Going further, the phrase "fully modern syntax" ("syntactic structure" does not make sense, it is like saying wet water or dark black) doesn't seem to refer to anything. — Lionino

You could start by Googling Everett’s G1/G2/G3 classification of grammar complexity if you are truly interested.

It is relevant to the OP in that Everett follows Peirce in arguing for an evolution of language where indexes led to icons, and icons moved from signs that looked like the referents, to symbols where the relation was arbitrary.

(I mean did you read that Mithen article you linked to? He just goes astray in thinking the icon/symbol step came before some more general neural reorganisation, which was likely as not itself nothing more that an example of genetic drift than anything that suddenly made sapiens rationally superior.)

Or Luuk and Luuk (2014) "The evolution of syntax: signs, concatenation and embedding" which argues like Everett that word chains become recursive.

The point is not particular whether the Peircean developmental path is right, even if it is logical. The point is that people's whose job it is are quite happy to think that syntactical structure must have evolved to arrive at its modern complexity. Out of simple beginnings, richness can grow.

(Is that woke and diverse enough for the thought police out there?)

But in seriousness, ↪apokrisis's arguments kind of rubbed me the wrong way from the outset, because they contained a kind of derision for the notion of homo sapiens not being superior to non-sapiens — Jaded Scholar

So you project some woke position on to a factual debate? Sounds legit. I shouldn't be offended by your wild presumptions about who I am and what I think should I.

But even in if that happens to be true, I think you are doing a great disservice to how clearly you see humanity, and reality itself, if you let yourself be comfortable attributing this to something innate about homo sapiens, instead of something much, much more circumstantial, that we are simply lucky (or belligerent) enough to be the beneficiaries of. — Jaded Scholar

Jesus wept. This is so pathetic.

It would be kind of silly to think there is only one difference. — wonderer1

It is silly of you to say that until you can counter that argument in proper fashion.

As is usual in any field of inquiry, we can fruitfully organise the debate into its polar opposites. Let one side defend the "many differences" in the usual graded evolution way, while the other side defends the saltatory jump as the "one critical difference" as the contrary.

To just jump in with "that's silly" is silly.

Considering all the bird species able to mimic human speech, it doesn't seem as if you have thought this through. — wonderer1

Yeah. I mean what can one say? You've reminded me of being back in the lab where we slowed down bird calls so as to discover the structure that is just too rapid for a human ear to decode. And similar demonstrations of human speech slowed down to show why computer speech comprehension stumbled on the syllabic slurring that humans don't even know they are doing.

Do you know anything about any of this?

I'm fairly confident that you aren't in a position to prove that the mutation leading to ARHGAP11B wasn't a critical step on the path leading to human linguistic capabilities. — wonderer1

I can see you are fairly confident about your ability to leap into a matter where you begin clueless and likely have no interest in learning otherwise.

you aren't in a position to prove that the mutation leading to ARHGAP11B wasn't a critical step on the path leading to human linguistic capabilities. — wonderer1

I can certainly have a good laugh at your foolishness. A gene for cortex folding ain't a gene for grammar.

By 50kya, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Australoid had diverged. — Lionino

Yep. I mentioned the "out of Africa coastal foraging package" – the explosive move that swept across the globe from about 60kya. Helped perhaps by changing climate as well as a newly evolved mentality.

Oh Banno. There really is no violin small enough to serenade your self-portrayal as the eternal victim of these exchanges. Comedy gold.

Your problem is that I win national awards for my writings on these issues. I publish books. I speak at conferences. You just sit there fuming. Thinking I give a shit.

Too much shouting for this time of the morning.

"Mabel! Call the plumber. It's back again!"

What do you mean by "grammatical speech"? — Lionino

Speech with a fully modern syntactic structure.

I take it from what I have read over the years. — Lionino

On the other side of the extreme, the theories that suggest speech showed up 50k years ago are absurd as soon as we look into palaeoanthropology. — Lionino

I will treat this as opinion until you make a better argument. This is a topic I've studied and so listened to a great many opinions over the years.

The story of the human semiotic transition is subtle. Sure all hominids could make expressive social noises as a proto-speech. Even chimps can grunt and gesture in meaningful fashion that directs attention and coordinates social interactions. A hand can be held out propped by the other hand to beg in a symbolising fashion.

But the way to think about the great difference that the abstracting power of a fully syntactical language made to the mentality of Homo sapiens lies in the psychological shift from band to tribe.

