My question to you nevertheless remains: can there be epistemology sans awareness (quite importantly, entailing the awareness we all know to be via the experience of being first-person points of view)? — javra

That kind of awareness would have to be sociocultural - Peirce's community of reasoning thinkers.

So epistemology only exists in the form you mean - rational inquiry - if you grant the ontic reality of social level mind.

We each individually then become shaped by that culturally evolved habit - and rather assume we just are born as reasoning linguistic creatures. Even without words and the conceptual structures they encode, we would have the necessary ideas in want of expression.

So the ability to divide the world conceptually into first person and third person point of view - the fundamental epistemic cut of modern metaphysics - is not something that would ever arise within biological level individual consciousness.

It is an epistemology that emerged at a higher level than that particular level of awareness, even if it is the habit that now shapes all us who have been brought up educated to think that way.

So I asked the question, when does mind enter the picture, and the answer was, 'right at the beginning'. So I'm trying to pinpoint what 'mind' means, if it has been there 'right from the outset'; and it seems obvious to me that this has metaphysical implications which don't really fit within the naturalist paradigm. — Wayfarer

Maybe I'm being too complex for your tastes but I've explained a thousand times that I am working on two levels here.

There is good old ordinary semiosis which would just be the biology of the epistemic cut. Life and mind begin as soon a molecule can function as a message. And that is a physicalism based on information and dynamics.

Then the more speculative metaphysical project is the Peircean one of pan-semiosis where the Cosmos itself is understood as an interaction between information and dynamics.

You could have one without the other. So life and mind only needs to begin on Earth some 4 billion years ago in a hydrothermal vent. Or we could talk about how the Big Bang was semiotic in marking the first moment that differences could make a difference.

Material events - as in particle interactions - could start definitely happening and result in a developing temporal history. And that could be described as "mindful" in a theoretically useful fashion. Semiosis gives us a particular tool - an irreducibly triadic metaphysics - that allows us to formulate a new physicalism to replace the old reductionist one.

Psi research is the one I've had close contact with. I can speak to the sociology of that as science as it is in the field.

If you want to talk about yogis, I've only read the biofeedback research. So I know that science is happy to research these things. And it is possible to learn to control the autonomic nervous system - the involuntary smooth muscles of the body.

But then no one is that amazed by toddlers eventually learning not to shit their pants. I guess it's all context.

I'll state the same differently: do you justify the ontic presence of reasoning/maths/logos via awareness OR do you justify the ontic presence of awareness via reasoning/maths/logos? Of course reality is a perpetual conflux of both, but that's not the question. — javra

The reason why Peircean semiotics impresses me as the most developed model of systems causality is because it turns things around. Epistemology also turns out to be ontology.

So semiotics starts off simply how humans (and lifeforms generally) make sense of the world. Then - ontically - the claim becomes that the Cosmos itself arises by the same "reasoning process". This is the pansemiotic hypothesis that Peirce dubbed objective idealism.

So for you, the world must be strictly divided into our epistemic view, and the ontic reality beyond.

Maths then sits in some curious Platonic realm. The philosophy of maths is torn over the question of whether maths pre-exists human thought and so is a realm to be discovered, or instead humans just construct convenient fictions. Maths is all a product of our contingent invention.

So for you, you speak for the conventional either/or framing. Either maths is an epistemic construction or a Platonic ontic reality. Them's your only two rational choices.

And I am taking the much more radical Peircean step of saying epistemology is onotology. The Cosmos is a form of mindfulness as much as a composition of materials. Maths then is the invariant structure that cannot help but emerge as the limit on chaotic or vague dynamics.

That is, the particular maths which centres on symmetries, or the groping after the maths of "pure invariance".

Again, I think it's more a matter of your view being supported by the kinds of ideas that the natural sciences are prepared to consider. Other schools of philosophy proceed according to different principles. — Wayfarer

I know that is bullshit as I've had close involvement with parapsychology research for instance. Science can afford to be open minded because it works. And sometimes investigation shows there really is nothing significant to report.

