So we can assign priority to doing what is morally good instead, as a goal which begins where growth ends. — Metaphysician Undercover

But ecologically growth doesn’t have to end. The limits to growth are limits in terms of certain unchecked exponentials. Population. Atmospheric carbon. Ecosystem destruction.

Population is enough connected to everyday life that it has been self-correcting. The problem there is we still must add a few billion, and yet we are slowing reproductive rates so fast that a grey unbalance is it own new exponential problem. A coming glut of centenarians to worry about. A double whammy from having to adjust numbers too fast.

Also it is arguable that given time we could run civilisation much as we know it off the solar flux and a big investment in sensible green tech.

And while we were at, reinvent the world of work and community in ways more to our liking.

So somewhere between how we want to live and what a planet can sustain can be a political setting we seek to optimise. But can that be captured as a snappy slogan or ethical algorithm? That is where the work starts. That would be connecting the is and the ought in some meaningful dialectical way.

You're an odd fish. — Banno

I might be insulted if this wasn’t confirming my point.

Between the iron posts and the paper maché, you mean? — Wayfarer

What was the Newtonian dream? A single act of measurement - the initial conditions of a logically determined system - would tell its story for all time. Indeed backwards or forwards in time with equal ease.

But then even that encountered the three body problem, the Galilean relativity problem, the spinning bucket problem, etc. The holism missing from the reductionism.

So the reductionist can’t live without the holist to complete their schemes. But the counter logic of the holist is actually intellectually challenging. As a debate, the energy gets diverted into the trivialities of idealism vs realism or other mock-tournaments of metaphysical yore.

Holism means that epistemology and ontology can be divided, and yet they must also remain connected. There must be the two-way interface of the epistemic cut. An Umwelt. A point at which the informational models can do real work in their worlds in a way that is transparent and undeniable in its causal plausibility. That is, in the testable theories of biosemiosis.

In quantum theory, Copenhagen interpretation made the right kind of dialectical start. Decoherence brought in thermodynamics, but not the epistemic cut needed to stop the kind of classical logic splurge banjo is talking about in the way it seemed to entail a Many Worlds interpretation.

I have outlined many times how biosemiosis now adds the epistemic cut to the business of quantum interpretation. As a mechanism, a modelling relation, even our enzymes and respiratory chains are actually doing that - preparing states of coherence with the intention of collapsing them and so ratcheting the entropy flows of a Cosmos guided by the telos of the newly NASA-rediscovered concept of dissipative structure.

But as I agree, none of this is intellectually easy. So much always to be learnt!

You fool no-one but yourself with those kinds of comments. Your butt is stinging. :wink:

This latter is shown explicitly in classical logic by the explosion ρ^~ρ⊃ψ, that from a contradiction anything follows. — Banno

Still sticking it to a strawman? Actually read Hegel why don't you.

Here for example an account....

While it is true that Hegel’s speculative philosophy is a systematic unfolding, it is an error to suppose that the Hegelian system operates as a smooth, progressive development, mechanically moving forward in a unidirectional manner.

The Science of Logic is not a simple movement where one term encounters its antithesis and sublates itself. On the contrary, causality engenders a reciprocal action, and is what Hegel calls a double transition or a double movement (gedopplete Bewegung), where the cause determines the effect, and the effect determines the cause.

Sublation is composed of “two factors conditioned by negativity, these being the two modalities of suppression and preservation…both together forming the energy of the negative.”8 It is precisely this energy of the negative that gives Hegel’s negation of negation its power and force. Sublation determines what it sublates. When something is absolutely negated, it isn’t entirely cancelled out, there is a minimal remainder and it is this preservation that transforms the sublated term into something decidedly new.

And so on with of course increasingly less clarity in the attempt to pursue Hegel's essentially right ideas into their ever deeper thickets of prose. Thank goodness an actual logician like Peirce came along to sort things out.

But the point is that even Hegel, obscure that he is, wasn't arguing the kind of caricature of dialectical logic that you accuse him of.

While classical logic might well implode as it does with the Liar's paradox and anything else requiring a more holistic metaphysics, this is why Peirce sought to secure the force of the PNC as the way out of vagueness, not as the door to it.

From a vague potential, anything could possibly follow it might seem. But no in fact. Only dialectical division becomes possible as the self-organising, self-balancing, way to split possibility towards its mutually-opposed limits of being. Reality can be made safe for the counterfactuality of the laws of thought. The Cosmos can be understood by the light of natural reason. The PNC pragmatically works because the dialectic gets us there by locking in bivalence and allowing us to proceed to the third step of Peirce's logical holism. The place where even the general or universal becomes the real and so allows the LEM to pragmatically apply as a logical tool when talking about the particular or contextual.

...and of course, you were always saying this... — Banno

Just as you were always agreeing I guess. :chin:

Just as I said. — Wayfarer

But perhaps not clearly? There is still this tendency to slide from an epistemic to ontic position in your choice of words. I add the scare quotes to try to maintain this distinction.

