But again this is reductionist to the extent that you're treating the subject - namely the human - in a biologistic way — Wayfarer

All modelling is reductionist ... even if it is a reduction to four causes holistic naturalism. And as I say, even the brain is a reductionist modeller, focused on eliminating the unnecessary detail from its "unified" view of the world. The brain operates on the same principle of less is more.

As far as free will (or won't) is concerned, the point from the perspective of a humanistic philosophy is not understanding the determinative causes of human actions from an abstract or theoretical point of view, but what freedom of action means. — Wayfarer

Yep. But that is covered by my point that neuroscience only covers the basic machinery. To explain human behaviour, you then have to turn to the new level of semiosis which is linguistic and culturally evolving. So you can't look directly to biology for the constraints that make us "human" - the social ideas and purposes that shape individual psychologies. You do have to shift to an anthropological level of analysis to tell that story.

(And I agree that the majority of neuroscientists - especially those with books to sell - don't get that limitation on what biology can explain.)

Isn't that 'the genetic fallacy'? Anyway, I'm Buddhist and an outed dualist. — Wayfarer

As it happened, Libet told me about his dualistic "conscious mental field" hypothesis before he actually published it in 1994. So I did quiz him in detail about the issue of his personal beliefs and how that connected to the way he designed and reported his various earlier brain stimulation and freewill experiments.

So I am not making some random ad hominen here. It is a genuine "sociology of science" issue. Both theists and aetheists, reductionist and holists, are social actors and thus can construct their work as a certain kind of "performance".

And believe me, the whole of philosophy of mind/mind science came to seem to me a hollow public charade for this reason. For the last 50 years (starting from the AI days) it has been a massive populist sideshow. Meanwhile those actually doing real thinking - guys like Stephen Grossberg or Karl Friston - stayed well under the radar (largely because they saw the time-wasting populist sideshow for what it was as well.)

This has some relationship with the famous Libet experiments, doesn't it? They showed that the body moves before the subject is aware that they want to move it. — Wayfarer

Yep. So what the experiments illustrate is that we have "free won't", rather than freewill. As long as we aren't being hurried into an impulsive reaction, we can - the prefrontal "we" of voluntary level action planning - pay attention to the predictive warning of what we are about to do, and so issue a cancel order.

So part of the habit-level planning for a routine action is the general broadcast of an anticipatory motor image. As part of the unity of experience, the sensory half of our brain has to be told that our hand is suddenly going to move in a split second or so. And the reason for that is so "we" can discount that movement as something "we" intended. We ignore the sensation of the moving hand in advance - and so then we can tell if instead the world caused our hand to move. A fact far more alarming and deserving of our attention.

So Libet was a Catholic and closet dualist. As an experimenter, that rather shaped how he reported his work. The popular understanding of what was found is thus rather misunderstood.

If you turn it around, you can see that instead we live in the world in a way where we are attentionally conscious of what we mean do to do in the next second or so. Then at a faster operating habitual level, the detail gets slotted in - which includes this "reafference" or general sensory warning of what it is shortly going to feel like because our hand is going to suddenly move "of its own accord". But don't panic anyone ... in fact just ignore it. Only panic if the hand fails to get going, or if perhaps there is some other late breaking news that means mission abort - like now seeing the red tail spider lurking by the cornflakes packet.

So the Libet experimental situation was extremely artificial - the opposite of ecologically natural. But it got huge play because it went to the heart of some purely cultural concerns over "the instantaneous unity of consiousness" and "the human capacity for freewill".

The purpose of the digital computer analogy also was to show that, in this case also, individual transistors, or logic gates, or even collections of them, need not have the high level software instructions "translated" to them in the case where the implementation of this high level software specification is a matter of the whole computer being structured in such a way that its molar behavior (i.e. the input/output mapping) simply accords with the high level specification. — Pierre-Normand

Real computers are structured in hierarchical fashion. So once you start to talk about operating systems, languages, compilers, instruction sets, microcode and the rest, you are talking about something quite analogous to the organic situation where the connection from "software" to "hardware" is a multi-level set of constraints. Functions are translated from the level of programmes to the level of physical actions in a way that the two realms are materially or energetically disconnected. What the software can "freely imagine" is no longer limited by what the hardware can "constrainedly do".

Where the computational analogy fails is that there is nothing coming back the other way. The physics doesn't inform the processing. There is no actual interaction between sign and matter as all the hierarchical organisation exists to turn the material world into a machine that can be ignored. That elimination of bottom-up efficient/material cause is then of course why the software can be programmed with the formal/final fantasies of us humans. We can make up the idea of a world and run it on the computer.

So the computer metaphor - at least the Universal Turing Machine version - only goes so far. The organic reality is rather different in that there is a true interaction between sign and matter going on over all the hierarchical levels. Of course, this is more like a neural network or Bayesian brain architecture. But still, there is a world of difference between a computer - a machine designed to divorce the play of symbols from the play of matter - and a mind/brain, which is all about creating a hierarchically complex, and ecologically constrained, system of interaction between the two forms of play.

Computers are not "of this world" so can be used as devices to freely imagine worlds.

Brains are devices constrained by a world. But in making that relationship structurally complex, brains gain the functional degrees of freedom that we call autonomy and subjective cohesion. (The freedom to actually ignore the world being a central one, as I argued.)

That is the well-known philosophical conundrum of the 'subjective unity of experience'. There is a vast literature on that, but it remains mysterious. — Wayfarer

It's not that mysterious once you accept that the unity is mostly being unified by what it successfully ignores. (Which is also what makes the computer analogies being used here fairly inappropriate.)

So attentional processing "unifies" by singling out the novel or surprising. And it does that by suppressing everything else that can be treated as predictable, routine, or irrelevant.

Well I say attention "does it". But of course it is anticipatory modelling and established habit that defines in advance the predictable, routine, or irrelevant. So attention-level processing only has some mopping up to do.