Stop asking for definitions and start listening to explanations.

A definitions based mindset is itself anti-pragmatic. It is key to the philosophy of science that definitions arise out the measurements that seem to make sense. Understanding emerges out of pragmatic interaction with the world. You can't impose understanding with some formula of words.

This is a basic fact of how language works. Any sentence is open to multiple interpretations. So if - like Galuchat - you develop an obsession with "the right definition", you have already lost the game. Understanding involves mastering a skill, a habit of thought, that reliably sees you always popping out on the right side of any particular speech act.

Definitions become a waste of breath if your goal is truly to arrive at some new state of understanding. You have to be able to live the words, not merely recite them as some kind of reverential incantation.

Now you appear to be talking about the basis for self-awareness. I know that I am a self because in modern human culture, that is a well-defined socio-linguistic construct. We are all taught the same habit of introspective self-regulation. We internalise a useful socially evolved habit where we understand our being in those very terms and do our level best to comply.

Check out anthropology and this vaunted Western sense of self - which really became crystallised as a the foundational myth of Socrates - is a reasonably new thing.

So I am careful to make a distinction between the usual conflated notion of consciousness as being inherently introspective - a view in which the self is already being seen - and an "extrospective" awareness which is the biological, pre-sociolinguistic, experience of the animal mind.

An animal just is a self. It is always acting from a selfish first person point of view. It sees a world, an umwelt, in which it's self is implicitly represented, not explicitly represented. It doesn't see itself experiencing that selfhood in a second order recursive fashion like we all learn to do.

Even the Hard Problem acolytes dismiss self consciousness as an easy problem. Anthropology and developmental psychology can explain it in mundanely comprehensible fashion.

So it is biological level extrospective awareness that is the scientific mystery. And then that is in turn already much less of a mystery because extrospection would produce a different kind of "feeling".

Schop, Wayfarer and the rest just presume an explicitly felt sense of self is intrinsic to consciousness. That is then the reason why they can't get their heads around an explanation which targets what it would feel like for "self" to be only an implicit and "unobserved" aspect of the flow of an umwelt - experience as an animal experiences it.

So just the experience or interpretance relation, no ghostly experiencer or interpreter.

Nope. I can only keep telling you that speaking of mindfulness as a noun rather than a verb is where folk always go wrong. If you assume mind to be a substantial state rather than a variety of process, then already you have painted yourself into an intellectual corner from which nothing will ever make sense.

Reason and observation. The usual combo of metaphysical speculation and scientific test.

Mind still continues to enter the scene. Even just 2600 years ago, we were simply linguistic minds, not mathematically and logically formed minds. Who knows where mind goes as the internet and AI takes on a mind of its own. Or how we might view the evolution of mind as we recognise formally the ability of fossil fuels to so thoroughly reorganise human culture and its organisational structure.

So mind is a journey of open-ended semiosis. You are doing the usual thing of treating it as a static, already fully substantial and realised existence. Hence you have a whole lot of questions about nature that make perfect sense within your paradigm and are incoherent - not even wrong - within mine.

So my story can't see any necessary end to the development of mind. It just sees a pragmatic limit in terms of what we know about the entropy balance sheet of the Universe. Minds, as negentropy, exist only by earning their entropic keep.

By the same token, mind enters the picture right from the start. As soon as there is the vaguest speck of semiotic mechanism in play.

I can see that is just as incoherent within your paradigm as what you assert is within mine. I only have the advantage that my paradigm is thoroughly supported by scientific investigation. Yours is the view from comparative religion.

I can't make you change your paradigm. You have to want to do it fo yourself.

Our difference is that you seek what concretely must exist as a foundation, I instead think everything fluidly emerges.

So for me, the question is what then concretely limits the inherent dynamism of "existence". And that is where maths (of symmetry) comes in. There are universal mathematical structures we can describe that are the invariant and necessary features of nature as they are the limits that must eventually emerge. Chaos has no choice but to throw up certain eternal regularities even in its attempts to be as unstructured as possible.