The evidence of how Erectus, Neanderthals and Denisovans lived is that they were small family bands that hunted and foraged. They had that same social outlook of apes in general as they lacked the tool to structure their social lives more complexly.

But proper speech was a literal phase transition. Homo sap could look across the same foraging landscape and read it as a history and genealogy. The land was alive with social meaning and ancestral structure. The tribal mentality so famous in any anthropological study.

It is hard to imagine ourselves restricted to just the mindset of a band when we have only experienced life as tribal. However this is the way to understand the essence of the great transformation in pragmatic terms.

Theories of the evolution of the human mind are bogged down by the very Enlightenment-centric view of what it is to be human. Rationality triumphing over the irrational. So we look for evidence of self-conscious human intelligence in the tool kits of the paleo-anthropological record. Reason seems already fully formed if homo could hunt in bands and cook its food even from a million years ago, all without a vocal tract and a brain half the size.

But if we want to get at the real difference, it is that peculiar tribal mindset that us humans could have because speech allowed our world to seem itself a lived extension of our own selves. Every creek or hillock came with a story that was "about us" as the people of this place. We had our enemies and friends in those other bands we might expect to encounter. We could know whether to expect a pitch battle or a peace-making trading ritual.

The essentials of being civilised in the Enlightment sense were all there, but as a magic of animism cast over the forager's world. The landscape itself was alive in every respect through our invention of a habit of socialising narration. We talked the terrain to life and lived within the structure – the Umwelt – that this created for us. Nothing we could see didn't come freighted with a tribal meaning.

At that point – around 40,000 years ago, after sapiens as an "out of Africa coastal foraging package" had made its way up through the Levant – the Neanderthals and Denisovans stood no chance. Already small in number, they melted into history in a few thousand years.

The animistic mentality was the Rubicon that Homo sapiens crossed. A vocal tract, and the articulate speech that this enabled, were the steps that sparked the ultimate psycho-social transformation.

Ligotti in his book called pro-natalists as part of the "Cult of the Grinning Martyrs" — schopenhauer1

why would you misconstrue a reasoned ethic with a cult, whereby people blindly believe unreasoned ideas and charismatic cult leaders? At least be apt with your derisions. — schopenhauer1

Err. Contradicting yourself much?

I mean does natalism even feel it must rally around some charismatic leader? Does it even have to explain itself to the general public?

The straw man was that you implied that antinatalists are trying to (politically) impose policies on people, — schopenhauer1

So you agree that you are ignoring the OP as given and simply seizing yet another opportunity to burden me with your personal hobby horse project? I must suffer as you have suffered with this pointless philosophy of committing suicide but only by proxy. Negating life so as to remove that chore from the next generation in advance. Somehow that thought becomes a solace.

This is yet more sidelining the ethical issue into some vague descriptive one. — schopenhauer1

Vague? Is that the best you’ve got? But enough antinatalism unless you can actually make it relevant to the OP as it was set out. Show some self-discipline here.

Not necessarily. Neanderthals had language, and they split from us 500k years ago. — Lionino

So you know they had grammatical speech? What evidence are you relying on.

I know this is a topic that folk get emotionally invested in. It seems unfair for Homo sapiens to draw a line with our biological cousins. Especially as we mixed genes with anyone who happened to be around.

But the evidence advanced for Neanderthals as linguistic creatures often goes away over time. For example, a finding of Neanderthals with advance tool culture becomes more plausibly explained by sapiens making a couple of brief unsuccessful first forays into Europe before a third is suddenly explosively successful and Neanderthals are gone overnight.

It doesn’t matter to the vocal tract argument whether Neanderthals had it or not. But the evidence leans on the side of not.

Even if people (aren't enlightened yet) to be full-fledged ANs, they are at least seeing the material conditions of the present and future to be such that it wouldn't be worth bringing more people into it. It's AN-adjacent, even if not full-AN. — schopenhauer1

So a cult? But passive-aggressive?

So you proposed a bit of a strawman here. Antinatalism is not a political policy but an ethical one — schopenhauer1

How could it be a strawman when my OP is about ethical precepts that can scale as political organisation?

l. That is to say, the fishermen blocking you to get to your car is an example of a positive project (fishing) getting in the way of your negative right. — schopenhauer1

Another way of talking about the competition-cooperation dynamic. Except you prefer to see constraints as imposed burdens in this cruel life we are forced to live, etc.

