My references to other cognitive modes are invariably met with vitriol — Wayfarer

So justify those cognitive modes in reference to my explanation of my cognitive mode.

I've highlighted the centrality of counterfactuality to metaphysical-strength reasoning. How are you going to reason employing a mode that rejects counterfactuality? That rejects measurable facts in other words. How are you escaping falling into the class of metaphysical explanations that is formally "not even wrong"?

You are welcome to challenge me with your alternatives. But you have to do more than name them here. You have to argue for them ... well, counterfactually. :)

And you get snarky when you think you're being accused of scientism, when surely that's the gospel you're preaching, bro. — Wayfarer

Sure its annoying that you can't be consistent. But since you are really just accusing me of being relentlessly reasonable, I can't complain.

I'll just remind - and you have to be reminded as frequently as a goldfish circling its bowl - that my "scientism" is systems science and not good old fashion reductionism. I am an organicist, not a mechanicist. I am about full four causes explanation, not just bottom-up atomistic construction .... etc, etc.

I'd define snark as an effort to be unpleasant in a way that rides rough-shod over the facts of the matter. Whether you are extremely forgetful, never really understood, or merely desperate to regain the ideological upper hand, I can't tell, and don't really care.

But the fact remains that I am not applying the same metaphysics as your totems of Scientism like Dawkins and Dennett and Krauss. So your snarky comments just undermine any credibility you might have hoped you have established here.

Obviously a variety of interpretations are possible, however note that many current adaptions of Peirce assume the 'hard-headed scientific Peirce' but eschew the 'idealistic and metaphysical Peirce'. — Wayfarer

Darwin believed in God. So did Newton and Einstein. Thus it makes no difference if Peirce believed in God.

That is the splendour of the scientific method. Eventually any superfluous mental scaffolding falls away to leave the naked physicalist reasoning. Talk about stuff that can't be measured - stuff that is not being talked about counter-factually - dies its death. It becomes classed as the "not even wrong".

The purity of scientific reasoning is the most marvellous realisation one can have. All the nonsense of life just falls away. One can penetrate to the core of the mystery that is existence. An idea as powerful as semiosis is giddy with beauty.

Grubby religious beliefs are to Peircean metaphysics as porn is to real sex. ;)

When you ask "what is" you can only answer in terms of other things. — Agustino

That's right. The Hard Problem has bite because in the end, causal explanations (about anything) rely on counterfactuals. You can believe the answer is A because you believe the answer isn't not-A.

And so when you make the question about the cause of some totality - like "the Cosmos", or "the Mind" - then there just is no not-A permitted by the question. Or rather you get the ridiculous answer that the only alternative is "not". Existence arose out of nothing. Mind arose out of nothing.

Talk about qualia has the same formula. Why is green green? Why is the scent of a rose like the scent of a rose? The question form itself fails the counterfactuality test. There just is no comparison possible as green is always green. And it still would be as far as I'm concerned even if it were to switch to bleen. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction)

Aristotle made the same point. Talk of causality is always a question about a reason for a change. Without counterfactuality, the game doesn't even get off the ground. The question you are asking is not really a question if you the questioner fail to provide a reasonable counterfactual basis for it.

The burden is on Schop to show why he is asking a good question ... if he now again denies that the question was answered.

Then to repeat what I've said about a Peirce-style organicism a million times, it does provide you with a critical extra counterfactual resource when asking questions - another dimension to standard metaphysics. It may not eliminate the problem here, but it is a further way to minimise it, to shrink it as small as we know how.

That extra resource is the (still pretty Aristotelean) notion of vagueness. So Peirce stood for a developmental metaphysics in which all things originate in a state of ultimate vagueness (or Firstness). Then by a mutual or orthogonal act of separation - a dichotomisation, a symmetry-breaking - you get a fundamental opposition arising. And from that dyadicy of a bare relation - a now crisp distinction that gives you your requisite either/or - you can develop further to the third thing of an interaction that hierarchically goes to equilibrium over all possible scales of being. The vague (as a formless chaos) becomes the crisp (a structured and law-like state of affairs in which change becomes minimal).