And it all matters. We might be just modellers of the world, but we also do attempt to then remake that world in our own image – a point crucial to my take on the OP. The aim of consciousness is to construct the reality of our dreams. :grin:

So that divides the world into the part that resists our desires and the part which we have made materially conform.

Again the kitchen utensils and household furniture issue, the lumpen realist's examples of choice. The things we make that wouldn't otherwise exist. The unanalysed position where human intention and natural order are conflated in a caricature of metaphysical inquiry.

"Behold! A realm of medium sized dry goods. Chairs, pens, tables, forks, doors, fridges. Puppies that shouldn't be kicked but stones that you freely can."

Nothing of value comes from this kind of cherry-picking where only material objects with the imprint of human intentions are taken as the canonical examples of how reality as a whole operates. It is either intellectually dishonest or puzzlingly ignorant.

Which is why I have stressed that is/ought thinking can't be supported by such arguments. If we have already stamped material reality with our heavy imprint of form then we can't treat that as nature in itself. It is nature as now mediated by a semiotic modelling relation. And attention has to turn to the physical reality of how that works. Enter at this point, a modern sophisticated understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics – recently rediscovered by NASA astrobiologists apparently.

nstead, I view the area between the red & blue curves in the Entropy graph as Negentropy — Gnomon

But what else did Layzer label it in calling it "negative entropy/possible information".

Negentropy was the term Schrödinger popularised back in the 1940s with his What is Life?.

Did your astrobiologists remember that classic as they restated what has been well known among those who study these things for so many years.

No need for the scare quotes around understanding. Which pretty well illustrates the point of the ‘mind-created world’. — Wayfarer

Not so quick. An understanding is an Umwelt. It is the manufacturing, or co-dependent arising, of the subjective and the object, the self and its world, as the one cohesive dialectic.

There is no ontological self that is the seat of consciousness. That is as much a useful epistemic construct as the world in which this self sees itself living within.

I guess we could all be subsistence farmers. — T Clark

I would say "all" is an over-estimate. And here is where we would need to contrast the tech green promises vs the harsh ecological realities.

A few years ago, the agricultural idea that was believed to scale was "vertical farming". Converting city warehousing into racks of food growing under efficient LED lights and sensor-based watering and fertilising. A hyperlocal solution for urban communities.

But then reality bit. The staff to run these grow houses had to be paid double your immigrant farm worker. Disease ran rife as it doesn't respect the sterile rules of an artificial environment that lacks natural biodiversity.

Meanwhile other more ecologically-savvy agricultural practices – permaculture and regenerative farming – haven't scaled as they too directly challenge the Big Business status quo. But as things crash, they represent the knowledge that would allow the fortunate survivors to begin over from a more sophisticated level. More mouths could be fed in a more sustainable way.

In the 1970s, we were told that over-population would destroy the world. Now we're told that one of the biggest problems will be not enough workers. — T Clark

Both things can be true. All the young might be in Africa. But all starving. And all the old might be in clapped out Europe and Asia, and also starving.

This seems odd to me, given how much of the world sees the US as an unwelcome influence. Do we still think that US lead globalization is the solution we're looking for, or even a good thing in and of itself? Is globalization the scalable solution? I guess in some sense it has to be. One-world government? Continuing the de-Balkanization of the past 150 years. 500 years. 2,500 years. — T Clark

This is the issue. What ought the goal be? The Enlightenment seemed so right in humanistic principle, but became a victim of its own success. It gained the monopoly position in a world that had been socially diverse. An ethical monoculture was successfully produced with the US taking over from the UK as its self-interested standard bearer.

The 1992 Kyoto Protocol marked some kind of high point on this humanist project, and then that got overtaken by neo-liberal exhuberance – the financialisation of everything. The house was wrecked by the teenagers throwing a block party. The GFC saw Big Money bailed out and the resulting debts serviced by poor. Folk had a look around at where things were at and could predict a coming long stagnation and deglobalisation.

And we're going to run out of fossil fuels while we keep on finding and developing more. — T Clark

And then this. The US choose to continue growth at all costs. It had only propped up world trade and Middle East oil deliveries to get the world out of its cycles of European and Asian wars. US was its own well-resourced and well-populated continental market. It did not need world trade itself. It is uniquely blessed in its geostrategic position.

So if globalisation was collapsing, let it. The US began its post-GFC move towards a retreat behind its own walls. Funny money could fund the shale fracking and oil sands revolutions – so long at the environmental consequences could be kept out of the economic calculus. The US caught everyone out by becoming oil self-sufficient again and so really having no need to protect the world's shipping lanes anymore.

Shift the factories back from China and again a win-win for the US. Domestic jobs bonanza and China left to disappear down its own plughole.

A really big game is being played by the US that no-one ever seems to talk about openly. Under Trump, Biden and whoever is allowed to follow them. The idea is that is scaling is it is time to bunker down as a nation. Canada comes along for its resources, Mexico for its cheap labour. Japan, Taiwan and Korea get to pay to stay in the club. The UK and Australia are useful to a point.

Elon Musk and a relatively few entrepreneurs have changed everything. They took a bet on finding a way to make good environmental sense also make good economic sense. — T Clark

Please don't fall for this horseshit. The Tesla was the final nail in the coffin for any Green hope.