OK, so I understand that you assume two distinct types of constraints, the constraints which act on material potential causing substantial being, and semiotic constraints which act on substantial being. This is what you just told me: — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Remember that a dissipative structure is organisation produced by environmental constraint. All the information involved is just how the world around it is organised.

Then a living system internalises that information. It takes control for itself by being able to build its own environment. That starts just by building a membrane with ion pores that can create a proto-cell.

So yes. Two quite distinct situations. And that is the mainstream understanding. Only the second is explicitly semiotic - an autopoietic point of view based on an informational machinery.

Pan-semiosis is then a further speculative metaphysical project where dissipative structure is also understood as a generalised sign relation. It connects to the mainstream of current physics now that it has turned productively from talking about reality in terms of particles to bits of information.

Rich has illustrated how deeply confusing this turn is for traditional metaphysics. The holographic principle now makes it sound like information - as some kind of magical stuff - paints a representation of reality on some outer surface, then a universe of matter particles flying about is some kind of projected illusion.

As usual, the map of the territory is being confusedly treated as itself the new territory. We are back into the dualism of representationalism that pushes the question of interpretation into homuncular infinite regress.

So the way out of this observer problem that dogs the metaphysics of physics is the same - the triadic observer-including modelling relation. That is where pansemiosis comes in. Semiosis can apply to physics too. But there is still a big difference between semiosis based on an epistemic cut and internalised points of view, and semiosis without that coding machinery, simply an environmental structure which creates some generalised, or universally coherent, point of view.

I talked about a modelling relation rather than a map as that involves the interlocking causality of all three things - world, symbols and habits of interpretance. What we label consciousness is the wholeness of that lived and embodied relation.

The obsession with explaining feels is a hang over from dualism. If you think the Hard Problem is central, you are still stuck in the metaphysics of a different era.

We know substance dualism can't work in any sensible causal fashion. So just move on. Quit banging your head against that particular tree. Try on a triadic picture of the issues for a change.

The key thing the Peircean view does is deflate the notion of a mysterious witnessing self. Instead we just have a habit of interpretance - which at its core involves a running, or emergently-constructed, self vs world distinction.

So the self exists only like a whorl in a stream. It is not a substantial thing - a first person witnesser floating above the whole show. It is simply a state of organisation that emerges within an embodied flow of action. In regulating the world, there is then selfhood or autonomy.

We can see this quite simply from falling asleep or lying inside a sensory deprivation chamber. The ego dissolves as soon as there is nothing doing. There is nothing more to account for but the fact that an ego is what appears because of a particular kind of semiotic interaction where interpretance - an entropic modelling relation - is what is busy going on.

No rushing stream, no backward whorl either. The Hard Problem really is that simple.

Yes, the striking thing that comes through from Hoffman is that the basis of life is way more mechanical than we knew. It is all a bunch of little switches and rotors and pumps and chains and conveyor belts. So out of utter instability, a little bit of genetic information can conjure a fantastic apparatus. We used to think metabolism was a chemical soup. The cell was a bag of reactants. Now we can see it is a factory with structure.

So the explanation of life back a decade or two was focused on genetic information and metabolic reactions. At school, we all had to learn a bunch of chemical equations like the Krebs cycle. Now there is this third intervening level of mechanical organisation.

That is a huge realisation in terms of the metaphysics of life. No one was predicting that ATP production would actually involve a proper little rotating spindle device. That is just so outlandish.

Hoffman's book also makes it clear how just the tiniest, simplest scrap of mechanical structure can have outsized impact at the nanoscale. And that is key to the abiogenesis issue. It is much less of a step from nonliving to living than we imagined.

Nick Lane's book then comes from the other side and talks about how - with alkaline sea vents - the nonliving world closes the gap to make it a much tinier leap than we ever previously imagined. In terms of a chemical soup (with no biological machinery), there can be a dissipative energetic process in full swing.