So this is a tale of how emergence and process can lead to the kind of deadened world we observe - a Cosmos nearly at its Heat Death doing nothing but entropifying. And thus - counterfactually - life and mind can be understood as "other" to that. We are distinguishable from our context by our negentropic qualities.

Semiotics is then a further part of this developmental story in both being the triadic logic of the metaphysics - the vague to crisp tale of developmental organisation just described - and also the particular story of the mechanism, the modelling relation, which accounts counterfactually for life and mind.

So to deal with both of philosophy's hardest problems - what is existence?, what is mind? - Peircean semiotics calls on the further metaphysical resources of the vague~crisp to get us further down the road towards an intelligible reply. Vague vs crisp is another source of counterfactuality to motivate the framing of the questions.

And vagueness is in fact defined logically as a perfect lack of counterfactuality. Peirce said vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. Crispness is thus the opposite - where the counterfactuality has developed to a point we might consider it absolute.

This is all very neat. Logic - the way we can ask definite questions - has just been extended in formal fashion so that it can safely talk about the indefinite. We can begin our metaphysical conversation even before counterfactuality arises - as the emergence of counterfactuality is what semiosis fundamentally explains.

This is not so new. Anaximander did it at the dawn of metaphysics with his much misunderstood tale of existence's emergence by symmetry-breaking from the Apeiron.

Indeed, something similar is the basis of most ancient wisdoms. You have the Judaic Ein Sof, the Taoist Dao, the Buddhist dependent co-arising, etc.

And of course - if you can get past the Scholastic misrepresentations - Aristotle was striving towards the same with his Hylomorphism. His "prime matter" was a logical attempt to vague-ify the basis of being.

So when it comes to asking the most interesting open questions - why mind? why existence? - the search is for some position of counterfactuality that can make those questions seem more sensible. And a Peircean developmental logic, one that is rooted in a notion of vagueness, a complete lack of counterfactuality, is the bold new metaphysical approach that deals directly with this very issue of counterfactuality.

That is why he summed up existence as "the universal growth of reasonableness". Such a statement sounds very mystical and is open to obvious misinterpretation. But that is why you actually have to study and learn the new logical notion that lies behind it.

Intelligibility is what emerges. Therefore it would be incoherent to claim that what it emerges from is the intelligible as well.

I can agree with you all day that modelling relations have feel like something aspects to it. — schopenhauer1

Finally. That being so, case closed.

These are very important thoughts you are sharing.

You've covered them by placing the cart before the horse: better spelled out, maths before awareness ... — javra

Again, you aren't really listening. Peirce begins with an examination of human reason - epistemology. And then pansemiosis argues ontology - existence itself - also shares the same self-organising logic.

Further - all thought/all reality being irreducibly complex - making your argument in terms of "cart before horse", or "chicken before egg", simply betrays a Procrustean need to make all argument conform to the mode of reductionist analysis rather than holistic understanding.

You want a sequential story of cause and effect. But this is explicitly a triadic developmental story. I know you will be starting to understand when you yourself think "cart before horse" is a nonsensical kind of issue to be complaining about.

Rich, you are proof the Cosmos loves hot air.

This is the part that I initially hoped you held a cogent grasp of when I started this tread. — javra

Did you really ever follow what I said then. You keep coming up with questions I've already covered.

Pansemiosis is about the fundamentally of thermodynamic purpose. And biosemiosis is entrained to that cosmic goal. It is required (if it is possible for it to be) by the need to break down blockages to entropy's great flow.

So I hope you now suddenly remember another part of the argument which I've so frequently presented. Maybe even an apology will be forthcoming, seeing you have chosen to join the insulters? :)

I've explained why all through the thread. There is a difference between biosemiosis and pansemiosis.