Right at the point where tech seemed to be delivering some kind of liveable future – electric bicycles and rideshare apps – we get Musk and his bloated dreams of how the future ought be. More cars. But now even faster on the acceleration and more toxic in their lithium mining and full lifecycle economics.

Doesn't apokrisis's scaling require central planning? — T Clark

No. Scaling is premised on the opposite. If an idea is "so good" then it will grow organically. It will self-organise its world.

But central planning does have to become some sort of guiding function that emerges as part of the deal.

The evolution of a body requires a devolution of its functions into a set of organs. A department of transport, of sanitation, of energy, of decision making. As things scale, they need to get hierarchically complex.

Planning is generally a good idea in life. And a good idea is what you want your society to be implementing over all its scales. The selling point of liberal democracy was that planning was going to one of those activities taking place over all levels – just as the nervous system might have a brain, but also reaches into every corner to allow all parts to contribute to "the plan". Even the gut turns out to be majorly connected to the brain in two-way relation.

It may be time to look at change of place as a primary goal over change of form. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean you would sign up for Elon's death trip to Mars? Or do you expect warp drive to exist in 20 years? :smile:

Refresh my memory. What have you been telling me? — Gnomon

As I say, I am officially baffled about how you deal with information.

For example I made this comment in a post last year.

Without understanding it, Gnomon in fact posted this graph of the creation of the negentropic gap from David Layzer, the cosmologist who saw this back in the 1960s.

What do you think the point of that simile is? — Wayfarer

The point is epistemic. And it reflects the semiotic fact that the mind must reduce reality to a system of signs. The world is a blooming, buzzing confusion of noise and we must distil that down to some orderly arrangement of information. A set of counterfactuals that impose a dialectical crispness on the vagueness of our experience.

So in Gestalt fashion, we turn sensory confusion into perceived order by homing in on critical features that would distinguish and R from an E or a K. We have to be sensitive to the fact that Rs have this loop that Es leave open. This becomes a rule of interpretation for when we start having to deal with a real world of messy handwriting and wild fonts. We have to see information that was meant to be there according to the rules and so ignore the variation that is also in some actual scribble or fancifully elaborate font.

Our interpretative experience of even the alphabet, let alone the world, has this epistemic character. We must divide the confusion dialectically into global formal necessity and local material accident. That is then how we can “decode” reality. That is how we can construct an “understanding”.

We infer others are conscious because I am conscious and other people seem to be like me and do roughly similar things under similar circumstances. — bert1

So for some reason it is OK for you to use commonsense to make inferences about things you can’t directly know, but science as a formal method for making such inferences does not enjoy the same privilege? It is defeated by the zombies in which you don’t believe? Curious.

So what does your commonsense tell you about the consciousness of the chair you are sat on? Given the zombie argument that is so legit, how can you know it is either conscious or not conscious. It might be just keeping very quiet and still. It might be aware but suffering locked in syndrome.

Your commonsense is this magical power that transcends mere scientific inference. Please clear up these deep riddles of Nature.

It points out that the pioneers were deep thinkers - cultured Europeans who understood philosophy. — Wayfarer

More than that I would say. I would point to how the logic of the Yin-Yang, co-dependent arising, Aristotelean hylomorphism, Hegelianism, Naturphilosphie, and all the other traditions of dialectical thought made the discovery of the quantum even possible.

Classical logic would seem to forbid one thinking in this fashion. It propels us towards a lumpen realism - a metaphysics of medium sized dry goods. Kitchenware and the like. The least critical mindset.

But a perspective widened by a relational view, a process view, a dialectical view, was necessary for science to make its great leap to discover quantum mechanics. It made the results observed thinkable.

What, you say particle mechanics and wave mechanics both seem to apply? Well as complementary descriptions - a local view vs a global view - maybe that should be no surprise.

Complaint? — Wayfarer

Sorry. Must have been someone else complaining about the fact science has arrived at the conclusion that reality is fundamentally irreducible in the dialectical or complementary fashion noted by Bohr.

Of course Bohr was more directly inspired by his education in the Lao-Tse than by Hegel. But same elephant, different philosophical traditions.

In opting for such a bold departure from the European tradition, Bohr was much influenced by the Daojia tradition of the Laozi, which enabled him to make sense of quantum phenomena, when he realised that these failed to conform to the ‘either (particle) or (wave)’ Law of Excluded Middle, as they are both simultaneously. There is logic other than classical bvalent logic.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321280738_Bohr_Quantum_Physics_and_the_Laozi

…in respect of what is ultimately real. — Wayfarer

Or let the maths decide what we might believe about that. Hence ontic structural realism as the new Platonic sounding metaphysics that has arisen out of a contemplation of gauge symmetry and quantum field theory.

Dissipative structure theory applied at the level of cosmology and particle physics in other words.

The fact we can calculate general particle properties to 15 decimal places, and also not measure everything about some particular excitation in the one act of measurement, ought to tell you something about how well we are in fact doing.

