freedom that can be spent by the fleas that live on the fleas."

So the oak becomes the dominant organism. And as such, it itself can be host to an ecology of species dependent on its existence. Like squirrels and jackdaws that depend on its falling acorns. Or the various specialists pests, and their own specialist parasites, that depend on the sap or tissue. Like all the leaf litter organisms that are adapted to whatever is particular to an annual rain of oak leaves.

This is literally ecology 101. The oak trophic network is the primary school level example. You can pick away at its legitimacy with your pedantry all you like, but pay attention to the context here. This is a forum where even primary school science is a stretch for many. I'm involved in enough academic-strength discussion boards to satisfy any urge for a highly technical discussion. But the prime reason for sticking around here is to practice breaking down some really difficult ideas to the level of easy popularisation.

It's fun, it's professionally useful, I enjoy it. I agree that mostly it fails. But again that seems more a function of context. PF is just that kind of place where there is an irrational hostility to any actual attempt to "tell it right".

So bear in mind that I use the most simplified descriptions to get across some of the most subtle known ideas. This is not an accident or a sign of stupidity. And an expectation of failure is built in. This is just an anonymous sandbox of no account. My posts don't actually have to pass peer review. I don't have to worry about getting every tiny fact right because there are thousands ready to pounce on faint errors of emphasis as I do in my everyday working life.

So it is fine that you want that more technical discussion. But the details of your concerns don't particularly light my fire. If you are talking about ecologies as dissipative structures, then I'm interested. If you are talking about something else, like measuring species diversity, or the difficulties of actually measuring exergy/entropy flows in ecosystems, then I really couldn't care less.

For me. diversity just falls out of a higher level understanding of statistical attractors - https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3507

While actually measuring network flows is a vain dream from a metaphysical viewpoint. Of course, we might well achieve pragmatic approximations - enough for some ecological scientist to file an environmental report that ticks the legal requirement on some planning consent. But my interest is in the metaphysical arguments over why ecology is one of the "dismal sciences" - not as dismal as economics or political science, but plagued by the same inflated claims of mathematical exactness.

What degrees of freedom does this create? How does it create rather than destroy them? How do those degrees of freedom get turned into degrees of freedom for certain organisms? Which organisms? What properties do those recipient organisms have? How do the 'degrees of freedom' in the 'crumbs' relate to the 'smaller stable niches', in what manner do they 'rain'? In what manner are they 'spent'? How does one set of degrees of freedom in the canopy become externalised as a potential for the ecosystem by its deconstruction and then re-internalised in terms of a flow diversification? — fdrake

OK. Degrees of freedom is a tricky concept as it just is abstract and ambiguous. However I did try to define it metaphysically for you. As usual, you just ignore my explanations and plough on.

But anyway, the standard mechanical definition is that it is the number of independent parameters that define a (mechanical) configuration. So it is a count of the number of possibilities for an action in a direction. A zero-d particle in 3-space obviously has its three orthogonal or independent translational degrees of freedom, and three rotational ones. There are six directions of symmetry that could be considered energetically broken. The state of the particle can be completely specified by a constraining measurement that places it to a position in this coordinate system.

So how do degrees of freedom relate to Shannon or Gibbs entropy, let alone exergy or non-equilibrium structure? The mechanical view just treats them as absolute boundary conditions. They are the fixed furniture of any further play of energetics or probabilities. The parameters may as well be the work of the hand of God from the mechanical point of view.

My approach, following from Peirce, systems science, holism, organicism and other -isms stressing the four causes/immanently self-organising view, seeks to make better metaphysical sense of the situation.

So I say degrees of freedom are emergent from the development of global constraints. And to allow that, you need the further ontic category or distinction of the vague~crisp. In the beginning, there is Peircean vagueness, firstness or indeterminism. Then ontic structure emerges as a way to dissipate ... vagueness. (So beyond the mechanical notion of entropy dissipation, I am edging towards an organic model of vagueness dissipation - ie: pansemiosis, a way off the chart speculative venture of course. :) )

Anyway, when I talk about degrees of freedom, my own interests are always at the back of my mind. I am having to balance the everyday mechanical usage with the more liberal organic sense that I also want to convey. I agree this is likely confusing. But hey, its only the PF sandbox. No-one else takes actual metaphysics seriously.