Biosemiosis is an actual modelling relation. The information, the constraints, are internalised to construct a point of view.

Pansemiosis is then more general. The information, the constraints, are environmental. The point of view in operation is external and so highly generic - just the state of the cosmos at some point along its historical development.

This bloody huge difference is why I wouldn't say leptons have feelings. There is no reason to think they form a point of view or have any autonomy. They are the products of a generic cosmic sign relation, not the authors of particular located points of view.

You'll have to try harder to make it worth continuing the conversation.

Start by answering honestly why a modelling relation with the world wouldn't feel like something. On what basis can you simply presume that?

No, freedom and constraint only actual exist in relation to something else, a thing which is either free or constrained. — Metaphysician Undercover

So the story is .... triadic?

Degrees of heat or cold only have reality in relation to something which is either hot or cold. — Metaphysician Undercover

Except a backwards triadism that relies on brute fact monism rather than emergence...

Sounds legit.

What's more is that credit seems to have saturated the economy. You can get credit for anything nowadays. — Posty McPostface

Yep. The economy goes sideways as it needs a good dose of inflation to wash away the debt. But it is so in debt that it can't jolt the patient to life by cutting interest rates and giving it more spending cash in its pocket. It all has to go into servicing existing debt as real production shrinks.

Next step, the deflation where the debt burden grows rather than shrinks. Whoops, apocalypse.

That also depends on how informed the rational agent is. I fear, and see, that the population of the US is hopelessly misinformed about current affairs. — Posty McPostface

And not that the population is simply hopelessly irrational these days? ;)

But speaking realistically, there are always going to be artificial constraints - state intervention - in any market system. States can't in practice stand back and let themselves collapse as good market practice demands.

Sure, plenty of people would have loved Greece or Morgan Stanley to take their medicine properly. But in the end, theoretical purity is going to run into self-preservation instinct.

That is the reality the GFC should have rammed home. In the end, at some level, an economic actor becomes too big to fail.

So given that, market intervention should be something that kicks in over all scales in fair fashion. That is what bankruptcy laws were for, for example. Or monopoly laws.

If you are building a car with an accelerator, you also want to remember to build in some brakes. It's just commonsense.

That has nothing whatever to do with Shannon's laws about information transmission. — Wayfarer

Silly me.

The whole point of Shannon's work was about transmitting actual information, something that has meaning. If it was just about transmitting white noise, then what would have been the point of the analysis? — Wayfarer

That comment sums up how little you understand about the subject.

We relate the two to each other through the assumption of present existence, but that they may be related to each other does not make them two faces of the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Constraints remove degrees of freedom. And the degrees of freedom not removed are then those that must be expressable. It's not rocket science.

The invisible hand might not be infallible (climate change and tragedy of the commons) — Posty McPostface

Hence the argument for a carbon tax and a national future fund.

It is just plain obvious that the active subsidising of Big Oil (which includes the massive US military spend) ought to stop. It is a market distortion proper free marketeers would abhor. Then a carbon tax is needed on top of that to pave the way to greener energy. Future generations demand it.

And why not be like Norway and actually ring-fence that income to start to pay back the damage done by galloping financial speculation?

Market principles work just fine so long as the markets are transparent enough to look sufficiently far into the future.

Another flaw in the OP is the complaint that neoliberal liquidity makes the future "a zone of indistinction".

What is actually the problem is the future is being rendered deliberately opaque by privileged interests who want to capitalise tomorrow's profits on their balance sheets today. The elite not only steal the present from the average Joe, they steal the future too.

In principle, a free market takes into account all information or self-interest. And most folk are at least modestly concerned at least a generation or two into the future.

So yes, the future has been made opaque for most people with climate denial and the lobbies against green technology or sustainable economics. But that is a product of having allowed wealth inequality develop to the point billionaires can buy administrations. It is not directly the fault of an economic theory about how best to unblock the barriers to free growth.

(Though the theory is also reckless in not clearly recognising its own downside, its need for strong regulation at government level.)