So biological machinery can then just hop aboard a ride that is already going. It doesn't have to invent a metabolism de novo. It just has to offer that metabolism some extra degree of stability. And so it is easy to see evolution happening. Nothing needs to be created. All that is asked for is regulation. And natural selection is all about that kind of whittling away what doesn't work.

The standard complaint about natural selection is that it can't be creative. It is a constraint that can only remove possibilities. And biologists fully realise that.

Now we can see that if the nonliving metabolic cycle already exists, all the first life had to do was take away the possibility of that metabolic cycle collapsing.

It all adds up to a revolution in abiogentic thinking. Just 10 years ago, the answer seemed as though it must be some kind of RNA world hypothesis. The thinking was all focused on how a coding mechanism might have spontaneously appeared in some autocatalytic fashion (RNA being able to function as an enzyme as well as a memory). But now the first step looks far simpler. You just need a protein that wants to curl up and act as a physical gate - a sodium ion transporter.

I note you continue not to answer my question to you. Too dangerous.

But anyway, your question to me has already been answered. The reply is that it is a flawed question in that it is a dyadic semiotic framing of things and not a triadic one.

The metaphor of maps and territories of course in reality demands the third thing of "an interpreter" - a further habit of interpretance. The map itself is the physical sign, the symbol, the information that connects the interpreter to the world in terms of the interpreter's own interests.

You will of course immediately jump to the presumption that the interpreter is now the conscious part of the whole equation. You won't see how this is just a continuation of a substance monism that you feel forced to impose on any framing of the issues.

But there you go. You are stuck with a particular habit of interpretance. I can offer you a better map, but you are only going to insist again on holding it upside down and complaining you don't get it.

Did you have a point or just feel the need to vent?

I ask why shouldn't it feel like something as that exposes the fact you don't really have any clear definition of feeling yourself. You keep telling me what can't have feeling - matter or information - and yet you have no real basis for that claim as you can't, in counterfactual terms, say what ought to have feeling.

Well I suggest such an empirical basis and ask for an honest response. Why is a brain's lived modelling relation with the world so sure not to be experiential? Doesn't modelling seem like it might be experience creating?

You take fright at this question as you realise how much you have to lose from an honest answer.

What I am I not seeing? — MikeL

That it is not a window into a functional understanding of cognition. Quite deliberately, it doesn't go there.

Of course even Skinner couldn't be satisfied with not trying to go further. He did later try to extend to cover associative or Hebbian networks. But he started from such an underpowered position that it had about zero influence. If you want to understand the mind in terms of Hebbian networks, Hebb had already made a better start.

Operant conditioning is still employed for behavioural training. It is important to slot machine design for instance. Or crude forms of psychotherapy, like desensitisation to fears.

If I understand correctly, substantial being exists only as the result of constraints. — Metaphysician Undercover

Constraints on "material potential". So there has to be something to act on. Then the question becomes what is the least kind of action that can be imagined? This is what leads to modelling the "prime matter" as simply a vagueness or "unbounded fluctuation".

Substantial being emerges from the interaction between material and efficient causation — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It arises from constraints on a vague material potential (that thus become the concrete degrees of freedom of the system because there are those limits that produce some distinct variety of substantial being).

So in terms of the four causes, it is formal/final cause constraining vague potential to produce definite material/efficient causes. The causal loop is then closed as these material/efficient causes must be of the right character to re-construct and perpetuate the global state of constraint.

Hence why Peirce's system logic is said to be irreducibly complex. It has to be understood as one entire developmental whole.

We also see the purpose becoming more intentional as we move up through the layers. Intentionality and behaviour can be explained by psychology - Operant Conditioning would fit best. — MikeL

Having studied operant conditioning way back when, I'm afraid I can't share your enthusiasm.

Operant conditioning is such a simplistic approach you could learn everything that matters in a week. It talks about frequencies of observed behaviour when circumstances are either "rewarding" or "punishing". You the experimenter determine what counts as a behaviour and then sit back and count the frequency as you find ways to make the reinforcement either a clear cut "reward" or "punishment" situation.