We can reach ridiculous levels of accuracy about the electron's dipole moment from just first principles. And we know why it has to be the case that you can't measure the two poles of a dialectic relation – such as position and momentum – in one go. Each variable is only quantifiable to the degree it is not its other.

But that's OK. We can capture all the information in a wavefunction. And then add in thermal context to narrow the probabilities to the point that they become pragmatically a classical description. A weak measurement gets close enough to certainty concerning one pole without driving its other pole to a reciprocal state of Planckscale uncertainty.

But instead of celebrating this quite remarkable success in fundamental science, you ... complain we're "not there yet".

Just as Bert does about an account of life and mind as biosemiosis in action.

It's not like the imaginary of the Enlightenment is easy to specify — Moliere

Some fact checking....

The Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that dominated in Europe during the 18th century, was centered around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

Enlightenment thinkers wanted to reform society. They celebrated reason not only as the power by which human beings understand the universe but also as the means by which they improve the human condition. The goals of rational humans were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.”- Montesquieu.

Four themes recur in both European and American Enlightenment texts: modernization, skepticism, reason and liberty.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that sought to improve society through fact-based reason and inquiry. The Enlightenment brought secular thought to Europe and reshaped the ways people understood issues such as liberty, equality, and individual rights.

The five core values of the Enlightenment were: happiness, reason, nature, progress, and liberty. Using logical thinking and reasoning the philosophers analyzed truth in the world. Given the current state of the world, we should all act more like philosophers in our day-to-day lives.

Enlightenment thinkers applied science and reason to society's problems. They believed that all people were created equal. They also saw education as something that divided people. If education were available to all, they reasoned, then everyone would have a fair chance in life.

We can identify three major 'roots' of the Enlightenment: the humanism of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Protestant Reformation. Together these movements created the conditions in Europe for the Enlightenment to take place.

So in all ways the world I remember growing up in. But then I was lucky with my parents and circumstances. These imaginings were pretty well fully implemented.

But as I say, now it would have to be Enlightenment 2.0, the green reboot as the Model A option. Or the Model B scenario question of how to salvage what's left during the great collapse so as to then start over in a well considered way.

I believe I did in defining philosophy as an anti-propaganda, at least. — Moliere

Even dialectics requires more effort than that. Tacking on not to A to arrive at not-A is the shallow approach of other logics perhaps. But it clearly defines nothing and simply begs the question concerning A.

Propaganda is a virus, as you say, but philosophy is an anti-virus in that it inhibits the mechanisms of propagation by asking questions and not giving answers, but rather methods of thinking through things. — Moliere

So now we have a reasonable natural system dichotomy of self and other - the infection vs the immune system.

And sure, the solution normally proposed is to educate a population in critical thinking. Instill the collective rational habit of fact checking. Properly fund and enable unpartisan journalism and other fact checking social institutions.

Implement life as the Enlightenment imagined it? But add planetary limits to human aspirations as part of the political and ethical equation this time around.

:up:

The "Peircean triadic systems view" is, so far as it is comprehensible, just more Hegel. — Banno

What am I supposed to do with your solipsistic pronouncements? If you have comprehension failures then that’s on you. I’ll get out the world’s smallest violin if it might help.

Why Maslow?

Is it true? — Moliere

It’s the meme that scaled. Maslow founded positive psychology in the 1950s.

During the 1950s and 60s humanistic psychology developed in response to what the pioneers saw as the reductionist, positivist view of the mind as a complex mechanism likened to a machine- a stimulus-response mechanism in behaviorism or an economy of sexual and aggressive drives in psychoanalysis (Mahoney, 1984).

Humanistic psychology championed the holistic study of persons as bio-psycho-social beings. Abraham Maslow first coined the term “positive psychology” in his 1954 book “Motivation and Personality.” He proposed that psychology’s preoccupation with disorder and dysfunction lacked an accurate understanding of human potential (Maslow, 1954).

It may sound that way, but is it that way? What is propaganda? — Moliere

I thought you were going to tell me?

But all communication is propaganda in being a message with a meaning and so coming from a point of view - a message with some intention conveyed from a “me” to a “you”.

Are you wanting to split the world into those messages that are particularly annoying to you and those are matchingly pleasing? Your world needs this new message setting.

Do you see this as a pragmatic job for AI browser settings or a case of “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee”?

One might be hard pressed to find a case where dialectic cannot be applied. That's not a good thing. — Banno

Yet you seem to claim that for “classical logic”?

And just to remind, in case you really did miss it, I don’t defend Hegel as the final word here. I defend the Peircean triadic systems view as the best metaphysical logic or model of causal being.

But keep on stabbing away at your straw man until it is time for lunch. Straw men are always a safer target than the real thing.

It's not like I really know what I'm talking about anyways (as the scary part of that is: I'm pretty sure no one does. We're strapped to a rocket without knowing where it's going, when it will stop, or how to control it) — Moliere

If this is your belief then in what sense are you interested in a real inquiry into solutions? And you should steer well clear of me as all I’ve got nothing but those. :wink:

I believe the liberal state is fully capable of combating propaganda. — Moliere

You mean like the same liberal state that pushes Covid vaccines on you? Or are you meaning you wish for the liberal state that has the balls to squash the conspiracy-mongers?