Being constrained by history, and having anticipation for the future are two completely distinct things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? They are the two faces of the same thing. Surely that is obvious? To be constrained is what results in being left with a more focused point of view.

Yes, but one of the foundations upon which the USA is a vigilant and informed public. That the Republicans keep the population vigilant with invisible enemies from within and outside the borders, then that's a political issue, not an economic one. — Posty McPostface

The US story is about how rage at the consequences of neoliberalism - especially the way liquidity paves the way for globalisation - needs to be re-directed against other targets.

So the middleclass majority, and well-paid blue collar worker, are still befuddled as to why the economic world is running against them when clearly the US is growing ever richer.

The war on drugs, the war on weapons of mass destruction, the war on terror - these are all geopolitical moves. Excuses for the assertion of US hegemony and the side-lining of proper international political institutions like the UN. They are the public excuses for private political agendas. They are only economic moves in the sense that it feels good to the US to be in tight control of basic resources like oil.

Yes, they also serve a US desire to impose moral hegemony as well. The American Way still matters at some level of US politics. Institutions like the State Department feel missionary about these things.

But check Trump and you can see how rage is being redirected in a very anti-neoliberal theory fashion. It's plain old gut-reaction xenophobia and other-bashing.

One of the funny things about SX's PoMo Marxism is that he doesn't see how neoliberalism - as theory - advocates open borders and multiculturalism. A free market lets all ideas have a go. A pluralist competition is what is healthy.

Yet Trump harnesses the attack on this social and economic globalism. Build a wall to keep out the Mexican rapists. Every open trade deal ever done was unfair to the US. Get rid of weird folk from our military - or weird and un-american folk in general.

So we have a number of forces in play.

There is "geopolitical chessboards" - maintaining a position of US hegemony. This is about the general benefits of power, not some piffling theoretical debate about particular economic mechanisms. The politicians need to divert the populace to be free to pursue that most critical of national agendas.

Then there is neoliberalism. This is a nice theory of dissipative structure. You maximise system throughput by taking away any barriers to growth. Access to speculative capital being a key one.

In theory, for a while, broken down welfare hicks in US hicksville could be property speculators and mint a fortune. That is what equality of opportunity meant. The convenient lie told the public was that it was perfectly safe even though the US system of market oversight had been systematically deconstructed, and in the case of the credit rating agencies, plain corrupted.

Then the third sweeping force is the usual human reaction of turning inwards when feeling under attack. Rally the village, get out the pitchforks, and apply a little mob justice to anything that smacks of "other".

Here the deception of the people is simply a President agreeing it is the proper thing to do. "You want to burn the world down, sure that's a great idea. Hey maybe I'll join in and do that to North Korea."

Stale PoMo Marxism is just so inadequate as a frame of analysis. Time to speak the truth in plain language. :)

Although the US could sure do with a good dose of Scandinavian social democracy and a radical overhaul of its broken political structures. Unfortunately world governance - the UN - has been so undermined that the US can't just step away from its dreams of empire. Russia and China are just two itching to take its place.

(Well China not so much as its main existential concern is forever going to be preventing the peasants revolting against the centre. It doesn't aspire to a new colonialism, just security and stability within the traditional boundaries of its Imperial Empire.)

Christ almighty. It rewrites the state of the Universe. Another bit of history has accumulated and so points all possibility toward a more constrained future.

Stop thinking about this as humans feeling mentally informed. And don't even start thinking about it computationally as the reading and writing of memory states.

Semiotics is about information as the bleeding differences that make a bleeding difference in the real world, even the lifeless real world. A bit has physicalist meaning as a sign of things to come. :)

No external interpreter is required. Reality arises as interpretance. The historical context points possibility towards its free future. Then history is created by that possibility making up its mind.

Why does an atom decay? Do you think you can answer that in causal terms using regular materialism? Do you think mad woo like Rich's or whoever's idealism can do the job?