It was bloody crude. A drop of milo for positive reinforcement, an electric shock to the feet for negative reinforcement. If you had an uncooperative rat, the lab technician would change it for you. Or maybe starve it a bit longer the next time.

So yes, there is semiotics of course. But it is you as the experimenter ignoring everything complex that might be going on in a real rat to interpret a push on a lever as a sign of the rat's mental state. As a sign relation, it is as crudely reductionist as it gets. And the whole point of Behaviourism is to dismiss any real interest in the complexities of cognition. It avoids having to say anything about the rat's point of view on life - the semiotic relation which explains its view of the world.

So as an experimenter, it is not behavioural frequencies that tell us anything about "mind". We want to be able to model organisms in terms of their functional cognitive architectures. What are the processes going on inside their heads?

Or again, what are the semiotic processes?

Thanks for pointing that interesting result out. My three immediate thoughts are:

1) The claim is that Landauer's Planck-based limit was violated, and yet still, it is not zero cost computing. Energy still has to be expended to erase a bit of information. So less energetic cost is not no energetic cost. Landauer's principle stands, even if his calculation of the limit might be faulty.

2) Then there look to be possible concealed costs in the circuit set-up. It is an odd semi-analog device where the inputs are electrostatic forces and the output is the degree of bending in a bit of metal.

So one concealed cost could be wear and tear on the bending metal. Eventually it might break from mechanical fatigue, or melt due to heat build up in its metallic bonds.

3) Then the other loophole would be that the bending of a metal cantilever as the output is an analog response which has to be converted into a digital input by being "read correctly" by the next metal cantilever in the chain.

I wonder if instead of an entropic cost, this means there is a steady information loss. Being analog and so continuous, no two "reading the output" acts might be exactly the same. It would be hard to rule out some environmental effect that causes the next metal cantilever to react fractionally before or after the "proper degree of bending" had been achieved.

So maybe a whole bit is not being reliably propagated in this hybrid set up. There is a steady information leakage which means less energy would have to be expended to erase "a bit".

My money is still on Landauer being right. It was such an elegant result.

In case you hadn't noticed, or more likely refuse to acknowledge as an inconvenient fact, Psychology and Sociology are sciences which investigate phenomena that are not physical. — Galuchat

In case you hadn't noticed, my physicalism is semiotic. So as science, or indeed metaphysics, it starts from psychology and sociology.

I'm not sure why that makes you so angry. You claim to be a fan of semiotics yourself. Did you want to be the only one, or something?

Yep. Back in the real world, the analogy is still proving useful to try and explain stuff to lay folk.

You are very good at replying why being a state of matter shouldn't feel like anything. Likewise a state of information.

But you go curiously silent on the question of why wouldn't a lived neural model of the world feel like something?

Hmm.

ou have two distinct forms of information in your description. You have information within the dissipative structures and you have information within the semiotics. There's a big gap between these two, because in "semiotics" information is a property of matter, and in your "dissipative structures" information is supposed to be prior to matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

To ungarble this, the story is that there is indeed the two things of semiotic information and dissipative degrees of freedom in my approach (which is also the mainstream information theoretic view, so not some personal theory).

The semiotic information acts causally as the constraints on substantial being. In Hylomorphic terms, it represents the top-down formal and final causes.

Then the physical degrees of freedom are the bottom-up material and efficient causes.

Substantial being emerges as the third thing of their interaction. As hylomorphism argued long ago.

So while I appreciate your attempt at parody, it failed by not understanding what it hoped to mock.

Meanwhile back in the real world, physicists make it clear that they are making an analogy. A hologram is some real physical pattern. The holographic principle is about the theories you could write that can measure observable events described in information theoretic terms.

So the Universe may be LIKE a hologram. No one is saying the Universe IS a hologram. (Outside of the usual misleading reader-grabbing headlines.)