Perhaps more isnt so different after all. — Joshs

Yep. Different was more in the case of Homo sapiens. :smile:

A step up the semiotic ladder. The brains of Neanderthals were bigger (simply because of their bigger frames). But their vocal tracts not redesigned to the extent that can be judged.

There had to be brain reorganisation too. A new level of top down motor control over the vocal cords would be part of the step to articulate speech, as might be a tuning of the auditory path to be able to hear rapid syllable strings as sentences of words.

So the human story is one of a truly historic leap. The planet had only seen semiosis at the level of genes and neurons. Now it was seeing it in terms of words, and after that, numbers.

recognize that More is Different and that humans have more cortical neurons than any other species, and thereby have a basis for recognizing a uniqueness to humans. — wonderer1

The human difference is we have language on top of neurobiology. And the critical evolutionary step was not brain size but vocal cords. We developed a throat and tongue that could chop noise up into a digitised string of vocal signs. Only humans have the motor machinery to be articulate and syntactical.

Exactly when homo gained this new semiotic capacity will always be controversial. But the evidence says probably only with Homo sapiens about 100,000 years ago. And the software of a complex grammar to take full advantage of the vocal tract may have come as late as 40,000 years ago judging by the very sudden uptick in art and symbolism.

I don't think philosophy gives ready answers to these, instead going in circles or into dead-ends. But the world seems to, and simply. — tim wood

I think you have to give a role to chance in all this. Especially in the modern world where the life choices are so many. A favourite teacher could tip a decision on career choice. At every point in life you might have gone some other way.

So balance in a physical sense can just mean a state of poised criticality. A random jitter always able to be tipped towards some other basin of attraction.

One could really work to find some life balance in a purposeful way. And one can also be bounced about by life in a resilient fashion. Psychologically, these would seem like different strategies and so you would aim for some sensible balance of those too.

It becomes a game of not having rules about rules as a rule. Sort of been my life plan anyway. Or play the game hard but don’t take the game seriously.

Criticality means being reactive but also falling into meta stable patterns. It might be a useful framing as it actually is a basic concept in explaining life and mind. Organisms have to live on the “edge of chaos” as that then allows them to be the ones that stabilise the instability by throwing biological or neurological information into the mix. Live in an energised environment and tip it in some consistant chosen direction.

This is why life is complex. It is both good to go with the flow and to regulate the flow. To not sweat the small stuff and also pay attention to details.

Being caught between contradictory impulse is itself the inherent character of the “good life”. The wife/book dilemma might only show that you are properly alive in that modern sense we humans have constructed as our dominant dynamic, the essence of our critical state. The two directions in which we must energetically swing as post Enlightenment beings.

Not saying that the modern world gives everyone this as a fact. But it does seem the image of an ideal.

:cry:

So what does that change? My systems story says there are global constraints and local degrees of freedom. Choice exists for the individual on all things. All that changes is the degree of constraint.

The tie you wear is such a free choice it might as well be random. Unless it is decorated in swastikas or something.

Having children isn’t compulsory. Your parents and friends may have views. Financial circumstances may impinge. As may fears for the future. As a decision it is complex because it does add real meaning to most lives but is also your biggest single life commitment.

This would be a reason why antinatalism seems wrong in trying to impose some global ought on the basis of a very false premise about the universality of human suffering.

Making a personal decision based on clear information about the collective future is quite a different thing.

I love the short phrases that say a lot. — Fire Ologist

Yep. You brought out the dialectical structure of the thought very nicely. :ok:

No I think “computation” is quite misguided in that direction. And what logic are we talking about? Boolean, Turing machine, floating point simulation, python? Just some kind of digitalism in general? The questioned would have to be sharpened.

You could think about where maths and physics do come close as an effort to simulate reality. QCD lattice models of the inside of a proton. What is achieved and what is glossed over might inform such a debate. But probably not.

I know digital physics is one of those popular topics. But I don’t believe that is what information - as it applies as the notion of physical degrees of freedom or entopy bits - has anything to do with computational logic.

Holography is about dimensional constraint - extracting bits from wholes. Computation is about constructing patterns from bits.

But on a technical note, "antinatalism" as you are using it is not quite how it is used in the philosophical literature in the last 20 years or so. — schopenhauer1

Yep. I joke when using it as I don't take it as a serious ethical response to the brute fact of existence.