I’ll return to my OP. Histories best ethical ideas have been fair exchanges that scaled. A society by definition has scale. And scale is always hierarchically organised in some form just to self-stabilise. So your political slogan has to promise the best of both worlds. Enough freedom for enough protection. Enough collectivism for enough individualism. Enough rights for enough responsibility. Enough excitement for enough peace. And so on and so forth in terms of Maslow’s familiar hierarchy of needs.

So just saying you don’t want propaganda isn’t much of a slogan. I can’t see what it is that you do want in terms of some balance that promises a win-win as we ought to want both things in the one social system.

Perhaps something along the lines that anyone should be free to have an opinion and yet everyone ought to be fact-checked?

Also, on philosophy: I think of it more of an anti-propaganda. Rather than giving easy answers to difficult questions it raises difficult questions without answers. Rather than attaching emotions to particular actions it questions emotions at every turn (to a point that's a bit much, at times). — Moliere

Sounds a shit notion of philosophy. Sounds exactly like propaganda run wild in feigning reason so as to spread its irrationalism.

so it's not a very good example of dialectic at work. — Banno

Oh the irony!

The argument agains dialectic that I presented above shows how it is that dialectic methods serve to choose the option preferred by the narrator. That critique stands. — Banno

It stands against a person and so also the method. Your suspicion has thus been justly confirmed?

Sounds legit, but what would Wittgenstein have said? “See me after class, boy, for a good slap around the ears.”?

It's more that each is a "way of talking about how things are", each with its own merits. — Banno

So a dialectic.

but realism aligns better with "homely examples like kitchen utensils". — Banno

And a resolution that is comfortably within reach of its lasagne. :clap:

If we want to win and prove that we're the idea-maker then we'll compete and keep to ourselves and make sure we say nothing until we have our name on it and can say "See! I am the creator of this idea!" — Moliere

Yep. So that is what I'm talking about as the tech entrepreneur model. And it became the social entrepreneur model about 20 years ago. It was supposed to be the politics of the Millennial generation.

You start small and dirty and give your idea away. Apps that can do good are set free on the world to see if they will go viral and scale.

Tech makes this form of politics or radicalisation near enough costless enough that there only has to be a micro-return to earn a fortune. But as your venture capital backers also understand, the goal is to lock-in customers to your unique solution and so become the monopoly service. That's when you retire to your billionaire yacht and island.

So politics through the tech entrepreneur route is now a well understood and tested thing. It has done a lot of good but now has also become rather corrupted. The US is full of charitable endeavours that are actually wealth shelters. And yesterday's millennial social entrepreneurs are now today's Tik-Tok influencers.

Moral philosophy or progressive politics has to face these realities as modern hurdles to overcome. You can scale up a good idea to educate and water a village in Africa, or round up the plastic debris floating in the Pacific ocean, but then the wider world may be scaling up something else – like a crushing Woke vs Maga social division.

The problem with coming up with different scenarios is that it doesn't matter which we choose since the powers that be will do what they do regardless of our reasonings. — Moliere

I think you don't understand the power of an organised crowd. Leaders shit their pants if they see an actual mob coming for them. The job is too look tough and appease.

That is why longterm change is killed by short-term electoral preference. Any radical measure gets watered down as soon as it is seen not to fly with the central 5% of swing voters.

what I like about pairing these ideas is it gives both a critical problem -- the Marxism -- and a different solution than Marxism-Leninism -- organizing along anarchist lines. — Moliere

Exactly. A dialectical analysis to discover the oppositions that can then become what the ethical algorithm balances.

So Marx vs Bakunin can be seen in systems terms as networks vs hierarchies, or bottom-up construction vs top-down constraint. The systems solution is to point out that hierarchies are just networks of networks – society as a scalefree realm of interest groups or institutions freely self-organising within a collective cultural and economic frame.

Social democracy would say it has already delivered that. Anarcho-Marxism would be reinventing this wheel in terms of combining some proper definition of a good community life tied to a economy that can deliver over the long-run.

But now we are into the accelerationism of the tech bro world coupled to the stagnation of the neo-liberal bust. So you are talking about 1800s politics that became the best of the 1900s' solutions and now we are well into the arriving crisis of the 2000s.

That is why I prefer to apply systems science to the task. It is the one that includes ecology and the realities of thermodynamics in its kitset of intellectual tools. The "is" to balance the "ought".

Ha! You got something against the science of Astrobiology* — Gnomon

No. I'm pointing out how the sociology of science operates. NASA wants to remain employed by the US taxpayer. The cold war arms race is over. The Mars colony or even Moon colony is no go. So it sponsors the new field of astrobiology because US taxpayers love aliens and their flying saucers.

I'm all for spending taxes on basic science research. But this Big Science story is also a problem.

Astrobiology has given some good researchers a new platform for working on the problem of abiogenesis. I follow this work closely. But that means also knowing what the field of abiogenesis had achieved before the tacit question – how is this going to make folk want to fund another mission to Mars or a next generation space-scope? – was hanging over its head. And a publicity department existed to make a rehash of old ideas sound all sparkly and new.