In the everyday world, a hologram is a special kind of photograph that generates a full three-dimensional image when it is illuminated in the right manner. All the information describing the 3-D scene is encoded into the pattern of light and dark areas on the two-dimensional piece of film, ready to be regenerated. The holographic principle contends that an analogue of this visual magic applies to the full physical description of any system occupying a 3-D region: it proposes that another physical theory defined only on the 2-D boundary of the region completely describes the 3-D physics.

http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA

Endogenous retrovirus sequences are the product of reverse transcription of retrovirus genomes into the genomes of germ cells. Mutation within these retro-transcribed sequences can inactivate the viral genome.[31]

Over 8% of the human genome is made up of (mostly decayed) endogenous retrovirus sequences, as part of the over 42% fraction that is recognizably derived of retrotransposons, while another 3% can be identified to be the remains of DNA transposons. Much of the remaining half of the genome that is currently without an explained origin is expected to have found its origin in transposable elements that were active so long ago (> 200 million years) that random mutations have rendered them unrecognizable.[32] Genome size variation in at least two kinds of plants is mostly the result of retrotransposon sequences.[33][34]

You cannot get experience from fiat. Emergence of physical phenomena from physical phenomena is part of the easy problems. Emergence of mental phenomena from physical phenomena is different based on the fact that mental phenomena is actually needed to observe the rest of phenomena. — schopenhauer1

So you avoid my question as usual.

Are you saying information is "just physical phenomena"? How does that work in your ontology?

Again then, why shouldn't a modelling relation with reality not feel like something? Information or matter alone doesn't have reason to be feeling like something. But to form a lived model of the world - one where informational possibility and material circumstance are in close and pragmatic interaction - just does seem as though it should feel like something.

Can you tell me why it wouldn't?

Yep. I can see how easy it is to confuse the holographic principle with literal holograms.

OK. How does energy come to rest to yield "solid matter"? What is your theory which isn't another "just so" story?

The same applies to dissipative structure. That is magic too.

The trouble with you anti-materialists is that you don't even appreciate the self-organising wonder of nature's materials. How does energy ever find the substantial stability of "coming to rest" in some form?

I can't believe you guys take the passivity of matter so much for granted. You just want to rob material nature of all its beautiful and profound mystery. It's just dirt and gunk to you lot.

Where are you in this? Are you passionate about local communities? Or are you more of a Zizek? The world exist, messy as hell, as an opportunity to theorize about it? — n0 0ne

Well I have certainly lived a life of wealth and selfish privilege. I have been doing my own thing from an early age. :)

So yes, I don't get my hands dirty much in actual community practice. Partly because the theoretical value of that is a recently recognised thing, but mostly because I'm too lazy to spend evenings on committees or weekends on working bees.

Yet then I am recognised and even earn a living from offering what enough people find to be useful analysis. And selfishly that feels like a reasonable contribution.

So the honest answer would be that I started out in cynical mode and turned that into a paying gig. And I'm still a disengaged cynic at heart. Or at least by long habit. But that is also a good basis for understanding the world as it is and as it could or should be.

The resultant red shift intensity would be relative to the speeds of objects. It could be that they are both red shifted equally, one is blue one is red, or one is more red shifted than the other, surely. — MikeL

Nope. Your scenario would predict inhomogenities in red-shifting that we just can't see. If it is our relative motion that causes the effect, then we couldn't be moving towards some things without moving away from other things. There would be no way to conceal that fact.

The red shifting is just too precise and well behaved in every direction for our motion to be the cause.

You could imagine an inverse physics where instead of spatial expansion causing this even outward flow the story is that every point of space is contracting inwards. So the universe is a constant size in the global sense, but every point within it is shrinking smaller. That is kind of your contracting galaxies story.

But that would predict the sun and the milky way stars all receding from us too. Every point in space would have to be contracting inwards .... at lightspeed .... to invert the same physical picture.