Sure, we might want a politics that can smooth the baby production to a sustainable rate. But who wants to turn off the tap just because of "the inevitable suffering imposed on those who were never asked"?

Prospective parents are turning off that tap as the future can look pretty dire. Another reason to give folk a political roadmap they can believe in. Not simply tell them your kids are screwed and so are you, so just die now please. No point hanging on for the bitter end.

In the meantime, celebrate a world where you get to make your personal choice on procreation. At least until - in the US – the Supreme Court gets around to dealing with anomalies like you.

How could truth be possible without a formally consistent and complete system to render it as such? — Shawn

Particular truths must be constrained by general truths. Particular worlds must be constrained by general worlds. This is the common structure of both a scientific and a mathematical approach to the business of metaphysical inquiry. As Peirce made especially clear.

I could be way off, so apokrisis can correct me on his own notions, but it seems like apokrisis mentioned this kind of "indigenous" model as once in play, but that it would not longer matter as it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle as far as the runaway entropy we've unleashed since the Industrial Revolution. — schopenhauer1

I'm arguing that we don't really want to go all the way back to this kind of foraging future. That would require getting the population back down to the 300 million or so that a pre-climate change and pre-ecosystem-ravaged planet could sustain – the world of the Roman empire. Actual foraging sustained a population of about a million indigenous souls crouched around their campfires.

We are what we eat and we now eat fossil fuel. Coal saw world population explode from 0.5 to 2 billion. Fertilizer and oil resulted in a population increase to almost 8 billion by 2020. For a while, until middleclass antinatalism started to kick in, we were going not just exponential but super-exponential.

So Model B says we should expect folk everywhere to seek to organise in whatever way works in their corner of the world. How much industrial capacity does a community retain? How defensible are its borders? What constraints does a different climate put on them? So on and so forth.

But a drastic change in circumstance is the time to be armed with some real insight into the mechanics of social organisation. The past can reveal who we really are as ethical creatures when placed in a survival situation. If we default to something, Wrangham can tell us about the kind of very basic settings which made us the highly-organised social creatures that we have the evolved instinct to be.

We "is" constrained by our genetics unless you happen to want to make the other choice and dial up Elon for a tech solution to our ingrained capacity for a cold-blooded hunter's violence that exists in fine-tuned evolved balance with our propensity for cosy campfire singalongs.

That... is highly doubtful. Definitely not a map I would follow. — Metaphysician Undercover

Good to know. :up:

One does not have to look far to find ethical stances quite divergent from those suggested in the OP. — Banno

In their details but not in their architecture. As any fool anthropologist kno'.

A religious and conservative community might come up with a grounding dichotomy such as the sacred and profane. God's eye is ever upon thee. The social constraint dial is turned up high. But in a small medieval peasant village, there isn't much mischief one could get up to anyways.

Foraging communities are likewise quite dichotomising. In a tribe, the in-group vs out-group kinship dynamic is very strong. Wrangham writes about this in his The Goodness Paradox. He argues humans are even neurobiology adapted to this way of responding. We became a "self-domesticated" species that could balance the cooperative aspects of a life based on collective hunting, sharing and child rearing with its dialectical other of a species able to engage in cold-blooded and quietly calculated murder.

Apes have reactive aggression. Humans became more polar in terms both of being able to live more closely as a group and to be proactively aggressive against those outside the group. Even an obnoxious or selfish tribe member could find themselves at the wrong end of a hunting party once that bistable switch of empathy~hostility got flipped. A socially-sanctioned assassination to restore the group equanimity.

It is worth understanding this moral reality as that is the one we may be heading back to under a Model B future. We are set up by our genes to revert to this if also forced back into the entropic status of scratching a living foragers.

The Enlightenment felt like it got it right as it drilled down to the dialectical logic of nature in its most universalised description – the dichotomous balance of competition~cooperation. But that same scientific mindset, that same application of pure reason, was also in the middle of releasing the Industrial Revolution as the next big thing after foraging and agriculture.

So we did as a species find our way into a morality that could scale. One that enshrine competition and cooperation as the dynamic duo – the two halves of the one good, the opposites that produced a unity which could scale all the way to life across a planet.