Thus the mind does have its strong central division into habit and attention. Everything that can be dealt with without clear conscious knowledge gets sorted out in 150 to 300 milliseconds by "automatic" habit. Then anything left over becomes a focus of "conscious" attentional processing - which takes 300 to 700 milliseconds to form and stabilise. With attention we are now talking about reportable awareness as - having managed to remove so much unnecessary sensory detail from the picture - we have a small enough "point of view" to retain as a persisting state of working memory.

So when it comes to something like the question of how does one lift one's arm, the usual way is without even attentionally deliberating. Attention is usually focused in anticipatory fashion on some general goal - like getting the cornflakes off the top shelf. Then habit slots in all the necessary muscular actions without need for higher level thought or (working memory) re-presentation. It is only if something goes wrong that we need to stop and think - start forming some different plan, like going to get a chair because our fingers can't in fact reach.

So - as I have argued through the thread - the key is the hierarchical and semiotic organisation of top down constraints over bottom up degrees of freedom. And even a simple action like lifting an arm is highly complex in terms of its many levels of such organisation.

I can lift a hand fast and reflexively if I put it on a hot stove. Pain signals only have to loop as far as the spine to trigger a very unthinking response.

Then I can lift the hand in a habitual way because I am intending in a general way to have my routine breakfast.

Or then I can lift my hand in a very artificial way - as perhaps in a laboratory experiment where I am wired up with electrodes and I'm being asked to notice when my intention to lift the arm first "entered my conscious awareness".

At this point, it is all now about some researcher's model of "freewill" and the surprise that a familiar cultural understanding about the "indivisibility of consciousness" turns out to be quite muddled and wrong.

Not that that will change any culturally prevalent beliefs however. As I say, the mind is set up to be excellent at ignoring things as a matter of entrenched habit. A challenge to preconceptions may cause passing irritation, but it is very easy for prejudice to reassert itself. If - like Querius - you don't like the answer to a question, you just hurry on to another question that you again only want the one answer to.

My question is is math deserving of this respect and trust? Could it not be flawed? What does a mathemstical analysis of a given subject deprive us of? Are there some areas of study where math is harmful instead of beneficial? — TheMadFool

Maths is a model of reality as a perfect syntactical mechanism. It predicts the patterns that will be constructed as the result of completely constrained processes. So if reality is also spontaneous and vague in some fundamental way, maths can't "see" that. It presumes an absolute lack of indeterminism to give a solid basis to its story of determinism.

This isn't a big problem because humans using maths as a tool can apply it with "commonsense". And when humans are actually building "machines" - as they mostly are in maths dominated activities - then the gap between the model and the world being created is hardly noticeable.

The key issue when it comes to applying commonsense is the making of measurements. We have to use our informal judgement when plugging the numbers meant to represent states of the world into our models or systems of equations. So it is outside the actual maths how much we round numbers up, how we spread our sampling, etc, etc. Garbage in, gabage out, as they say.

The flipside of all this is then when we are dealing with a world that is complex and it is not absolute clear what to measure. Or worse still, the world may be actually spontaneous or vague and relatively undifferentiated, and so every definite-sounding measurement will be dangerously approximate.

So the issue is no that maths simply fails to apply to some aspects of life. If you are talking ethics or economics for example, game theory gives some completely exact models which can be used. However then they have to presume a world of machine humans - perfectly rational actors. Thus judgement then has to come in about how much one can rely on this particular modelled presumption. Can the actual model work around the issue by adding some further stochastic factor or is the real world variance in some way "untameable".

So maths works well when the world is made simple - as when building machines. And then complexity can cause fatal problems for this mechanistic modelling when the complexity makes good measurement impractical. For a chaotic system, it may be just physically impossible to measure the initial state of the world with enough accuracy.

Then where the metaphysical strength issues really bite is if the world is actually spontaneous or vague at a fundamental level - as quantum physics says it is.

The final source of indeterminism is the semiotic one - the issue of semantically interpreting a sign or mark. We can both see a word like "honesty" or "beauty" written on a page as a physical symbol. But how do we ever completely co-ordinate our understandings or reactions to the word?

So clearly, to the extent that human lives revolve around the common understanding of systems of signs, there is an irreducible subjectivity that makes maths a poor tool for modelling what is going on. That would be why philosophers would put aesthetics and morality in particular beyond the grasp of such modelling.

However as with the probabilisitc modelling of chaotic and quantum processes, that is not to say maths couldn't be applied to semiosis. Instead, it may be the case that we just haven't really got going on trying. It is not impossible there would be a different answer here in another 100 years.

Indeed, I view consciousness as indivisible .... — Querius

So you say. But I've asked you to show how mind science could have got it so wrong then.

So do you agree there are these three levels as I've described? Or do you dispute it? If so, on what grounds?

If there is not an "I" who encompasses all three levels, how can you overview and be aware of those three levels? — Querius

So do you agree there are these three levels? Or do you dispute it?

My point was that you are talking a monadic substance approach to consciousness - the usual outcome of reductionist simplicity.

I said consciousness - as what it is like to be in the usual human modelling relation with the world - is a complex hierarchically-structured process.

And all that was by way of dealing with the original point - what we would really mean by "top down acting consciousness". To remind you, I was explaining how constraints depend on semiosis and that in fact our human interaction with the world has at least three distinct levels (and so at least three distinct levels in which those constraints are evolving).

If we are talking about the neural level, for example, then that means the top-downness is to do with attentional and intentional brain processes.

But if we are talking about human "self-consciousness" - the self-regulatory awareness of the self as a self - then the source of those higher level constraints come from right outside of individual biology and development. That level of selfhood is socially constructed and linguistically encoded.

Of course everything is then functionally integrated. We hang together pretty well despite these multiple levels of constraint.