So organically, a degree of freedom is an action with a direction that has to emerge for some holistic or contextual good reason in the physical universe. So why these basic translational and rotational freedoms? Well Noether's theorem and relativity principles account for why actions in these two directions can never be constrained away even in a spatiotemporal system that represents a state of maximal constraint. They can't be parameterised out of existence. Quantum uncertainty has sure rammed that message home now.

So an ontology of constraints - like for instance the many "flow network" approaches of loop quantum gravity - says that constraints encounter their own limits. Freedoms (like the Newtonian inertias) are irreducible because contraints can make reality only so simple - or only so mechanically and atomistically determined. This is in fact a theorem of network theory. All more complicated networks can be reduced to a 3-connection, but no simpler.

So in the background of my organic metaphysics is this critical fact. Reality hovers just above nothingness with an irreducible 3D structure that represents the point where constraints can achieve no further constraint and so absolute freedoms then emerge. This is nature's most general principle. Yes, we might then cash it out with all kinds of more specific "entropy" models. But forgive me if I have little interest in the many piffling applications. My eyes are focused on the deep metaphysical generality. Why settle for anything less?

Now back to your tedious demand that I explain ecology 101 trophic networks with sufficient technical precision to be the exact kind of description that you would choose to use - one that would pass peer review in your line of work.

Well, again I'm thinking fuck that. I really don't care beyond the possibility that the discussion might be another little window into my bigger picture. I last talked with Ulanowicz probably 15 years ago. So it was interesting to read his recent papers and see how much he has continued on post-retirement in a rather Peircean vein like the rest of that particular crew. (Pattee was the funny one. He got grumpy and went silent for a number of years, despite being the sharpest blade. Then came back blazing as a born-again biosemiotician. The boss once more.)

Anyhow, fill in the blanks yourself. When I talk of a rain of degrees of freedom, as I clarified previously, I'm talking of the exergy that other entropy degraders can learn how to mine in all the material that the oak so heedlessly discards or can afford to be diverted.

The oak needs to produce sap for its own reasons. That highly exergetic matter - a concentrated goodness - then can act as a steep entropy gradient for any critters nimble enough to colonise it. Likewise, the oak produces many more acorns than required to replicate, it drops its leaves every years, it sheds the occasional limb due to inevitable accidents. It rains various forms of concentrated goodness on the fauna and flora below.

Is exergy a degree of freedom? Is entropy a degree of freedom? Is information a degree of freedom?

Surely by now you can work out that a degree of freedom is just the claim to be able to measure an action with a direction that is of some theoretical interest. The generality is the metaphysical claim to be able to count "something" that is a definite and atomistic action with a direction in terms of some measurement context. We then have a variety of such contexts that seem to have enough of your "validity" to be grouped under notions like "work", or "disorder", or "uncertainty".

So "degree of freedom" is a placeholder for all atomistic measurements. I employ it to point to the very fact that this epistemic claim is being made - that the world can be measured with sufficient exactness (an exactness that can only be the case if bolstered by an equally presumptuous use of the principle of indifference).

Then degree of freedom, in the context of ecological accounts of nature, does get particularised in its various ways. Some somewhat deluded folk might treat species counts or other superficialities as "fundamental" things to measure. But even when founding ecology more securely in a thermodynamical science, the acts of measurement that "degrees of freedoms" represent could be metaphysically understood as talking about notions of work, of disorder, of uncertainty. Ordinary language descriptions that suddenly make these different metrics seem much less formally related perhaps.

That is the reason I also seek to bring in semiosis to fix the situation. You complain I always assimilate every discussion to semiotics. But that is just because it is the metaphysical answer to everything. It is the totalising discourse. Get used to it.

So here, the key is the epistemic cut that can connect entropy and information. Disorder and uncertainty can be physically related in terms of rate-dependent dynamics and rate-independent information. I earlier linked to a long post which explained how this is currently being cashed out in a big way in biophysics - hence my mention of ATP as the unit of currency that puts a material scale on a cell's metabolic degrees of freedom. ATP is the concentrated goodness of "pure work". We can ground exergy at life's nanoscale, quasi-classical, intersection where a set of entropies just happen with remarkable convenience to converge.