But that also set us up to ride the techo-fossil fuel train to an exponentialising future. As a political/ethical idea, it could regulate any powerlaw growth regime. And a barrel of oil is as dense and deliverable a jolt of entropification that the Cosmos could possibly offer.

The actions implicit in such a view are very different to those in either of options A or B in the OP. Yet such an approach might be quite conducive towards long-term stability. — Banno

But as I've pointed out, you haven't inquired deeply enough into how indigenous lives are actually structured, both as biology and sociology.

My own position here is based on a deep knowledge of all that.

Furthermore, regarding my previous post, it seems possible that there could be some things one can have in causality (think synchronicity or Bell's inequality locality and non-locality) that can't simply be modeled. — Shawn

That's another line of attack. To what degree can we tolerate a physics that is illogical or a logic that is unphysical?

The two have to hang together in some deep way or they both risk becoming abstract nonsense.

And there is a lot of that about, hey? :razz:

Personally I look at most of what has been said in this thread in terms of computability. — Shawn

But remember Beckenstein’s bound? Even information theory has achieved the entropic closure which seals its deal.

Additionally, as apokrisis main question, is there anything standing in the way of a direct relationship between logic and physics? — Shawn

Another line to take on the question is to note how both logical entailment and physical causality share a presumption about global closure. A grounding as in conservation laws or Noether symmetry.

Just one is closed for energy, the other truth.

I generally don't like the idea of teleology in terms of purpose. — Apustimelogist

That's fine. In line with those articles, the shift is to understand finality in terms of global constraints, not as some kind of futurised effective cause.

Cause must come before the effect, never the effect before the cause, right?

But as a systems science proponent, I work with the expanded causality that started with Aristotle's four causes analysis. A system is a hierarchical structure of relations where global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees then act – in their generalised statistical fashion – to (re)build the world-system that gave rise to them.

So global constraints are the embodied version of Aristotle's formal and final cause. And local degrees of freedom are the embodied version of his effective and material causes.

Good old "cause and effect" is just how all this complexity looks at an average scale of observation, such as would exist in our own world as we imagine it to "really be" – a place of medium-sized dry goods.

I guess what I'm getting at then is, what would be a justification for an ethical decision? If we said something like, "We are entropic beings with global constraints and local degrees of freedom", that would be some sort of category error, no?

So, looping back to the OP, what would be an ethical stance and what would be its justification towards resource management? What should we do? — schopenhauer1

Well given that I say this is all about the correctness of the dialectical view – the fact that nature organises itself as a local~global balancing act – then the answer should pop out of that presumption for me.

So I then ask, what is "justification" in that scalefree local~global sense? We always will have two poles, two equally justificatory alternatives, that orient our resulting argument. We can justify in terms of rights, or in terms of responsibilities. In terms of a natural inclination towards competition, or towards cooperation. And so on and so forth.

Individuals and communities. Cohesion and differentiation. Constraints and freedoms. Always some balance of justifications – a balance that can be struck as vagueness has been excluded by living in a dichotomised world. If we pretend the world is black and white, that is how we can then go on to discriminate all its possible shades of gray.

A map is no use if your roads and landscape are indistinctly marked out as two shades of near-identical gray. You want a map that asserts boldy, here is the ocean and here is where it falls of the cliff into the realm of monsters and dragons. Black lines on white pages.

So justification is always to be organised as this call for a negotiation. "I was travelling over the speed limit, m'lud. But not excessively. It was broad daylight and the road empty. etc." Rules need interpreting. Circumstances can be extenuating. That is to say, our actual justice system is set up on a systems' principle of laws as not the exceptionless judgement of a god but as constraints – general behavioural guidelines - that then allow some discretion in terms of an individual's degrees of freedom.

The guilty can plead passion, inattention, good character, reformed intentions, and any other spur of the moment shit to lessen the coming blow.

So the question in the modern era – given the same justice would now have to be extended to all the people of the planet, and perhaps all it sentient life as well – is what would that look like as a pragmatic intention?

And the usual two choices are possible, along with the third thing of all the balances that they would stand as the measuring poles to.

We could really go overboard and attempt to imagine a future where the whole planet is saved in some pristine sense where all ecosytsems return to as they were, at least in 1800. But we also end up with folk continuing to have as many babies, or houses as big, cars as fast, as has been the historic trend ever since then.

One can see the impracticalities of that. But hey, we start at the ultimate dream why not? And work our way back towards what might be the practical.