As I said, actual galactic structure couldn't still exist. It would have all shrunk out of our sight. Even the good old sun would be a light-day "more distant" from us each morning when we wake up. Not to mention that we would have to junk quantum mechanics and its claims that physical action is tied to some actual minimum Planckian scale.

So your conjecture predicts observables we don't observe. And in the case of the sun rising tomorrow, the degree of error in the prediction is not small. It is astronomical. :)

And I'm saying that what you don't accept is the epistemology that is necessary to even underpin any ontic commitment either way. SX was correct about your stubbornness on that score.

I have zero expectations of making any real difference here. That's way I might at least one day be pleasantly surprised. So carry on....

I keep dealing with the same points over and over. To be immeasurable is to be epistemically vague or an idea that is "not even wrong".

You are convinced of the veracity of the whole story, while others in this discussion are not. Again, I could buy into the idea of an expanding universe. What I do not buy in are the current cosmological theories. — Hachem

I was explaining why cosmologists, as a pragmatic community of inquiry, would proclaim themselves convinced.

You are free to dissent. But your dissent only counts as reasonable if you can show you understand what is being said, and why, then make some other case in that light.

Otherwise its all fake news and alternative facts, as they say.

Do you see where I'm going with this? He can justify a selfish "Romanticism." He can embrace something akin to stoicism, skepticism, hedonism --attempt an individual solution. He can view his actions in the world as a stupidity to be endured. He can climb the career ladder by playing along with structures he doesn't believe in. He can pay his bills, hide in his little house, and pursue his idiosyncratic notion of happiness. Perhaps for you this is the opposite of Romanticism, since it is cynical. But abandoning the folly of the world aligns with the Christian component in Romanticism. — n0 0ne

I agree with you there. We do wind up having to make personal meaning of our own existence. But then the general political issue becomes how much of a burden that is for "ordinary folk".

This is the real question we would be asking of neoliberalism (if we can just set aside for the moment that larger question of whether it should be allowed to rape the Earth the way it is doing).

We all want to live lives that are meaningful. And our social system should deliver us that. Neoliberalism's promise on that score is we are given an unlimited possibility of the self-actualisation of our choice. It sounds just like the Romantic dream of being allowed to express our own personal potential to its fullest extreme.

But just as obviously, that neoliberal promise is pretty hollow and burdensome in practice. Who really needs its version of self-actualisation which is mostly about extreme consumption or extreme capital accumulation (power now being monetised via the new economics)?

So then the question becomes what should the average person do to construct personal meaning within a world that basically looks to be going mad (or as I put it, developing its own supra-human identity)?

Stoicism and cynicism seem like a response. But I would say that is retreating inwards and living in sufferance.

It does have some advantages so is not completely wrong. But there is the alternative of reaching out consciously to reforge local community. That is a positive response which would then collectively start to become an actual counterpolitical movement to roll back neoliberalism.

And indeed re-localisation has been a major theme among political activist for a decade now. If the problem is that globalisation has resulted in a life denominated in US dollars, then you can grab back power by creating local community time-banks and local community currencies.

The theory is just obvious. And you will find people trying to do that in every smart town or city now. But of course it does seem like a token scale effort for the most part. Neoliberalism still holds sway over the majority of lives. It is the way ordinary folk think. They have internalised the oppressor if you like (although, as I say, neoliberal theory itself is more neutral, less black and white, than its practice). So the current counter-politics is trialling change in small fashion. But it is also pretty vocal and clear about its approach.

And in fact - manifesting as the social enterprise approach beloved of Millenials - it is itself quite neoliberal in philosophy. So the economic model isn't really so much the problem. It is the lack of a place for social values and green values within a "market" approach to living life that creates a systemic ill.

This is why the kinds of authors cited in the OP make me despair. It's retreaded Marxism. And Marxism was retreaded Romanticism. We already know that model of socio-politics to be a dismal failure, consigned to the dustbin of history.