And yet you belly-ache like buggery just because I dare to apply Peirce's careful generalisation of a psychologically-derived tale of causality. And point out that it is science as the duality of matter and information is now a formally exact, formally measurable, deal.

Mate, either catch up with the 21st century or leave me alone.

you're evading the point, — Wayfarer

The point is eluding you. That is something different. I've explained myself endlessly. Time for you to do some work in understanding better.

If you keep just asking me "who knows", why should I show respect for your lack of imagination here?

You believe consciousness to be itself a universal property of nature, well fine. Stick to that. Don't for an instant explore the alternative of deflating consciousness by understanding it in terms of a universal semiotic process.

You won't abandon your mentalism. Fine. Science isn't for you. And thus the metaphysics that follows in the wake of scientific advance is also not for you. Again fine. It's your choice.

The door to your cage or conceptions has been opened. But you don't have to walk through it if you prefer the comfort of the familiar.

If an atom decays, that is an event that changes the history of the world in definite, digital, fashion. Existence will never be the same again having received that message. It will be that bit - or bit - colder feeling. ;)

But 'information' has many meanings, it is not as if there is a unitary thing, force or power called 'information' which serves a role analogous to (say) 'the atom'. — Wayfarer

You miss the point. Information was given rigorous mathematical meaning by Shannon. It was defined in terms of message uncertainty or information entropy. So a physical result was derived from psychological argument.

And yes, it is obvious that Shannon information in fact stripped out the semantics so as to wind up talking only about its physical signs. He created a universal way to count bits. What any bit meant became absolute general - or rather, it just stood for a 1 or a 0, a yes or a no, a presence or an absence. It stood for a bare metaphysical strength dichotomy - a difference that makes a difference in the most absolute possible fashion.

Thus having stripped out semantics from a theory of information - or reduced that semantics to its ultimate abstract form - information then allows science to build semantics back into its descriptions of nature in controlled and explicit fashion. Useful models are possible.

You have to understand how science builds its tools to understand the metaphysical implications of the new scientific results that then follow.

To protest that "information has many meanings, some of them very colloquial or mentalistic" is missing the point.

When Mr. Apo - "symmetry" "constraint" "triadic" - Krisis accuses you of jargon mongering. You couldn't make this up if you tried. — StreetlightX

It is not the individual words so much - although plenty of them are way more obscure than talk of symmetry or constraints. It is the dense thickets of abstractions with no pauses for illustrative supporting examples.

And on top of that, the overall hesitant tone where a concern is introduced in one paragraph, only for us to be told that wasn't really it, here is the new real concern. Your posts unfold as a series of self-corrections arriving at no resolved point. Clearly you want to make some thread of an idea come out right, but all you can do is point off in a variety of directions as you meander in a maze of PoMo mutterings.

You see my problem:

But the argument is not so much that life itself becomes a commodity but that it has been co-opted into circuits of speculative finance. — StreetlightX

The key distinction is that of temporal orientation: — StreetlightX

The crux of it is that this is exactly the same commodity form as debt. — StreetlightX

In other words this cooption of life into the circuits of speculative finance converges with debt as the high-point of capitalist accumulation — StreetlightX

But even this is not what I'm super concerned with. My real interest lies in the collapse of temporal categories occasioned by such developments: by tethering calculations of risk in the present to the quite literally incalculable speculative promises/fears of the future, almost every and any 'preventative' action is licenced. — StreetlightX

Essentially what is at stake is a temporal 'state of exception' in which the boundaries between the calculable and the incalculable are effaced such that there is cartre blanche to do anything whatsoever in the name of the incalculable. — StreetlightX

these myths don't just spring up out of nowhere - the point is the chart the mechanisms that have brought it into being, and have allowed it to catch on. — StreetlightX

In this tangle of words, what you seem to be trying to argue is that there is this thing called speculative finance. And "human biology" is being sucked into its voracious maw as another asset to be monetised. Neoliberalism is a mechanism that allows every aspect of life to made tradable - and thus to be traded away in a fashion that inevitably favours the few, disadvantages the many, even though the political promise is that a free market floats all boats.