Does our utopia have to be so large that it includes the planet itself? Or even the bacterial scale of life which in fact dominates it? Well most will probably say no. We just don't want to flush ourselves down the toilet of history. But if we are gone, well practically speaking, who cares?

God may judge. But He was only ever a social fiction used to constrain human behaviour at a tribal or community scale of moral organisation. We were mature and responsible adults by the time we decided to drive the ecosystem over the edge of the cliff.

And do we owe some ought to the larger world that is the physical Cosmos. The Great Heat Sink in the sky? Well now you are taking the conversation in a really silly direction. If I don't exist, the Cosmos can go screw itself. It never cared for me in any discernible way. Why would I feel a duty of care to it? Or even a sentimental attachment like I might for the ecosystem of the 1800s? I can't stand in the dock accused of messing up "God's creation" like some kid throwing a house party while the parents were out of town.

Even as a collective moral economy – the planetary civilisation imagined by the Enlightenment – there is no ultimate feedback loop where we humans could destroy the Cosmos in any meaningful sense. The only judgement being passed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics is "did those little shits entropify".

On a finite planet of finite energy and resources, we do have a choice of doing that slowly for a long time, or very quickly all at once. That is a completely free choice from the Cosmic point of view.

But then what use is having a free choice if we are not even claiming that possibility? The Second Law sets up the large scale flow. We get to harvest that with our ingenuity. It is then up to us to ensure we have a morality that scales – a system of social justification that adapts to the change that change itself produces.

If you want to focus on resource management, it is a little late in the day of course. Harsh rationing or fewer mouths seem the general dichotomy that composes the immediate future. Given green tech became instead a politically-engineered exercise in corporate greenwashing.

That is to say, the morality is equivalent to the terrain. The physics surrounding it, the map. You are stuck in mapland. — schopenhauer1

You assert this. But I don't see the substantiation by way of an argument.

It is plainly wrong that we are stuck in any map if the map is what we are always involved in writing.

Would you follow Google Maps off the edge of a cliff rather than believe your own eyes about the washed out road ahead? And if it were made easy, would you feel a social responsibility to rewrite that tiny bit of Google Maps to alert other road users in your immediate vicinity?

So physics is our map of reality at its broadest possible level. It is a map of the most cosmic scale constraints that frame our minute to minute existence. One might want to fly off the top of the building, but that free choice is a little constrained if we haven't yet evolved wings. Or at least have a jet pack attached to our backs and it is fully fuelled up for our little adventure.

I'm not sure how much more pointing out the bleeding obvious I have in me. I set out an OP in a reasonably developed fashion. This rehashing of old points is very stale.

That question is not answered by physics. — Banno

Bang on. It is answered by our dialectically-structured interaction with "the physics".

It just helps not to talk like a lumpen realist about the physics and a fluffy idealist about the moral dilemmas. Biosemiosis helps us get our global metaphysics right.

All life and mind is an ecology living off an entropic bounty. Always has been and always will. And that could be the case because "is" and "ought" exists as a two-way feedback relationship that couples the organism to its environment in a pragmatic loop.

Any other way of looking at it is a few lifetimes out of date. There are moral philosophy attitudes we can no longer afford to espouse. In today's world, it counts for wilful blindness.

The underlying principle is "entropic heat death", and we are just staving it off on various short or shorter timescales. — schopenhauer1

That would be the negative framing. The positive one is that as physical creatures, we live off the negentropy we harvest as the free gift of the Cosmic entropy flow. The sun shines, plants grow. Hydrocarbon deposits are laid down by decaying ancient forests and ocean plankton and hundreds of millions of years later, workers turn up with fracking rigs to power proud nations.

Everything we love and value comes from harvesting nature’s bounty and spending that negentropy wisely. :razz:

However, is this not descriptive and not prescriptive? — schopenhauer1

Here we go. Morality locked into its old is/ought shibboleth.

A natural philosophy understanding of nature emphasises that global constraints and local degrees of freedom are what go together to constitute the holism of an evolutionary system. At the level of humans as a social organism, that cashes out as the organising dynamic of competition-cooperation. Our actions must achieve a world where there is a global cohesion and yet also a local differentiation.

Over all scales of our lives. Even nation states are meant to be a state of order where a planetary level of competition-cooperation is laid out in an institutional fashion. Nations have rights and responsibilities under international treaties. They can wage wars, but meant to follow the rules.