So again, are you disputing that there are these three levels of organising constraint that make up the complex process that is being a "conscious human"? If not, present the evidence that contradicts my sketch of the scientific analysis.

All you have done so far is kept jumping to new questions and evading any detailed consideration of the technical arguments already put to you.

But my position deals with your "I" on three Pragmatic levels - genetic, neural and linguistic. All three are explained semiotically as habits of regulation that are produced by more general contexts.

So you can continue to talk confusedly about some singular notion of the experiencing self, but I've already explained the complex nature of "being a human mind" in terms of the empirical facts.

If there is no "I" who perceives and understands the facts of social science, then how can you be aware of the facts of social science? — Querius

Maybe "I" am a social scientist. That is "I" understand and perceive the world in a fashion that is a particular educated habit of some human community. Those in the know will point and say, see, there's a guy whose read his Mead, his Vygotsky, his Harre. He is one of us. And so that is how "I" in turn can recognise "myself".

So I'm not a social scientist in some romantic, intrinsic, ineffable fashion. I can instead see that is "what I am" by all the same objective criteria by which anyone would "be a social scientist". It is not any kind of problem that the source of "my identity" in this regard would be completely communal and so reliant on linguistic structure.

Of course, we humans are also all animals. We are genetically and neurally individual. So if you start to break "consciousness" down into its actual semiotic levels of organisation, there is also no problem in talking about awareness in the kind of "raw feels" way you are concerned with now. You can try to imagine the human mind without its cultural/linguistic habits - and find that science says there is now no introspection or "off-line thinking" going on, just what we might call "extrospection", or living "mindlessly" for the present.

So my objection is that you are just bundling all the complexity into some simplistic and dualistic notion of a mental stuff that is somehow the object of perception. The brain produces a display of data ... and a wee homuncular Querius sits perched in the pituitary gland, or somewhere, soaking up the ever-changing panorama being neurally represented.

You are arguing here as if there is some problem to do with the soul of the machine. And yet a living/mindful system is not a machine (in the literal sense) and so we don't need to worry about souls or other mental stuff that might animate the inanimate.

But the key point is, to reify the self as an object of perception, as something constant and changeless, is a perceptual error. — Wayfarer

Yep. Of course the feeling of being conscious always involves the feeling of intentionality or the feeling of there being a point of view in play. So by logical implication - if you are habituated to believe in a reductionist causality - the act of experiencing requires then a subject who "has" the experience. Which then sets things up nicely for the usual homuncular regress.

Reductionism has no choice but to fall into the trap because it has done away with the richer model of causality which could cash out the self as simply a generic dynamical context. Some accumulated weight of habit which thus gives mental events a probable direction.

I cannot doubt my existence. I exist. Undeniably so. — Querius

Of course you can't doubt it ... given that you are in existence as a socially constructed self regulatory habit of thought.

And indeed, you are reading right from the script in protesting your existential essence in these terms.

Modern romantic mythology requires that you be solipsistic being in this regard. You have been soaked in a Nietzschian ideal of selfhood from the earliest exposure to popular culture. So nothing could insult you more than the suggestion you might actually be a habitual product of some time and place in the developing story of human history.

Heard it all before a million times. But I stick with the facts of social science.

There are two possibilities here: — Querius

You are ignoring the third possibility that consciousness is just a bad word in that is sounds like it is talking about something substantial, and that is not the right way to think about it. You are presuming something that doesn't warrant presuming, and then getting angry when others point that out.

When I choose to raise my arm, certain neural changes occur. Okay. But again, how does that work? — Querius

What you are neglecting is that the "I" here is a socially constructed concept enabled by the learnt semiotic habit of speech. So the top down causality has to be traced back now to human social concepts about autonomously regulated behaviour. In the final analysis, in is not you pulling the strings. You are just responding with the various degrees of freedom formed for you due to your particular cultural upbringing.

So you do have freewill ... or rather society set you up from childhood with the habits of rational self-regulation. You then creatively fill your society's purposes (or you get locked up, or in various ways, physically constrained.

In other words, this semiosis business has multiple levels. There are at least three levels of regulatory code we are talking about here - genetic, neural and linguistic. Each code supports an even richer level of evolving downward constraint over material action.

The broader question I am asking here is about the interaction problem wrt emergentism. — Querius

In a nutshell, information can regulate physicochemical instability. If the physics is delicately poised - what they used to call on the edge of chaos - then an almost immaterial nudge can make the switch between competing states.

This is the biosemiotic basis of life. The fact that this is happening right down at the nanoscale of cellular processes is a recent biophysical discovery. Everything is constantly on the verge of falling apart, so by the same token, only needs the slightest regulatory nudge to reform. Top down informational control of living processes is possible because the physical machinery has critical instability - in complete contrast to the reductionist expectation that bodies must be built from strong and stable materials.

So that is the basic principle - empirically demonstrated.

And then brains are just higher level information generators, supplying the regulatory nudges that manage the critical instabilities that are a muscular body in purposeful interaction with an environment.

So forget "consciousness" with all its antique Metaphysical connotations.

If you want the modern scientific story, we are talking about semiosis - the ability of rate independent information to regulate rate dependent dynamics. A system of signs (or a model) can act top down to manage a sea of critically unstable physical processes in such a way that organised and meaningful behaviour arises from a mess of potential chaos.

The point I made already though, is that this top-down form of constraint is not acting as causation, top-down, it is passive. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not passive. Individual neuron firing is actually being suppressed or enhanced.

It's also not purely top-down of course. As I've said often enough, it is the interaction that counts. So you can't really treat selective attention as "a thing" that floats above the action. Instead it is a rapidly evolving balance of activity across the brain - a global act of integration~differentiation.

But critically, it is a wave of purpose forming action. To attend is to be already intending.