So on neoliberalism and why it is a danger, I'm sure we agree. It is a routine analysis as you say.

And on making human biology a tradable asset, well yes I guess so if you mean medical biotechnology and gene engineering. But I asked how does that add a specific form or precariousness to our individual lives (as you seemed to be suggesting in your tortured prose)?

Why would ordinary folk find that an existential threat? Instead, surely new medicines are a bright promise. Start-up companies generally excite the imagination. A generalised use of biological information has no obvious personal implications.

So in regards to the Precariat - the modern world of uncertain employment - you have made no logical connection here.

Then working back to your notion of speculative finance, this looks to conflate blind risk taking and complex risk-removing behaviour.

As you also acknowledge, financial instruments like derivatives are designed simply to amplify economic actions. So they can work in both directions. They can allow economic actors to take bigger leveraged risks. Or they can be used to insure a future outcome against risk.

Of course again there are the large and now painfully obvious shortcomings of permitting financial complexity. It creates a system that is easy to game - especially if you get the politicians to take away the market regulators.

So the economic system in theory might aim to be just - neoliberalism is not intrinsically malign as your argument appears to demand - but the Wall St elite got the safeguards removed so they could screw over nations of home buyers and even whole small nations like Greece and Iceland.

So when it comes to "speculative finance", this becomes just a pejorative term in your hands - a way to win the argument without clearly making one. It is easy to read your uncertainty in applying it. Sometimes you are talking about malign neoliberalism, sometimes about an elite of individual economic actors. Sometimes you are talking about risk-avoidance that went wrong (like CDOs), sometimes about speculative asset bubbles - overly-optimistic risk taking.

You seem aware of the variety of economic and political issues you are trying to shoehorn into a single bogeyman term - speculative finance - but when called on it, you get pissy rather than attempting to mount some further justification or clarification.

So these things need tying together properly:

1) speculative finance as one unitary force.
2) human biology as a new tradable asset class.
3) neoliberalism being inherently a social evil rather than simply a neutral mechanism.
4) the above adding up to an actual source of existential precariousness in the Precariat.

"Information" and "semiosis" have become equivocal terms, and are used by apokrisis in a manner which attempts to validate a physicalist worldview (which I alluded to here).

Whereas, ascribing semiotic attributes to anything other than a psychophysical organism is a category error. — Galuchat

What you are missing is that it is the triadic causality of semiosis that pan-semiosis is generalising.

And I think you don't really get that aspect of Peircean semiosis. This is not surprising if your knowledge of semiosis - as a metaphysical structure - has been shaped by the "Turku crowd". They were pretty mentalistic in understanding semiotics as a theory of meaning making. They weren't working at a level of absolutely abstract metaphysical generalisation.

It was US hierarchy theorists who could appreciate the mathematical bones of Peirce in this fashion.

Peirce himself clearly felt his semiosis applied at the physically and cosmologically general level. He was a scientist - summa cum laude in chemistry at Harvard - so was up with the thermodynamics of his era.

So to the degree that you accept Peirce's triadic scheme, as opposed to Saussure's dyadic one, then it simply can't be a category error. Peirce himself said it wasn't.

So this is the semiotics of dissipative structures? The water sees the channel as a symbol, and interprets the meaning of this sign as "go this way". — Metaphysician Undercover

You aren't going to be able to follow this as you are insisting on a mentalistic reading of anything I say. But anyway, the river channel is an example of history acting informationally. A whole bunch of individual erosive events in the past add up to tell a story about which way to go. The current flow of water doesn't interact with that past directly, in some material fashion, but it does interact with that past indirectly in seeing the current state of the channel as an informational constraint on its possibilities.

So this is a Bergsonian metaphysics if you like. Or at least what he was on about with his cone of memory. :)

Constraint = information = history. It is the difference between background and foreground, context and event, when it comes to analysing causality.