So it just is the case that everywhere, at every level, we organise in this win-win way where individual striving is set within a collective justice and morality.

The mistake humans make is believing that including the larger natural system that is our environment is a nice optional choice that good-hearted folk might choose to bleat about, but really that is not a central concern of debates over our moral choices. When it comes to the environment and ecosystem, well that is - as you say - merely a great big heat sink of no intrinsic value.

Not what is happening, but what ought to happen. — schopenhauer1

So you have set up the situation as I describe. A demand that society is set up according to some institutionalised understanding about rights and responsibilities. Justice becomes about a proper balance of interests. An algorithm of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” might help defuse this “your car vs their fishing” real world dilemma.

I’m sure those involved would love you to arrive as a third party to sit them all down, talk it through this way and see if some new general understanding comes to rule such incidents in the future. Or you could tell them to fight it out and see which one right now is the stronger or more determined.

There are always “free choices” to make. But natural order arises from just making some damn choice in terms of whether the approach you try is competition or cooperation. Do you seek short term advantage or long term understanding? It is not always clear which is “right”. Which you “ought” to do.

But what matters from an evolutionary systems point of view is that you frame your choices with a crisp dialectical counterfactuality. You don’t fluff about vaguely, sort of looking imploringly at the blocking anglers and hoping for the best. You choose a path and live by the consequences.

The way it works - as an organism seeking its adaptive balance to its world - is you always should be able to see clearly the two oughts of any social situation. To compete or to collaborate. And most every social situation is already institutionalised to make the balancing of the two imperatives an unthinking habit.

On the tennis court, if I hit a ball on the line it is in. That is the rule we all agreed. If my opponent pretends to see it out, I probably oughtn’t pull out a gun and shoot him dead. But that is still an option. It answers to the short term of one line call. However I might want to pause to consider the way it would interrupt the flow of the rest of the game, or even my entire day.

Now your point is that our moral dilemmas are always of the most immediate kind. The fate of the planet does not hang on every line call or traffic obstruction. Thermodynamics seems as remote from morality as you can imagine.

But humans have blown up their world in just 200 years. It all went exponential starting around 1800. And even then, not really until 1850. Thermodynamics was a remote issue for society even in my own childhood. But the planet has gone from 3 billion people to 8b since then.

I think it is time cosy notions - like an is/ought separation of powers - are consigned to the dustbin of academia. The house is burning down around us and folk are looking about in dazed moral confusion. Doing a bit of green tinkering and a lot of hand wringing. Ineffectually looking at those anglers with slightly imploring, yet also insisting eyes. As there’s more of them than you. But maybe if you waved your gun…

I think that a distinction can be made between 'intrinsic' and 'relational' properties. — boundless

So like gauge invariance vs Poincaré invariance? Constrain spacetime to a manifold of points and it still has degrees of freedom in that the points may spin rather than sit still. They may be vector and chiral rather than scalar. Quantum spin arises as an intrinsic property and the rest of particle physics follows.

What relativity doesn’t forbid becomes what QFT exploits.

So you can't demonstrate it? — Apustimelogist

You mean experimentally? - https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3343

As a bone of contention? - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04251-x

Set out your objections.

This then may be a useful primer as well. A more recent attempt at the historical context.

Predictive processing is an ambitious theory in cognitive and computational neuroscience. Its central thesis is that brains self-organize around the imperative to minimize a certain kind of error: the mismatch between internally generated, model-based predictions of their sensory inputs and the externally generated sensory inputs themselves (Clark 2016; Friston 2009, 2010; Hohwy 2013). Clark (2015) has recently suggested that this overarching theory of neural function has the resources to put an ecumenical end to what he calls the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. Specifically, he argues that it implies an understanding of internal representation that can accommodate important insights from the enactivist tradition without renouncing the theory’s representational credentials.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6566209/

Well I don't see any connection whatsoever. — Apustimelogist

That would be consistent with your rejection of quantum temporal entanglement I guess.

I'll give it some thought. No primer comes to mind as such. I speak from being engaged in this debate since the 1980s. So thousands of papers, many conversations. Some hard won wisdom I hope.

Howard Pattee would be my usual go to. Not the simple argument but the exact argument...