And also it is memory and expectation based. So the brain knows how to make sense of the current world because there is this "top-down" weight of prior experience to direct things. And I put top-down in quotes to show I am talking about a hierarchical story where the higher level stuff acts on a larger spatiotemporal scale, so avoids your vicious circularity that comes from thinking a process like attention or consciousness happens "all at once" in a flash.

This is what I was arguing in the case of your army analogy in the other thread. What you call "the army", consists of a structure of static constraints. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. There is no need for constraints to be considered as passive or static. But certainly - if you follow hierarchy theory - they do play out on a larger spatiotemporal scale. So from the point of view of the soldier, the army is forever the same. But of course the army also changes over sufficient time. It is only ever relatively static or passive.

The cause of the army is bottom-up, each individual coming in and choosing to do one's part. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well this just comes back to your own mystical beliefs about freewill. So I can repeat the same argument and you will avoid it just as swiftly. Anyway, the individual soldier is a soldier because army training has pruned away all the unhelpful civilian freedoms he might have had as a raw recruit. And if the soldier felt he had "freewill", that is one of the first things that boot camp was designed to hammer out of him.

Eventually indoctrination will lead the soldier to learn some narrowed set of habits and so will of course "choose" to behave in military fashion. That will even carry over in civilian life. Everyone knows this.

You have the dubious claim that conscious intention is the top. Can you offer any support for this assumption of yours, that conscious intention is the top? In what context is intention the top of anything? — Metaphysician Undercover

It's standard neuroscience I would say. Attention acts top down by applying a state of selective constraint across the brain. You can hook an electrode up to a retinal ganglion cell and watch it in action. Or an EEG can record the fact as it happens in general fashion as a suddenly spreading wave of suppression - the P300.

So, as far as neuroscience goes, folk wouldnt talk about it as consciousness (too many unhelpful connotations for the professionals). But top down integrative constraints are how the brain works.

Note that this is still basically a biological perspective which understand life it terms of underlying thermodynamic and other physical laws. — Wayfarer

Of course. It would have to be otherwise I would be in trouble.

So life|mind is an example of radical emergence ... which is also in a deeper sense just more of the same.

The signal characteristic of bios is that it is negentropic complexity that is thus the precise "other" of entropic simplicity. No one would mistake an organism for a rock. And yet still, on close inspection, negentropy is only possible because it accelerates local entropy production. So it's purpose is completely aligned with the second law and the universal arrow of time. Yet it is also completely different ... when we start describing it in its own apparent terms at its own emergent scale of being.

Now this physicalist understanding of life - as biosemiotic dissipative structure - is completely uncontroversial in theoretical biology circles (at least the ones I choose to circulate in ;) ). And there is no reason not to think it extends also to explain mindfulness as a physicalist phenomenon.

The big challenge for semiotics is instead about heading in the other direction - explaining the Cosmos itself in pan-semiotic terms. That is still a speculative Metaphysical venture, and not yet on the agenda in any open way amongst physicists. Although David Layzer has been pushing the dissipative structure story there for a long time now.

Isn't this contradictory to say that constraints are responsible for freedom? I don't know how that could work — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. And I've already explained it to you in this thread as in umpteen other threads.

Well, I've seen you attempt to explain your understanding of hierarchical organisation, and like the one above, which I commented on, they all end up with a vicious circle. — Metaphysician Undercover

But as that vicious circle is locked up, biting its own tail, inside the small world of your own imagination, I can't feel unduly worried.

I mean you could read a book about it - Stan Salthe wrote a pair of splendid ones - but I've no evidence you actually put any effort into researching the positions you take.

Why is it that e.g. a bacterium avoids death? Does it fear death? Does it even have a concept of death? — Querius

Is this a serious question? Are you now arguing here as a theist and so have some dualistic concern about bacteria having souls and freewill?

Or do you guys assume that ‘striving to survive’ is just one of those things that ‘emerges’ due to a ‘limit’ or some similar 'cause'? — Querius

If teleological talk frightens you for some reason, you can think of it as simply a way of characterising the imperative to grow and reproduce.

And why would freedom be constructing constraints anyway, this is opposed to its nature? — Metaphysician Undercover

How is it opposed to its nature if the constraints are responsible for its nature?

Which is really more laughable, the vicious circle, or the attempt to avoid it? — Metaphysician Undercover

Obviously the attempts to avoid it. Or rather, the failure to understand how hierarchical organisation is not viciously circular at all.

No-one? Are you sure? Tell me, what is the universe floating in? — Querius

What do you mean by "float"? In what sense could that be a property the Universe is said to possess.

But how does this apply to a universe floating in nothingness? Assuming that this universe has a certain shape, we cannot coherently say that ‘nothingness’ causes the shape of this universe, because nothingness cannot have causal power, cannot constrain anything. — Querius

Already your cosmological speculation has started to go very wrong. No-one says the universe floats in nothing, let alone that this would be what gives it a shape.

In general relativity, the shape is flat unless otherwise deformed by its material contents. And because those material contents are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, they will spread themselves about in a way that minimises the deformation.

As Wheeler so famously put it, "Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve." Which is the holistic view in a nutshell. Each is in complementary fashion the cause of the other.

But this movement towards complexity didn't have any autonomous teleology since the complex molecules, or their parts, didn't have any organic function. It is only when early replicators not only were passively selected by environment pressure according to fitness, but also began to strive to survive and replicate, that they could be considered alive. They then had teleology in the sense that their parts became functional organs and they acquired autonomous behaviors. — Pierre-Normand

That is essentially it. But I would add that chemical evolution would be teleological in carrying out the wishes of the laws of thermodynamics. So molecular complexity would arise because its was being successful at accelerating local entropification rates. Chemical evolution would be functional in that (inorganic) sense.

And then the big shift is the development of a semiotic code or system memory - the RNA or whatever that created the epistemic cut between the "program" and "the world". Now you have the new possibility of local functional autonomy. The organism can mean something to itself.