(Like SX, you really need to add Hoffman's Life's Ratchet to your reading list.)

Right. I'm sure you will have a bunch of nit-picking pedantry welling up inside of you so I will leave off there. Just remember that I really am engaged in a broad metaphysical project. The correct definition of degrees of freedom is certainly a central concern as it is at the heart of the scientific method. It encodes whatever it is that we might mean by our ability to measure the "real facts" of the world. So it is at this level we can hope to discover the presumptions built into any resulting umwelt or worldview.

You keep demanding that I cash out concepts in your deeply entrenched notions of reality. I keep replying that it is entrenched notions of reality that I seek to expose. We really are at odds. But then look around. This is a philosophy forum. Or a "philosophy" forum at least. Or a philosophy sandbox even. What it ain't is a peer review biometrics journal.

Here's a book chapter arguing the same thing in a more general philosophical way.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Ulanowicz/publication/292610642_Enduring_metaphysical_impatience/links/56b00ad608ae9c1968b490b7/Enduring-metaphysical-impatience.pdf?origin=publication_detail

I like two key points. Natural systems are irreducibly complex because they feed off their own accidents. The traditional mechanical view wants to separate the formal laws constraining systems from the material accidents composing systems. But nature includes the accidental or spontaneous in the very thing of forming its laws, or constraining regularities.

This is beautifully Peircean. The "stuff" of the world isn't some disconnected universal machinery. It's Being includes its accidents as part of what makes any laws.

The second point is Elsasser's combinatrics argument which says that even a computable universe is very quickly an intractably computable one. Really, the Universe is always "a one off". A propensity view of statistics - as argued by Peirce and Popper - has to be fundamental.

Put the two together and every state of the Cosmos is an instance of one-off chance - or at least as much as it is its traditional "other" of a deterministic, law-constrained, mechanism.

Ulanowicz sums up the dichotomy of this "ordering vs the disordering" tendency in complexity thus.....

Elsasser argued that nature is replete with one-time events - events that happen once and never occur again. Accustomed as most investigators are to regarding chance as simplistic, Elsasser's claim sounds absurd. That chance is always simple, generic, and repeatable is, after all, the foundation of probability theory.

Elsasser, however, used combinatorics to demonstrate the overwhelming likelihood of singular events. He reckoned that the known universe consists of somewhere on the order of 10^85 simple particles. Furthermore, that universe is about 10^25 nanoseconds in age. So at the outside, a maximum of 10^110 simple events could possibly have transpired since the Big Bang.

Any random event with a probability of less than 1 in 10^110 of recurring simply won't happen. Its chances of happening again are not simply infinitesimally small; they are hyper-infinitesimally small. They are physically unreal.

That is all well and good, one might respond, but where is one going to find such complex chance? Those familiar with combinatorics are aware, however, that it doesn't take an enormous number of distinguishable components before the number of combinations among them grows hyper-astronomically.

As for Elsasser's threshold, it is reached somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five distinct components. Chance constellations of eighty or more distinct members will not recur in thousands of lifetimes of the universe.

Now it happens that ecologists routinely deal with ecosystems that contain well over eighty distinct populations, each of which may consist of hundreds or thousands of identifiable individual organisms. One might say, therefore, that ecology is awash in singular events, They occur everywhere, all the time, and at all scales.

None of which is to imply that each singular event is significant. Most simply do not affect dynamics in any measurable way; otherwise, conventional science would have been impossible. A few might impact the system negatively, forcing the system to respond in some homeostatic fashion.

A very rare few, however, might accord with the prevailing dynamics in just such a way as to prompt the system to behave very differently. These become incorporated into the material workings of the system as part of its history. The new behavior can be said to "emerge" in a radical but wholly natural way that defies explanation under conventional assumption.

So good luck to any science based on a mechanistic metaphysics that presumes accidents are simply uncontrolled exceptions that can be hidden behind a principle of indifference. Yet also the universe does have lawful regularity. It incorporates its accidents into the habits it then forms.