The illusion of autonomous symbol systems

There is a real conceptual roadblock here. In our normal everyday use of languages the very concept of a "physics of symbols" is completely foreign. We have come to think of symbol systems as having no relation to physical laws. This apparent independence of symbols and physical laws is a characteristic of all highly evolved languages, whether natural or formal. They have evolved so far from the origin of life and the genetic symbol systems that the practice and study of semiotics does not appear to have any necessary relation whatsoever to physical laws. As Hoffmeyer and Emmeche (1991) emphasize, it is generally accepted that, "No natural law restricts the possibility-space of a written (or spoken) text.," or in Kull's (1998) words: "Semiotic interactions do not take place of physical necessity." Adding to this illusion of strict autonomy of symbolic expression is the modern acceptance of abstract symbols in science as the "hard core of objectivity" mentioned by Weyl. This isolation of symbols is what Rosen (1987) has called a "syntacticalization" of our models of the world, and also an example of what Emmeche (1994) has described as a cultural trend of "postmodern science" in which material forms have undergone a "derealization".

Another excellent example is our most popular artificial assembly of non-integrable constraints, the programmable computer. A memory-stored programmable computer is an extreme case of total symbolic control by explicit non-integrable hardware (reading, writing, and switching constraints) such that its computational trajectory determined by the program is unambiguous, and at the same time independent of physical laws (except laws maintaining the forces of normal structural constraints that do not enter the dynamics, a non-specific energy potential to drive the computer from one constrained state to another, and a thermal sink). For the user, the computer function can be operationally described as a physics-free machine, or alternatively as a symbolically controlled, rule-based (syntactic) machine. Its behavior is usually interpreted as manipulating meaningful symbols, but that is another issue. The computer is a prime example of how the apparently physics-free function or manipulation of memory-based discrete symbol systems can easily give the illusion of strict isolation from physical dynamics.

This illusion of isolation of symbols from matter can also arise from the apparent arbitrariness of the epistemic cut. It is the essential function of a symbol to "stand for" something - its referent - that is, by definition, on the other side of the cut. This necessary distinction that appears to isolate symbol systems from the physical laws governing matter and energy allows us to imagine geometric and mathematical structures, as well as physical structures and even life itself, as abstract relations and Platonic forms.

I believe, this is the conceptual basis of Cartesian mind-matter dualism. This apparent isolation of symbolic expression from physics is born of an epistemic necessity, but ontologically it is still an illusion. In other words, making a clear distinction is not the same as isolation from all relations. We clearly separate the genotype from the phenotype, but we certainly do not think of them as isolated or independent of each other. These necessary non-integrable equations of constraint that bridge the epistemic cut and thereby allow for memory, measurement, and control are on the same formal footing as the physical equations of motion. They are called non-integrable precisely because they cannot be solved or integrated independently of the law-based dynamics. Consequently, the idea that we could usefully study life without regard to the natural physical requirements that allow effective symbolic control is to miss the essential problem of life: how symbolic structures control dynamics.

https://casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html

OK.

Mathematics has a massive foundational crisis with insurmountable issues. — Tarskian

So you shit on both sides of this divide? What intellectually does meet with your full approval?

I don't have the background to understand what you are saying or hinting at here. — Janus

No worries. It just goes to the larger Peircean project which argues that reality as the thing in itself would have to have this Darwinian logic. And that this connects to the position I expressed as the answer to the OP.

For reductive science, the principle of least action is both a necessary axiom – a universal principle and not just a law – but also something to be a little embarrassed about because of its teleological overtones. The very idea that is and ought could be connected in this finalistic fashion!

But for a larger holistic view of science, as the Big Bang demands, the action of least principle becomes itself a matter in want of a decent explanation.

Right, and this is just what I've been saying except I don't think the fact that we must acknowledge that there is a reality beyond our perceptual and conceptual capacities is without significance, since it is a fact about the human condition. — Janus

Better yet, we can subtract the human from the epistemic equation as best we can. That is, apply the scientific method, or Peirce's logical arc of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Arrive at the view that represents the limits of inquiry for a community of rational thought. Act as if it were the Comos that is contemplating its own Being.

This underscores the limits of human knowledge and reinforces the idea that our understanding is always shaped by the conditions of our cognition, making any direct knowledge of the "thing in itself". — Wayfarer

So once the direct route is accepted as forbidden to us, then what becomes the best indirect route? That is what pragmatism is about. We can subtract the psychological individual from the equation and make it about a dispassionate community of reason.

Social cognition based on the scientific method.