So the inorganic realm is still teleological (in the dilutest fashion). Where it is different is mostly that it lacks local autonomy in the semiotic sense. The telos is the general or "ambient" one of the how the complexly stratified physio-chemical realm of the planet's surface is serving the second law. Life and mind are then actually something new in internalising that telic imperative symbolically, and by doing so, managing to entropify the world at an even greater rate.

Thus, the alphabet of life -- what is being varied, mutated and selected by environmental pressures -- doesn't consist in meaningless nucleotide sequences. It rather consists in functional (and thus meaningful) elements of anatomy, physiology and behavior. This teleology is manifested in the structure of whole organisms, and their organs, only in the ecological context of the holistic forms of life that they instantiate. From the moment of abiogenesis onwards natural selection became a top-down (and teleological) causal process. — Pierre-Normand

Yep. That was the point. Life has meaning because ... there is death as its contrast. So because of biosemiosis or a new symbolic level of action, an organism could become a survival machine. While of course being constrained by the general purposes of the second law, it could also now think its own prime purpose was to flourish and multiply. As a direction in nature, it could point counterfactually away from entropic death and decay and towards negentropic life and growth ... for a time at least.

And even when the body dies, the genome persists into the next generation. The functional information gets transmitted and not lost. What the genes pass on is hardly meaningless noise but the essence of what it means to live again in this world.

So that makes the very idea of "random mutation" rather an obvious conflict. Sure, people used to talk about mutation in terms of "hopeful monsters", but I hope they don't even mention the phrase to school kids anymore.

In fact mutation itself is a highly constrained or tuned thing in nature. Evolvability itself has to evolve. The degree to which the organism exposes its essence to the vagaries of fate has to be a careful choice as the history packaged up in a genome is hard-won information.

Which is why "random mutation" no longer explains anything in modern biology. It is just the start of the unravelling of what has turned out to be a very complex part of the whole evolutionary deal.

The constraint, as a cause, is inherently passive. It functions as a cause merely by affecting an occurring activity. This presupposes the existence of the activity. So the constraint is a cause only if there is activity. Therefore we still need to consider "cause" in its true primary sense, as the activity itself, which is required in order that a constraint may be capable of being a cause. If we focus on the constraints, as causes, and divide constraints into top-down and bottom-up constraints, we have simply distracted our attention from the true, primary cause, the activity itself, which is being constrained. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, the reductionist imperative being expressed as a law of thought. If nature seems divided against itself by a metaphysical dichotomy, we must rush in and save it from itself by deciding that the duality is in fact a monadism. So we collapse the complexity and hoist the reductionist flag, proclaiming all is calm and well in the world again. Only one of any two things can be fundamental.

It is laughable. This is what happens because humans have developed an essentially mechanical culture. If you make machines, eventually you want to be a machine.

Anyway. Causality is dichotomous because that is simply how metaphysical development works. To change a vague state of affairs, the vagueness must be crisply divided towards its complementary extremes of possibility. This is the dialectical logic that got started in ancient Greece and now - because people believe themselves to be meat machines (even if infested with some kind of secondary soul stuff) - it can't even be seen when it stares them in the face.

So it is not a surprise but a prediction of dialectics that causality would gain its real world definiteness by becoming divided against itself in logical fashion. Thus we have - in holism - the hierarchically-organised interaction between global constraints and local freedom.

We have bottom-up construction matched by top-down constraints. Each is the cause of the other (as constraints shape the construction, and the construction (re)builds the generalised state of constraint).

And yes, constraints would seem to passively exist as a context ... because the freedoms are in complementary fashion, the active part of the deal. So causality covers all the bases. It gains real world definiteness because it has both its active and passive forms to create some actual state of contrast ... that is another way it is no longer just vague possibility.

If we focus on the constraints, as causes, and divide constraints into top-down and bottom-up constraints, — Metaphysician Undercover

I should note that you keep getting the detail of anything I say quite wrong in your eagerness to shoehorn it into some semblance of what a reductionist might say.

It is freedom that constructs bottom-up. The role of top-down constraint is to give shape to that freedom. So constraints (as the bloody word says) are all about limiting freedoms. They take away or suppress a vast variety of what might have been possible actions ... and in so doing, leave behind some very sharply directed form of action. Or as physics would call it - to denote the particularity that results from this contextual sharpening - a "degree of freedom".

You are missing the point because of your unfamiliarity with basic biological theory.

Dawkins' Weasel algorithm is a simple illustration of the power of constraints - given mutable variety. So not only does he have the computer selecting the letter pattern closest to a pre-existing goal, but also the computer generates a population pool of a 100 sequences at a time, with a built-in variance of 5%. So even the mutational variety is set so as to meet some external pre-existing goal.

Dawkins says the final sequence goal is not a big teleological puzzle because in nature, that becomes just the (now utterly contingent) constraint of some fitness landscape. So first you have a world created by some programmer playing God. Then - in good old reductionist fashion - the world suddenly takes over the goal-setting ... in a way that is as little teleological as it is possible to imagine. It becomes good old random shit again.

Great. And also notice that nothing further is said about the programmer's role in setting up the mutational variety so nicely.

Nor also - the even deeper point - that the whole example skips over the issue of the epistemic cut where physical acts become symbolic acts (and vice versa).

So as I pointed out, the very thing of marks with meanings that could be interpreted - letters that could make words that get read by a mind, or gene sequences that could make proteins that then become the switches and the motors regulating dissipative metabolic processes - goes assumed and not explained. In Dawkins example, we have already crossed the Rubicon between the physical realm and the symbolic realm.

So - as usual when listening to an arch-reductionist - there is a ton of question begging. And my holistic approach addresses all those questions that go to the very thing of how life - as a biosemiotic relation - could arise emergently in the first place.