Then why this is not just metaphysics, but physics, is because science knows how to count both contextual information and material entropy in the same coin these days. At the Planck scale, the two kinds of "construction material" are equivalent and inter-convertible.

This duality allows for powerful new mathematical ideas, like the holographic principle. We have a second way of describing - and more importantly, measuring - reality. We can now get exact results that relate the contextual causality of global constraints to the efficient causality of local material events.

If you don't follow modern physics, you likely have no idea how important this new approach is. But it is why fundamental physics is attempting to rebuild itself on thermodynamic principles like entropy, dissipation and emergence.

One doesn't have to label this pan-semiotics. Physics calls it information theory, holography, thermal, etc.

But also, there is the usual confused variety of metaphysical interpretations of what the discovered duality of information and matter might actually imply. Some folk have taken off with ideas like digital physics - the belief that reality is a literal computation of some kind. Others talk as if the informational boundaries, the event horizons, are the new fundamental reality and all the material events they encode on their branes or holographic surfaces are just now ghostly fictions.

So the new physics works. And its metaphysics is up for grabs, just as was the case for quantum interpretations.

My view is that Peircean pan-semiosis offers the best metaphysical framework for interpreting what this new physics is actually struggling to say about reality.

So you can scoff at the triviality of the river in its channel example. But instead, why not think about it carefully. All those little bouncing H2O molecules knocking off one another. And then the mysterious invisible hand that is their collective past. The events of the moment are being shaped by the information which represents the context of a history. But also each molecule has the chance to rewrite the history of the river bed.

You have two levels of action to account for. Plus the further fact that they form an interaction. Modern physics has the mathematics to formalise these accounts. Peircean semiosis provides the generalised triadic metaphysics which offers the best interpretation.

But if you prefer the idea that reality is a hologram, or a simulation, go for it.

You are simply highlighting how your abstracted jargon conceals from even yourself the huge logical gaps you are leaving in the wake of your purple prose and frantic cut and paste.

For instance here, if you weren't suggesting the deliberate fostering of a sense of crisis, then why would tying current investments to future returns be automatically a bad thing? Especially when the argument you want to make is that it is merely a vague or indistinct thing.

As I point out, the biotech bubble would be the product of investor optimism. It has nothing to do with debt economics or financialised balance sheets as such. So why - even inadvertently - would it create some dramatic sense of precariousness?

If you tried to write out your clever musings in plain language, they would just fall apart as there is nothing substantive by way of logical links to hold them together. Sorry if it upsets you to have it pointed out.

Hence the widespread 'need' to enact legislation - all around the Western world - that violates fundamental rights in order to protect us from Godknowswhat impending, immanent, but incalculable risk of.... ???. A kind of permanent state of emergency, licenced by temporal collapse. The ubiquitous threat of 'terrorism', unsurprisingly finds a perfectly receptive audience in neoliberal societies. — StreetlightX

So at no point did you suggest anything about the fostering of a sense of crisis? Hmm.

Anyway, as usual you're singularly incapable of holding a discussion without turning it into some sort of dick measuring competition — StreetlightX

Perhaps if you posted a coherent argument it would go better for you. Have a go at writing out your OP in plain language without all the fancy words. And with proper examples to support your point at each turn. See how much sense you think it makes then.

In plain language, where is the promised account of how any of this impacts on the individual's relation to their own body?

How doesn't the biotech bubble impact in a way that makes me feel precarious about myself. Ditto GM crops? Ditto the financial games played on third world farmers?

If this wasn't written in such tortured prose, it would be clear that it is nothing more than a list of concerns with no logical connection.

Fostering a sense of crisis to be able to push through a political agenda is quite the opposite of creating the false market optimism on which speculative bubbles depend. That is just one example of how none of the dots connect here.

So sure, biotech is another bubble asset. But that isn't a "debt" issue.