One reason I mentioned this particular scientific theory --- in this way-off-topic thread --- is that the postulated anti-entropy arrow-of-time puts Evolution in a new light. For years, scientists were able to picture Darwinian evolution as meandering, aimless, and ultimately doomed to a pathetic meaningless Heat Death. But now we have reasons for a more optimistic perspective : "his idea suggests that while as the universe ages and expands, it is becoming more organized and functional, nearly opposite to theories surrounding increasing cosmological disorder"*2. This notion is also in opposition to the presumptions of Materialism, which focuses on the Randomness & Chaos of the universe, instead of the Order & Organization that makes Science & Philosophy possible. — Gnomon

Sorry @Gnomon, I don't fathom how your brain works. What else have I been telling you for at least a decade?

Saviour by green tech or battening down the hatches for when it gets rough for everyone else and the job of the navy is to sink the refugee ships? — apokrisis

What was I even thinking. Ukraine shows that cheap drones would quickly put paid to inbound refugee ships. Citizen militias could crowd fund their own private enterprise solutions. The US Navy wouldn't even have to consider its ethical position on this new mission.

Smart ideas do scale. Moral scruples can also do so in the good times, and be swapped out just as fast when the community mood changes.

What's my point? I guess it's that somebody (everybody?) believes that you have to grow to survive. — T Clark

You have to grow enough to just to stand still as an organism. So as a going concern, an organism has to earn a margin on its entropifying sufficient to maintain the fabric of its body and then replace itself with reproduction of the next generation of owners. From there, in good times the bacteria can grow exponentially to fill their Petrie dish, or find that they are born into bad times where the dish is full to its brim and drastic degrowth follows.

Tribes who live by foraging learn restraint so as to coexist with their environments. It can be done. But does it scale?

So I'm not really sure if it's an ethical issue at all, rather a logistical one. The ethics comes in when we try to decide how to spread the pain around. — T Clark

The point of the OP is that the philosophically inclined like to preach about ideal societies and what they would look like. A world where technology fixes all problems. A world where we share and share alike. Or whatever.

We now have a crunch coming - scenarios A and B. Unless you think the current global politics has got everything under good control, it is time to be outlining the politics to deal with this imminent future.

And to work, any new political/ethical philosophy will have to scale. It has to appeal because it is plainly a win-win.

Does any such marvel exist?

Just curiosity, on the graph shown at about 8:30, it shows a dramatic drop in food per capita in the coming years. What would cause that and what does it mean? Mass starvation? — T Clark

Murphy is using the latest Limits to Growth data.

Resources can be renewable, like agricultural soils, or nonrenew- able, like the world’s oil resources. Both have their limits. The most obvious limit on food production is land. Millions of acres of cultivated land are being degraded by processes such as soil erosion and salinization, while the cultivated area remains roughly constant. Higher yields have compensated somewhat for this loss, but yields cannot be expected to increase indefinitely.

Per capita grain production peaked in 1985 and has been trending down slowly ever since. Exponential growth has moved the world from land abundance to land scarcity. Within the last 35 years, the limits, especially of areas with the best soils, have been approached.

Another limit to food production is water. In many countries, both developing and developed, current water use is often not sustain- able. In an increasing number of the world’s watersheds, limits have already been reached.

More data…

Feeding 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, then, requires closing three gaps:

A 56 percent food gap between crop calories produced in 2010 and those needed in 2050 under “business as usual” growth;
A 593 million-hectare land gap (an area nearly twice the size of India) between global agricultural land area in 2010 and expected agricultural expansion by 2050; and
An 11-gigaton GHG mitigation gap between expected agricultural emissions in 2050 and the target level needed to hold global warming below 2oC (3.6°F), the level necessary for preventing the worst climate impacts.

https://www.wri.org/insights/how-sustainably-feed-10-billion-people-2050-21-charts

I think the political situation here in the US gives us a good idea how at least one large country will handle it - badly. — T Clark

OK, we are discussing the Model B future. For sure this is the politics and ethics of starvation and resource scrambling. You can see folk consciously or unconsciously sliding into the required mentality when billions are going under around the globe.

The US is in a happyish position geostrategically. It has the demographics, the geography, the resource wealth, to begin closing in on its own corner of the world and letting the rest of the planet crash as it likes. This retreat from being the sponsor of the current global trade world order had already begun under Trump and Biden only made it quieter and more organised.

If you know Africa and Asia are screwed, much of Europe too, then the plan would rationally become get selfish, let the degrowth and decarbonisation happen to 6 billion others, problem solved.

The MAGA solution. It scales. Are its adherents irrational or just very cunning and forward looking. No matter who is next elected president, will the infrastructure investment in that new world order continue to be made? Fracking, internment camps, trade deals to draw Canada and Mexico in tight, wind farms and solar panels, geoengineering to fix the climate over chosen areas.

Given that the US isn't likely to handle this all that well, isn't continued US hegemony an obstacle to solving the problem rather than a help? — T Clark

But which horse is the US backing? Saviour by green tech or battening down the hatches for when it gets rough for everyone else and the job of the navy is to sink the refugee ships?