This is just a far more interesting story of the Cosmos than the usual one that pictures it as a mathematical clockwork - the one where science is reduced to a collection of measurement protocols rather than scientific measurement being the crafty art we know it to be.

I think you usually handwave this by calling it 'coupling', too (forgetting that coupled systems have shared parameter spaces). Lo and behold, when you put a bit of work in, you can see literal coupling when your figurative sense of coupling was implicated and it looks like there's some way to take the intersection of parameter spaces such that each individual system's has a non-empty intersection with enough of the rest to make a connected network of flows. — fdrake

This is an example of our different interests. You presume parameter spaces can be glued together. I'm concerned with the emergent nature of parameters themselves. You have your idea of how to make workable models. I'm interested in the metaphysics used to justify the basis of the model.

So it just gets tiresome when your criticism amounts to the fact I'm not bothered about the details of model building for various applications. I've already said my focus is on paradigm shifts within modelling. And core is the difference between mechanical and organic, or reductionist and holist, understandings of causality.

The principle of indifference cannot be extended as equiprobability to countable or continuous state spaces - this is because a uniform distribution cannot exist on infinite sets of outcomes. — fdrake

Another inventive way to miss the point I was arguing. Sure Boltzmann had a problem if the world wasn't actually atomistic and entropy was a continuous substance, a caloric.

Without lingering too long on that fact that that isn't actually correct, there's an observed upside down U shape in ascendency (increase then decrease) over an eutrophication gradient, though since the paper detailing that doesn't do an error analysis it's still up for debate - he has to at least engage with the relative strengths of the terms in the formula. He does. — fdrake

You can have your doubts about the robustness of his approach. But again, I was responding to the OP in terms of what ecologists actually say about ecologies based on the kind metaphysics they've actually developed.

And both Salthe and Ulanowicz argue for a three stage lifecycle - that inverted goldilocks U-curve. Regardless of how well it may or may not be cashed out in real world models, the general metaphysical level argument seems sound enough, and obvious enough, to me. If you want to critique that, then great.

Ulanowicz describes the motivating metaphysics in: The dual nature of ecosystem dynamics, 2009 - http://izt.ciens.ucv.ve/ecologia/Archivos/ECO_POB%202009/ECOPO7_2009/Ulanowicz%202009.pdf

The yin and yang of ecology

By now the reader may have noticed that two countervailing tendencies are at play in the development of any dissipative structure. In one direction a continuous stream of perturbations works to erode any existing structure and coherence. Meanwhile, this drift is opposed by the workings of autocatalytic configurations, which drive growth and development and provide repair to the system.

This tension has been noted since Antiquity. Diogenes related that Heraclitus saw the world as a continuous tearing down and building up. With the Enlightenment, however, science opted for a more Platonic view of nature as monistic equilibrium.

Outside of science, Hegel retained Heraclitus’ view of the fundamental tension, but with significant amendment. He noted that, although the two tendencies may be antagonistic at the level of observation, they may become mutually obligatory at the next higher level. Hegel’s view is resonant with the picture of ecosystem dynamics portrayed here.

Indeed, the second law does dissipate what autocatalysis has built up, but it has been noted that singular chance is also necessary if systems are truly to evolve over time and develop novel emergent characteristics. Looking in the other direction, complex, evolved systems can be sustained only through copious dissipation.

The problem with this agonistic view of the natural world is that, unlike the mechanistic (Platonic) convention, dialectic like dynamics cannot be adequately represented as algorithms.

To repeat again, mechanistic simulation models are inadequate to the task of describing ecosystems over the longer run, because the selfsame selection exhibited by autocatalysis can unpredictably replace not only components, but their accompanying mechanisms as well. Not only does the notion of mechanism defy logic, it seems also to poorly match the dynamics that actually are at play.

So complexity is irreducible once we start talking about self-parameterising systems. Like a dissipative structure. All your fussing about a lack of particularisation of parameter spaces by me makes no sense as we are essentially - when doing science of such systems - talking about modelling as an art. We can make better or worse choices. And any choice must be guided by some grounding, if fuzzy or vague, intuition. (Such as that entropy/information/exergy/degrees of freedom/whatever are "this kind of generic thing or process".)