The GFC was about turning debt into a tradable asset class. The claim was risk could be packaged to create financial instruments that performed like good old unexciting bonds (plus a percent). Biotech is a risky stock, an upfront gamble. You might be buying a future promise, but a naked risk one, not a financialised one that claims to remove the uncertainty in the return.

To confuse the two is financial illiteracy.

I think you need better examples of how biology is being financialised rather than just commodified. And then any actual example of that making folk feel a bodily precariousness of some personal form.

Perhaps you could explain this, because it appears to be the missing link which serves as the foundation of your metaphysics. How are sign relations inherent within a dissipative structure? I — Metaphysician Undercover

I said they were external, not internal. That would be the difference. The water of the river knows which way to go because a channel carved over time points the way downhill.

There are no hidden mysteries here. It is quite prosaic. Until you get into foundational physics with its talk of holographic event horizons or wavefunction collapses.

Of course all the idealists would support such a statement as this, but when pressed, you seem to withdraw it again. — Wayfarer

That is because the idealists want support for a substance ontology. Semiotics is about a metaphysics of emergent process.

My point is, disciplined introspection, such as that practiced by yogis, perfectly reveals the artificial or constructed nature of conscious awareness. — Wayfarer

But my view is that kind of thing is the most exquisitely artificial kind of practice of all. It is wildly unnatural. It takes introspection away from being just a pragmatic habit of social self-regulation and treats it as mystic experience.

I'm sure I already mentioned to you that I had zen training from a Buddhist monk as a kid living in the East. That was when I became personally clear that eastern mysticism was just as much bullshit as the western kind. I concluded it was simply mad posturing to mediate under the tropical sun when all you could hear was the cloud of malarial mosquitoes forming over your head and starting to make their buzzing descent.

Of course you won't agree with me there. But the idea of the stilled and wordless mind is against the neurocognitive facts.

(Or rather you will execute another bait and switch because you won't ever really make your own case, just carp about mine.)

What can I say, you can in the same breath deny the presence of substance while affirming the triadic relation as the substance. — javra

This systems approach is as old as Aristotle's hylomorphism. So no need to sound so put upon in a discussion on metaphysics,

Substance in a process philosophy view is an emergent limit on individuation. So yes, it is irreducibly triadic. It is the meat in the sandwich. You have formal/final cause and material/efficient cause in interaction. Substance is the emergent result of these two sources of cause - constraint vs potential - arriving at some steady state of balance or equilibrium.

Each side goes at it until the changes don't start to make a difference anymore and things look solid, or at least static enough to become a ground of further developments.

I admire the persistence with which you hope to trap me into a formula of words which you can then claim to interprete dualistically rather than triadically.

So I will just remind that I am happy with the idea that the personal exists because what else is it that I might hope to explain as being the emergent limit of a bio-social semiotic process here?

There has to be an I that experiences the power of his beliefs in terms of their measurable outcomes.

Or at least, that is the emergent structure one might observe in the blood and flesh creature successfully navigating its world via developed habits of interpretance that minimise the entropic uncertainty connecting his intentions to their results.

If you want to celebrate guys who can stick their arm in the sky until it withers and locks, go for it.

If you believe in levitating monks, present the evidence.

No point just promising me that you can upturn my arguments by suddenly presenting the supernatural abilities of those steeped in the exotic mysteries of the east.

Get on and show us what you got. Leave the really poor puns out of it. Flames that lame aren't even entertainment.

How do you justify its presence?

Do you need a reasoning based on personal awareness? Or can you justify it without any personal awareness? — javra

Huh? It forms awareness - biological, in the flow, extrospective awareness - into considered, rationally structured, introspective awareness.

You just did the usual thing of treating awareness as a substantial state - "personal awareness" - when I have explained that as the interaction between two levels of semiosis, the biological and the cultural.

A habit of interpretance is hardly nothing if it becomes the cause of everything.

Maybe you should slow down and actually think all this through some time, not just pile in in desperate and defensive fashion.