Rural America may be looking at its big useless cities and quietly making the same hard calculations.

Humans have to organise collectively to survive. That requires politics and ethics. Investments are already being made in terms of Model A and Model B futures. The mindset fostered in the free trade/world peace era is no longer going to be fit for purpose under Model B. And even Model A is a degrowth story as green tech way undelivers on the tech bro hype.

Possible slogans:
Thank god I'll be dead by 2050
Let's all build an underground bunker in Hawaii with Zuckerberg. — T Clark

:razz:

Truly the Boomers slogan, the first.

And if you are building your billionaire bunker somewhere remote, you will need to get onside with the natives. Otherwise we will be coming for you. We know where you live.

A serious point is that if world order breaks down, then every remaining pocket of humanity will need its own politics/ethics suited to its own Mad Max location. Philosophical inventiveness and understanding of rapid morality scaling will be a critical community resource.

This has been demonstrated around the world where what is a natural disaster that tips a low resilience and under resourced community into decades of chaos can be something that instead pushes a wealthy and connected community into a positive step up.

In moral philosophy, we have free choices apparently. Now is a good time to look around and see how things are liable to pan out in your own small corner of the world.

It is a law of economics, not physics, of course. So not so much a law but a business projection startling enough to make folk wake up to what scaling is about.

I had fun briefings on the topic at Intel’s Portland fab in the mid-1980s, as well as other manufacturers. Gene Amdahl for instance had his own law that predicted the demise of mainframes because they wouldn’t scale. IBM was starting to bolt together CPUs and Amdahl reckoned diminishing returns would kick in after six or seven units.

So scaleability was a hot topic at that time. Another example were the military guys making dedicated hardware for the subs and AWACs. It was a rude shock when they realised that Intel microprocessors had just changed their world and put them out of business. Bespoke doesn’t scale and off the shelf does.

‘Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush’. — Wayfarer

Comedy plays well. But as moral philosophy, we would soon have the anti-natalists hammering on the door. And as lived experience in the moneyed world, our children aren't having children. They are shifting to lifestyles less consumption-celebrating.

So degrowth has entered the chat. It's ethical and political outlines might be less hazy the more we boomers inquire into it. :smile:

However remember my argument is that the slogan would work in the pragmatic sense of putting folk in mind of some win-win complementary balance. Draw attention to the "other" of their own preference as also needing to be scaled to match.

As in "do unto others", or "to each according".

The future you impoverish may be your own’? — Wayfarer

Better because it focuses attention on to the collective future. Certainly counts as getting somewhere here.

but I'm also very dubious of green-left politics ... ever-increasing 'economic growth' pretty well defines liberal capitalism ... i've never seen Marxism as a credible alternative ... Maybe we need an Al Gore for alternative economics. — Wayfarer

OK. That sketches out the failures of the past. None of which were actually failures as all were ideas that scaled in the sense of grabbing some sizeable audience of believers. Can you identify some common thread in that history. What did they all fail to do?

Liberal capitalism at least gained the balance of power long enough to keep the economic growth growing. It delivered on that, even if its equation had the unsaid part about ever-increasing environmental degradation.

But this is about a slogan for the future.

As a data point, the Aussie 2019 election had its slogans like "A fair go for Australians", "Building our economy, securing our future", "Make Australia great", "The guts to say what you're thinking" and even "Making sure South Australia always comes first." :gasp:

The Greens' had the suitably anodyne: "A future for all of us."

So this can be done. Memes can be constructed in the hope of some ethical/political promise being made at least reasonably clear enough that enough voters would want to hold your party to them. An attitude can catch on. Given voters who want to play.

God knows there are those who are trying, but they don't seem to have much of a profile. — Wayfarer

Yep, the point of this thread is to focus answers to the level of a compelling elevator pitch. Your audience has a very limited tolerance for either philosophical complexity or political vagueness.

You sketched out some past experience, some real world context. Is there really nothing you can put forward as a slogan that works both for yourself in the idealistic sense and could also work for "us all" in a realistic sense?

I've bolded the relevant bit. — bert1

But the relevant bit is (as an ontological committment)...

Some physicalists, such as Daniel Dennett, argue that philosophical zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible — wonderer1

The Cornell University team called their "new law" of Evolution : "the law of increasing functional information.". — Gnomon

One has to laugh. Astrobiology - NASA’s fund-raising publicity department - reinvents the wheel. A new law that no one ever thought of.

Have you ever heard of pragmatism as a theory of truth? Doubt has to have its reasonable basis.

The Hard Problem pretends to have its ontic ground - zombies as a real possibility despite all that science and commonsense says - but it simply devolves to standard Humean epistemic issue that “we will never really know” that bedevils all rational inquiry and which became precisely the reason for pragmatism becoming standard as the way to move forward after that.

Did the sun come up this morning? It looked as though it did. But maybe you dreamt, misremembered or hallucinated that fact. One could always doubt your certitude.

In history I'd call this "cherry-picking" — Moliere

But this was your choice of example. I just followed through with the historical facts. And these seem to tell another story.