The way forward is to use neoliberalism against itself by building back in the local social and green values that the globalised version has managed to strip out. There is an actual pragmatic philosophical discussion going on out there in the real world, within every town and city with any intellectual capital, that goes right over the OP's head.

Of course then I have to go back to the larger fossil fuels story. We are still screwed unless a localised neoliberalism can connect us financially to a post-fossil fuel productive economy.

Again, that is why the OP prompts hair-pulling. We really don't need Marxist theorists fighting the same old class wars when they are dealing with things - like debt and entropy - about which they are philosophically clueless. They only muddy the water with their meandering musings at a time when utter clarity of thought is what's required.

So our entire assumption about the universe expanding is based on one interpretation of a bit of red in a telescope when there seems to be other interpretations for that bit of red? — MikeL

As T Clark points out back at the start, if the red shift was just us moving towards some mythical centre, then we would also be approaching other galaxies, creating a blue shift. And even if they were moving faster ahead of us for some reason, the resulting red shift would not be as red as galaxies in the opposite direction.

Then if it was instead just our galaxy collapsing inwards, we would have collapsed long before now. And also all the other galaxies would look redshifted equally regardless of their distance. They would all appear to have the same velocity, not a velocity that appears to accelerate until it eventually goes super-luminal (faster that lightspeed) and so get swallowed up by a cosmic event horizon.

So there are a whole bunch of astronomical observations which are simplified best by believing that what we see is an expanding/cooling universe. And science says the best theory is the one that accounts for the most variety with the least explanatory effort. We have no good reason to doubt the expanding/cooling universe hypothesis.

There is not just one observation that demands the theory. The theory is the only one that makes sense of everything we so far observe.

Remember Olber's paradox. If the universe is infinite and wasn't expanding we would be blinded at night by the blaze of every star in the cosmos. Thank goodness for event horizons that means we only see a finite number of those stars and so can sleep in the dark.

Yes, it is nice to reimagine every physical claim from its other angle, tell the same story in reverse. That is what physics gives you - reversible stories that thus connect starting conditions to final conditions in a predictable way. But if you actually try to understand the physics backwards, then you will become prone to all kinds of metaphysical error.

So red-shifting was the big clue that forced the reach for a good explanation. But there were already other reasons, like Olber's paradox.

General relativity also created an issue of how the Universe could be stable, given that it either had to be gravitationally collapsing, or for some reason expanding. We could guess it wasn't collapsing because otherwise our odds of being here to witness its existence would be infinitesimal (given infinite time, at any particular moment, collapse would have already occured with matching probability). So that only left expansion as the reasonable guess.

And now - surprise - Einstein was righter than he knew on that score. We have discovered a further observation, what has been dubbed dark energy or the cosmological constant, which tells us metric expansion is wired into the fabric of being. Expansion forever is a hardwired-looking fact now.

So as I say, physics ain't dumb. The expanding Big Bang universe was predicted by theory as much as it was necessitated by multiple lines of observation. Once Einstein cracked GR, expansion had to be the case somehow.

The 'epistemic cut' implies a dualism between matter and symbol and so implies a duality. — Wayfarer

It implies a formally exact complementarity, which is a very different (triadic) thing.

The reason matter~symbol works, and mind~body doesn't, is that we have fundamental physical theories of the relation between physical degrees of freedom and epistemic degrees of uncertainty. I just explained that above - the equivalence of Shannon information and Gibbs/Boltzman free energy.

So it is a dichotomy that works. We know how to measure it as a physical reality. We can convert it to bit, and back again. This has become an insight of fantastic power.

And as I've mentioned with considerable enthusiasm, biophysics has now discovered in the past 10 years how this works for life and mind. There is an obvious reason now why - at the quasi-classical transition zone of the nanoscale - bio-semiosis and neuro-semiosis could take off. Again a unit of biological information and a unit of biological work (the two sides of Pattee's epistemic cut!) are zeroed at that scale for reasons that are just physically transparent (once you understand the physics).

This is huge. As big as DNA. Science has come through for us once again.