Hence while your strained attempts at a put-down are mildly amusing, I might wish you would make the same effort to actually read a little deeper before parading your basic ignorance of the issues you have chosen to raise here.

Selection obviously does not create variety. Variety is created by random mutations. — Querius

Why are you babbling about mutations? My point about your weasel was that the letters already exist. So how did that situation develop? Recombination is one thing. But where did that alphabet come from? If you want to say it evolved, run me through the story.

I know you react viscerally against anything you perceive as a 'God idea', but consider other models of cosmic order, such as logos, Tao or Dharma. They too suggest a kind of 'intelligible order' but not along the lines of what is usually described as 'theistic personalism'. — Wayfarer

Talk of an external intelligent creator is simply question begging - displacement activity rather than metaphysics.

But talk of an immanent organic telos is something I can get right behind as being even "quite magical", and a good reason to reject "silly reductionists". So I am always citing the various ancient expressions of this general naturalistic view of existence. You could add Judaic Ein Sof to that list.

I do suppose that at some point your emergence narrative also gets passed the phase of nothingness. — Querius

But the problem is that you don't understand the current science well enough to have a clue what stage the narrative has reached. And you don't seem that interested in finding out either.

Random mutations. — Querius

So natural selection can certainly remove those. But how does natural selection also create them?

(It's a basic issue in evolutionary science.)

The two stories are a perfect fit. — Querius

But they are not the same story at all.

Your scrambled sentence already begins with the counterfactual definiteness of some set of letters ... a conventional set of marks which I know how to read and thus can tell a gibberish sequence from one that has a reasonable interpretation.

And your citing of Dawkins and evolutionary constraints continues to underline that you are nowhere near the kind of holistic emergence I am talking about.

It is a central problem of evolutionary theory that evolution can only explain the reduction in variety. It can't explain the presence of that variety in the first place.

This is why theoretical biology has gone over to evo-devo thinking in a big way. A theory of evolution has to be coupled to a theory of development (or dissipative structure).

They exist if a physical theory postulates their existence, and that theory is successful in explaining various empirical phenomena.

There are two grounds for contending that X exists: X is a subject of direct experience, or X is postulated by a successful explanatory theory. A theory is successful, of course, when it correctly predicts future experience. — GE Morton

Yep. Like the Copenhagen Interpretation, we accept our epistemic limitations. In the end, all we have got is some state of conception that looks pretty consistent. We create for ourselves some forrmal theory. And then we agree with our selves that certain acts of measurement can be taken as signs of the thing we mean to talk about. We can read a number off a thermometre and say "that is the temperature". And away we go, making predictions - ie: suggestions about further acts of measurement.

So the slippery bit is the act of measurement. We have to presume that our instruments are making some kind of proper translation of the physical reality (the thing in itself) into the symbolic currency on which are theoretical conceptions are grounded. The numbers on the dial are phenomenon, not noumenon. But we operate on the expectation that the relation we have establish with the world in this fashion is reliable. It tells us what we need to know - at least in terms of the purposes we might bring to the table.

So "existence" becomes a symbolised reality. We say yep, that is the temperature - I read the number off a suitable instrument.

Of course we can always hope that through all our scientific advance, we are really getting down to the bottom of things. But just from thinking about the logic of this modelling relation we have with reality, we can see that might be a rather false hope.

For a start, the essence of any act of measurement is a severe constraint on physical existence. The needs of computation mean we have to impose finitude on the world to allow sharp observation. Less is more when it comes to information that has meaning. We want the message coming in from our instruments to be all signal and no noise.

And likewise the other feature of modelling is that good models need to be based on (unrealistically) sharp dichotomies. We want absolute separation of that which (as is itself implied by the contrast) not in fact in a state of actual separation.

So we come at reality with a crisp division - like law vs particle. Or formal vs material cause. We break things apart with conceptual violence so as to stand "outside" the world we must in fact stand within in fully participatory fashion. That is a necessary fact of modelling epistemology. But it is then naive metaphysics to think that the needs of modelling mean that the world in itself has both laws and particles that exist in some mysterious dualistic and absolute fashion.

The complementary limits on reality are just its conceptual extremes. That is why it is equally wrong to talk about laws or particles "actually existing". Yet as far as our modelled understanding of reality goes, both would be real in the sense of being real measurable bounds on actual existence. Formal cause vs material cause (what laws and particles represent) are what you would seem to see if there was really such a thing as standing outside the world as it substantially is.

Of course, folk have little problem of understanding formal cause in this fashion. But they get very prickly when it is suggested that material cause is in exactly the same boat - by logical necessity.

And Peirce called our existing universe God's argument, a symbol whose object is Himself and whose interpretant consists of the living realities that it is constantly working out as its conclusions. — aletheist

Forgive me, but I can't take any argument for a divine creating intelligence seriously. There is just nothing about this actual observable world which suggests that minds exist outside a state of semiotic complexity. So I am happy to reduce existence to that abstraction - the notion that the universe itself arises as a kind of mindful, self-organising state in being pan-semiotic. And if you want to say that is what theists might really mean by "god", then fine. But once you start attributing free choice to an immaterial creator or material being, that's another kettle of fish. It goes against the whole point of even in believing the sign relation to be the fundamental seed of existence.

Theism (of the first cause type) is simply contradictory of Peicean semiosis ... even if Peirce himself made some weak arguments for the difficulty in resisting such theism in the end.

And as to what Peirce really thought about maths, its not something I've really looked into, but the commentary suggests he vacillated between constructivism and Platonism - like all philosophy of maths does.

https://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/file/index/docid/53339/filename/ijn_00000208_00.txt

But my own argument here is that his oscillation between these two poles doesn't have to mean he was simply confused or inconsistent. Instead, I have argued that this standard dilemma is to be expected because the actuality is in fact that both poles are correct in defining the dichotomistic limits of (mathematical) being. There is both contingency and necessity in play - with actuality being the effective balance.