I think the question is more of a: where does the rubber meet the road? Same sort of question Marx receives. If we start from any thermodynamic paper, how do we get to "ought"? — Moliere

Yet again you simply ignore that I have already said that your disjunction is my conjunction. Is and ought wouldn't be separate, they would have to be openly complementary or reciprocal under a dichotomising systems logic.

A two-way mutuality is assumed as a condition of them being the larger thing of a causal-strength relation.

The top and bottom levels of a hierarchy must be in support of each other even if they are doing opposite things.

Even Bongo tried to make this point in his homily about corporate management where the board level ought must cash out as the bottom level office manager's is. The boss sets the strategy, the underlings beaver away at the monthly targets.

But in a fast moving world, underlings become closer to the changes that matter. The leisurely decision horizons of the board become a growing problem. Theories of flat hierarchies and the entreprenurial employee become the vogue.

Management science is another department of system theory. Like the rest of the humanities (even if the tap on the door hasn't quite been heard in the dusty forgotten corners of this large ramshackle institution).

Somewhere there are folk still sitting in their stuffed armchairs, digesting a belly of good lunch, basking in golden glow of their 1950s memories when philosophy had banished metaphysics, booted out the continental Marxists along with the irritating scientists too, so that all that counted was having a damn fine wrangle about the meaning of life in plain old ordinary language English.

They do not include thermodynamics as a base of thought to come from, though. — Moliere

But he said you don't need good grammar, philosophy or science in general. Just Jesus. Or at least the plain commonsense that Jesus expressed in saying competition must be tempered by cooperation. The social and ecological organising principle that hierarchy theory captures with mathematical crispness.

You keep reaching for this word, thermodynamics, as if it were restricted to the dead realm of gone-to-equlibrium closed systems. But even the Second Law doesn't demand that reality. Prigogine got his 1977 Nobel for proving that and so launched the new age of thermodynamics as dissipative structure and "order out of chaos".

You might have approved of Prigogine as a person.

Born in Moscow at a complicated historical moment ... the family fled what Ilya himself described as “a difficult relationship with the new regime,” ... his attraction to the humanities would be decisive in his turning away from the more practical chemistry chosen by his father and older brother ... and instead seek more philosophical ground.

“Maybe the orientation of my work came from the conflict which arose from my humanist vocation as an adolescent and from the scientific orientation I chose for my university training.”

He was particularly fascinated by the concept of time, which he explored through the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. ... Bergson was known for his rejection of rationalism and science in favour of intuition and subjective experience. But in an age when time was just one variable in equations that could work both ways, the idea of unpredictability that he found in Bergson may have broadened his vision to take a step back and look at physico-chemical natural processes more broadly.

There was another essential ingredient in his cocktail of influences: his mentor and doctoral supervisor, Théophile de Donder, who specialised in thermodynamics.

Prigogine found a limitation in the thermodynamics of his time: it applied only to systems at or near equilibrium. This idealisation of nature left out a wide range of processes, such as the emergence and evolution of life itself, processes that are far from equilibrium and which, because they are irreversible, have a clear direction of the arrow of time, contrary to what occurred in the physical equations used at the time. The thermodynamics of irreversible processes was the subject in which Prigogine continued the work begun by [de Donder], considered the father of this discipline.

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya-prigogine-brought-order-to-chaos/

It is worth keeping an open mind and reading on. Your reaction to the term "thermodynamics" maybe because you view science and scientists as it they were some race apart from their worlds. Your lens is the one set to "scientism" as being dialectical to ... its righteous other.

I gotta make a lasagne. — Banno

Yep. Time to fire up the thermodynamics and turn that entropy flow on. :fire:

I'd say the Enlightenment is over. — Moliere

Huh? It's political structures are largely still in place organising the world. Even in the US with all its current corruption and division.

To take it back down a few notches of abstraction: Did Martin Luther King begin with thermodynamics? No of course not, but surely he knew something about how social organisms work. Or is everything he wrote and did parochial in the face of the new science? — Moliere

Were you referencing?

And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. (Amen) That's a new definition of greatness.

And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, (Everybody) because everybody can serve. (Amen)

You don't have to have a college degree to serve. (All right) You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve.You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. (Amen)

You only need a heart full of grace, (Yes, sir, Amen) a soul generated by love. (Yes) And you can be that servant.

What ground is King calling upon here then? What balancing structural principle is this ancient Christian wisdom meant to invoke?

Even as religion it resonates. And that is because it is the systems view which you dismiss as "just thermodynamics". King was addressing the gross inequalities his social interest group faced, pointing at a systematic imbalance that a new politics of the US would have to address.

And various technocratic measures were implemented in the US as a result – affirmative action, and end to busing, sensitivity training for law enforcement. Mechanisms designed to achieve outcomes. Even if the headwinds of self-protecting wealth and privilege, not to say engrained social prejudice, made it tough for America to live up to its original founding Enlightenment creed.

Agreed. The sad thing is that philosophy would now seek to reject such a totalising discourse? The very idea of a single way to live that would constrain us all as if we lived under actual environmental and thermodynamic constraints!