You are continually jumping to the position of there being a right way to measure the world. But it is basic to a particular group of theoretical biologists I respect - Salthe, Pattee, Rosen, Ulanowicz - that measurement is an informal act. An art or exercise of good judgement. And this is because the world of interest is inherently non-linear - it has a complexity that is irreducible.

Ulanowicz then goes on to talk about the lifecycle model which is relevant to the OP. He makes the point that his ascendancy has this dualistic dynamic. The trade-off is between the organisational power of a system - its useful order - versus the systems overhead needed to physically instantiate that pattern of organisation.

The chief advantage of using information theory to describe organization is that it allows one also to quantify the opposite (or complement) to information in similar fashion. Whence everything
that is disordered, incoherent and dissipative in the same network can be captured by a related, non-negative variable called the system’s overhead...Furthermore, a system’s ascendency and overhead sum to yield its overall capacity for development.

The actual pattern of order is the result of two opposing tendencies: In an inchoate system (one with low a), there are manifold opportunities for autocatalytic cycles to form, and those that arise create internal constraints that increase A (and thereby abet a). This tendency for a to grow via autocatalysis exists at all values of a. The role of overhead however, changes as the system progresses toward higher
a.

In inchoate systems (low a), it is ˚ that provides the opportunities for new cycles to form. In doing so it abets the tendency to increase autocatalysis. However, in systems that are already highly developed
(a ≈ 1), the dominant effect of ˚ becomes the disruption of established feedback loops, resulting in a sudden loss of organized performance. (The system resets to much a lower a.)

So at high a, ˚ strongly opposes further increase in a. Presumably, a critical balance between the countervailing roles of ˚ exists near the value of a at which the qualitative role of ˚ reverses.

Or as the Wiki page sums it up more simply...

Originally, it was thought that ecosystems increase uniformly in ascendency as they developed, but subsequent empirical observation has suggested that all sustainable ecosystems are confined to a narrow "window of vitality" (Ulanowicz 2002).

Systems with relative values of ascendency plotting below the window tend to fall apart due to lack of significant internal constraints, whereas systems above the window tend to be so "brittle" that they become vulnerable to external perturbations.

So my reply to the OP was to point out what I find to be a metaphysically reasonable account of a natural lifecycle approach to systems. It is a model developed for describing ecological systems, but both Salthe and Ulanowicz say it does extrapolate to the political and economic levels of sociological analysis.

Thus I demonstrated that within my Peircean/organicist kit-bag of well grounded metaphysical concepts, here is a sound argument that has been already advanced.

Then check it out and you see Ulanowicz is pretty exercised by the Hegelian logic which his approach employs. He is very concerned with the Rosen modelling relation and what it says about the informality of acts of measurement and the incommensurability of mechanistic models to irreducibly complex worlds. He employs the very same metaphysical kitset as me. (Well up to a point. Ulanowicz is a good Catholic and so we differed on the theistic slant he was working towards on the sly. :) )

You then come along with the intent of nit-picking away, complaining that I don't follow through from a general metaphysical view to the particularity of every possible kind of entropy/information/exergy/degrees of freedom/whatever model.

Well, like ... whatever.

I’ve been talking about the thermodynamic constraints that shape dissipative systems like ecologies. You have failed to show why I should care about a species diversity index. The fact that the two don’t relate nicely is only to be expected.

Your notion of generalising entropy talk is epistemic. My interests are ontic. But best of luck with your future endeavours.

It would be interesting if Shannon biodiversity was related to ascendency — fdrake

This is the bit that puzzles me. It seems that all your arguments want to circle back to this species diversity index. But that is an utter triviality. It says nothing about the flow of energy through a biological system, nothing about the negentropic response of a system being pushed away from its equilibrium state, nothing about anything which has to do with the global dynamics or the fluxes that are what create ecologies in the first place.

It is pretty clear that I’m talking about dissipative structure. And so is ascendency. So is Salthe, Kay and Schneider, Bejan and the many other cites I offered. But your critique amounts to me failing to relate dissipative structure theory to some mundane measure of species diversity.

I love this so much though. — StreetlightX

I see you jiggling with joy on the sidelines. SX and his man-crushes.