So at the worst, it is a "good thing" that Peirce didn't just lump for one metaphysical extreme over the other. To reduce to some monism would be contradictory of his own holistic triadicism.

Thus yes, every mathematician in history might have added up two plus two incorrectly. And yet also the mathematics of symmetry could be maths that has a Platonic strength that even "God" could not question.

(As further clarification, the maths of symmetry I hold as the highest form of maths because it is the pure science of constraints. Arithmetic is clearly just the science of constructive acts. That is why arithmeticians do end up making lumpen statements like "God created the integers". If your mathematical metaphysics has to start with concrete atomistic construction, then like all reductionist, you end up with this kind of hand-waving towards foundations as brute facts. Arithmetic's lack of holism is why division is such a problematic operation of course. But I digress even further...)

Correct me if I am wrong, but does the very concept of 'emergence' not imply a lower level of (more) fundamental laws? Emergent stuff emerge from fundamental stuff, right?
Unless you are arguing that it is emergence all the way down, which seems incompatible with the concept of emergence, I do not see the relevance to a discussion about fundamental laws. — Querius

So if more particular laws emerge from more general laws, what's illogical about extrapolating from that observable fact? If what we see is emergence, then why shouldn't we think that is all there is, rather than having to leap to belief in something mysterious, transcendent or supernatural?

All that is required then is a proper understanding of emergence itself. And your claim - the usual reductionist one which makes emergence some kind of elaborate linguistic illusion - is not a proper model of emergence.

Emergence - as it is understood by hierarchy theorists, Peirceans, and others who take it seriously - is a holistic or cybernetic deal. The whole shapes the parts that constructs the whole. So what is "fundamental" is hierarchical development itself. Existence begins not with nothing but instead an "everythingness" - a "state" of unbounded potential. And then limitations develop to produce definite somethingness.

As I say, this is simply a fact when it comes to accounting for the "higher level laws". It is what we mean by them being emergent. Complexity and particularity arises as the general (some generalised set of freedoms) becomes more constrained in specific ways. History locks in its own future by removing certain possibilities as things that could actually happen. And the future is then woven from what was thus left open as a possibility.

So we know this holistic understanding of emergence is right just from looking at the world and listening to how physics actually describes it. For that reason, it is more logical to expect that emergence of this kind can explain it all ... or at least get as near as we are ever going to get to answering that ultimate question of "why anything?".

But instead you have fallen into the usual trap of expecting reality to bottom-out in some fundamental atomistic stuff. And in the 1880s, most physicists would have agreed with you, feeling that the great success of classical mechanics and atomistic metaphysics had basically put an end to physics - leaving it "an exhausted mine". Yet then guess what happened next.

Of course it is just as bad to make the other monistic claim - that everything is instead top-down. That just winds up in mysticism.

If we want to talk about real emergence, it is irreducibly triadic (because everything must emerge - the forms, the materials, and the dynamical balance of these two which is then the substantial actuality).

So you are not even dealing with the actual argument of a proper holist yet. You are just thinking in terms of the reductionism that wants to neuter emergence by treating it as "mere appearance". Or in the slightly more sophisticated defensive position of "supervenience", one shrugs one shoulders and says even if all this top-down stuff is true, it can't change anything important down here at the level of concrete atomistic particulars.

But unfortunately for supervenience, there are no concrete particulars except to the degree that top-down constraints have shaped them.

One can imagine taking an instantaneous snapshot of some material system and transporting its information to make a perfect clone ... that would then roll on as if nothing had happened. Beam me up Scotty! Dissolve my atoms in one place, produce a replica in another. Hey presto.

But science fiction is science fiction. Real science knows it has a fundamental observer problem. The acts of measurement needed to animate the mathematical equations are not reducible to the formalisms of theories. And this is going to catch you out any time you start talking about the big questions of existence.

So supervenient emergence sounds good - if you don't understand the basic problem of observerless physics.

It is something that does catch out everyone. Tom is another example in that he repeats the same error at the level of the information. He believes in observerless computation. And so he has no problem with a scifi story of human minds being downloaded. Or existence itself being a grand computation (finitude being something that can be taken formally for granted and not instead a fundamental problem in being an informal issue of deciding when an act of measurement is "sufficient to purpose").

Anyway, the point is that to dismiss a metaphysics of emergence, one first has to learn quite a lot about what that position entails. Reductionists have conjured up their own strawman versions which they can erect at the boundaries of their domain and say "see we understand, and it doesn't change anything". To people who actually study emergence, you can see why the constant waving of the limp effigy of supervenience or epiphenomenalism is rather annoying. :)

He also insisted that we cannot be absolutely certain that 2+2=4, since human fallibility entails that it is possible - even if very unlikely - that every single person who ever performed this addition made the same mistake. — aletheist

Sure, Cartesian doubt means that all knowledge is in principle fallible. But Peirce then built his career on dismissing Cartesian doubt by insisting on starting right where we are - in some state of belief. And then that the purpose of reasoned inquiry is to minimise uncertainty (rather than pursue the phantasm of absolute certainty).

So what you say seems to cut across the whole tenor of his thinking for me.

What Peirce says is: "Mathematical certainty is not absolute certainty. For the greatest mathematicians sometimes blunder, and therefore it is possible ‑ barely possible ‑ that all have blundered every time they added two and two" (CP 4.478).

So his point appears to be that humans are certainly fallible. Even if infinitely likely, it is still infinitesimally possible no-one has ever managed to get the simplest of all sums right.

But an omnipotent God couldn't be that incompetent surely? And more to the point, there is a big difference in executing a calculation and providing the very world which makes a mathematical model a matter of logical necessity. From certain reasonable axioms, certain deductive consequences (like arithmetical operations or permutation symmetries) must flow.

So either God is constrained Himself by the general principle of intelligibility - existence as the universal growth of reasonableness - or the whole of Peirce's metaphysics collapses for a far more serious reason. Semiotics just doesn't exist unless the sign relation is in fact a sign of something.

Assuming omnipotence, as Peirce did, the only thing that could have limited God's options were God's own previous choices, including the creation of those mathematical symmetries. — aletheist

But it is one thing saying God could choose to create a world in which 1+1=3, quite another to believe it in your heart. Do you think Peirce would have gone along with such a frontal assault on natural reason?

So you now agree that relationships themselves have causal status when we talk about the reality of things.

Gentleman, our work here is done!

Yet another reason not to be a big fan of Sean Carroll. :)

But anyway, the facts are that isolated water molecules have a bond angle of 104.4 degrees, yet the symmetry of the snowflake demands they get comfortable with the new number of 120 degrees.

I mean do you (or Carroll) believe that even the water molecules, or the nucleons of which they are composed, have some absolute fixed shape rather than an effective shape - one that is a holistic dynamical balance or some general average? C'mon.

Chaos is a fully deterministic feature of some time-reversible dynamical laws. — tom

You are confusing the models with the reality being modelled. The map you hold in your hand may be time-reversible, the territory it describes looks to be irreversibly dissipative.

But of course, your time-reversible laws don't take account of the material fact that energy is involved in there being a spatiotemporal process.

So we already know how our current best models of dynamics are incomplete. The motivating force of a matter field has to be inserted by hand still.

Any fool knows that deterministic chaos is reversibly deterministic, exactly as it says on the box. But any fool also ought to know that someone has to go out and make the acts of measurements to feed the hungry system of equations. And at that point, the harsh truth that observers are really involved in reality becomes more than just a sideline epistemic issue.

So just like QM and relativity, chaos theory also has its strong version of the "collapse" issue. That is how we know it to be a "fundamental" theory. We have talked the observables to death and now have to turn around and somehow deal with the still informal issue of the observer.

Again, that is what makes Peirce such a splendid chap. He was on to the metaphysics of this in a big way. He managed to reduce the observer~observables dichotomy to a formal abstract model - his semeiotic relation. He came up with the right approach to quantum interpretation even before the quantum was discovered.

God conceived an inexhaustible continuum of possibilities, and then chose which of them to actualize. — aletheist

But could God have had a choice if mathematical symmetries limited His options rather rigorously?

The tendency to take habits was one of those spontaneous occurrences at first, but its very nature was to persist and reinforce itself, so it did. Then other things began to take habits, and that is how matter eventually came about, with the "laws of nature" serving as its habits. — aletheist

What is missing here - from a modern hierarchy theory point of view at least - is that wholes simplify their parts so that they increasing have a better fit.

Like I said about the way snowflake symmetry has to bend water molecules to shape, the collective level of action acts as a literal shaping constraint on the spontaneity that is doing the reacting. It limits absolute freedom by imposing some common direction or character on all free action.

And this is why habits are absolutely real. They are the cause of regularity all the way down.

Peircean metaphysics certainly gets this irreducibly complex triadic relation. But a minor criticism is that it doesn't really foreground this further crucial wrinkle of the causal deal.

The chaos, the crystal's chance path, during the formation of snowflake fractals is comfortably situated in the context of our orderly stable lawful universe. IOWs it is not chaos all the way down. It is chaos embedded in order. — Querius

What do you think I was saying? The only subtlety is that that I add that the chaos is "embedded in the order" all the way back to the start. Which is what a logic of vagueness would be required to model. Things have to begin with the unexpressed potential for chaos~order as the yin yang synergistic outcome. And so now we have a third thing to label - unexpressed potential. Which is what I am calling Vagueness, or Anaximander called Apeiron, Peirce called Firstness (as well as vagueness), etc.

Moreover the law ‘every snowflake is six-sided’, which emerges due to symmetry/equifinality, is fully determined by underlying more fundamental laws, such as the laws which dictate what binding angles are permissible for water molecules. — Querius

Hah. Snowflakes are a little more complicated in fact. Water molecules actually have to bend more than they want to as their "natural angle" is not exactly that of a hexagonal symmetry. So they are an example of top-down causality or constraint producing the simplified regularity required for the very expression of the hexagonal order that comes to historically dominate the accidents (the accident that is the attachment of further water molecules).

So snowflakes are a good example of an effective solution - a global equilibrium balance that reshapes the very stuff out of which it is being formed. What you call "fundamental" is what has got fundamentally pwned.

My point is: sure you can watch some pretty amazing things emerge in nature by a combination of law and chance/chaos, but this does not tell us that chaos can explain the natural laws. — Querius

Well it should be clear that "chaos" is a pretty bad word once you start to study the reality closely. Even when chaos theory became vogue in the 1980s, it was wildly misunderstood.

So of course I am talking about dynamical self-organisation. And chaos is the state of things when imagined with the fewest possible constraints. But you can't just have ... no constraints, or no boundary conditions.

So chaos doesn't explain natural laws - in the sense that order just emerges from disorder. That would be merely a reversal of orthodox fundamentalism or absolutism. Chaos is not the cause of all things, and order merely its effect.

My argument in favour of effective physics is instead that the chaos~lawfulness dichotomy would be a mutually-formative deal from the vague get-go. It is there as a relation in seed form even before anything "actually happens".

So it is the division that pre-exists the existence that manifests as a result of it being the case. It is the (triadic) relation that is fundamental (triadic as in its vague dyadic initial state, it of course has its whole future developmental history as a compressed axis of action and memory).

We have looked deep into the dark heart of "chaos" and found in fact precise mathematics. Order is inevitable even in chaos as chaos - to actually exist in a way we could then point back at - needs organisation or structure like any system or process.

Thus what I am talking about is an empirical discovery by science which is still recent enough not to have sunk in with that many people. But really, metaphysics should never be the same again.