It is circular reasoning. — schopenhauer1

It is the dialectical reasoning of the systems science view. The complexity of a system arises from the fruitful balancing of its contrary impulses. Rights and responsibilities are one such way of capturing the essence of modern social structure.

I only used your emotive jargon - burdens - to make the connection to your own reductionist position. You can see that burdens are really just the global responsibilities that can justify a person also having their particular local rights.

Speaking more generically, a system is a hierarchical balance of the dichotomy that is constraints and freedoms.

So at every level of natural order, we have the same general idea of a balancing of top-down long-run constraints and bottom-up constructive or creative freedoms.

What you call burdens are in fact the constraints that shape up a society as a collection of individuals with their freedoms. The freedoms that are meaningful and pragmatic as they are how the society can continually renew its own globally persisting being.

But you don’t seem to have an understanding of nature as a developmental or self-organising system. This is why your logic is so broken.

Language evolved from a theory of other minds. — Harry Hindu

That’s been one theory favoured by cognitivists. As a biosemiotician, I would instead stress the simpler story that language proper arose when Homo sapiens evolved the modern articulate vocal tract.

Drawing scribbles and making sounds with your mouth are just more complex forms of communicating your intentions and reading into others intentions. — Harry Hindu

A capacity to generate syntactical speech is a difference in kind and not just degree. All apes are social and so have an ability to anticipate and coordinate actions in their social setting. But no ape can learn fluent grammar.

99.85% does seem rather high, but I don't think it unreasonable to determine the majority of people have net bad lives. — Down The Rabbit Hole

The case against antinatalism is not about its logic. That is all too easy to dismiss. It is about people confirming themselves in the social role of being victims of life itself. It is about the nonsense of forming a communal identity around a justification for not feeling better about their world.

Suffering can't be avoided so one can't be criticised for not even trying.

This thought used to be framed as existentialism and nihilism. Now it is framed in this really bullshit legalism of existence being an unconsented fact. Of no person having a right to impose a burden on another.

Systems of laws arise out of the need to organise successful human communities and not the other way around. If you think there is a problem, changing the system is what you should strive for.

But systems of laws recognise rights and responsibilities. They are based on a pragmatic balance between individual wants and communal needs. Burdens will be imposed. All that is asked is that they are reasonable.

"Nearly 1 in 2 people born in the UK in 1961 will be diagnosed with some form of cancer during their lifetime", "12.7% of all deaths registered in the UK in 2018 were from dementia and Alzheimer disease". — Down The Rabbit Hole

In modern society, what are we truly the victim of? The industrial food industry. Big pharma. The banking industry. The atomising effects of neo-liberal economics and social policy.

If you live a healthy life, the odds of metabolic diseases are greatly cut. We can live in ways that avoid cancer and dementia. But also a lot of that is down to the fact we now all live so long.

What are the actual death bed regrets of people? They are about not doing more to be part of a personally meaningful community. About not getting out and living life more.

So from a moral philosophy point of view, there are some real issues to be addressed. The modern world has many pluses compared to other times, but also plenty of questionable economic and political settings.

You know something has to be out of balance when most folk are more familiar with Kim Kardashian's intimate life than they are with their next door neighbour's.

In this context – life as something to be lived – antinatalism is just whiny bullshit. A wet legalistic self-justification.

Sure, the decision to be a parent ought to be taken with a clear-eyed view of the risk/reward balance. Studies show that 10% of parents in developed countries wished their kids had never been born. :grin:

But taking a rational view of life is the habit we would want to encourage. People who can cope with balancing complex risk/reward decisions and so likely to make the best of their lives as well as of their communities.

For me this all goes back to Aristotle's idea that a definition or understanding requires a genus and a specific difference. "Coffee machine" is "A machine" (genus) "that makes coffee" (specific difference). In order to understand a term we must understand how it is alike other things (genus) and how it is unlike the things it is alike (specific difference). — Leontiskos

Yep. That is all it is. Meaning is constrained in nested hierarchical fashion. The basic contrast of sameness and difference. Or the differences that make a difference versus the differences that don’t.

The differences that matter are the ones that must get said.

I would say it is most likely the vast, vast, vast (perhaps 99.85%) of people born will, on balance, suffer more than they enjoy their life. — AmadeusD

Why not check rather than pulling numbers out your arse?

Two thirds of adults globally (64%) report being happy: 14% very much so and 50% rather so. Countries with the highest proportion of adults considering themselves as very happy are Canada (29%), Australia, Saudi Arabia and India (28% each), Great Britain and the United States (27% each).

:up:

Yes, what indeed.

You're welcome.

Which brings out again the falsehood of thinking there is one notion of colour to rule them all. — Banno

So some locutions would have more phenomenological accuracy? Curious that you might want to contradict yourself so blatantly.

What do you think is the structure of real labour? — kudos

I think the flip you identify is the financialisation of the real economy – the shift from producing to meet a current demand to manufacturing the consumption that can justify an unbound growth in production.

If investment in labour is about satisfying a current level of demand, that is one thing. But if the investment is in consumers willing to financialise their futures and so take on an ever rising interest burden, then that is a different world.

What then is real labour when the economy is more about selling future debt? Well financial engineering and debt marketing are well paid occupations. And real work so far as the global debt industry is concerned.

Not sure if this covers your concept of abstract jobs. But who exactly employed this spreadsheet content person and for what ostensible purpose? Did it help sell loans? Directly or indirectly?

Not sure what you mean here but I think from the free energy perspective, information can be more or less equated with dynamics. In fact, some recent free energy papers have started using the phrase "Bayesian mechanics". Central to this is the fact that free energy minimization can be generalized to any kind of random dynamical system as first seen in the A free energy principle for a particular physics paper where Friston also goes through quantum, statistical and classical mechanics through this perspective. — Apustimelogist

You have jumped to a conclusion. All this arises out of the 1990s dilemma in neuroscience about what we could mean to talk about a “neural code” to parallel the genetic code that revolutionised and demystified biology.

The problem was that there were two general camps. The computationalists and the dynamicists. The computationalist kind of made sense as they became neural networkers. But then the brain is also a biological organ and not an information machine. So that pointed towards the dynamicists like Scott Kelso and Walter Freeman. The code would be some kind of holistic entropy minimisation principle.

As I said, Friston was making the most sense of anyone I talked to. He was on his way to coarse graining the heck out the issue so that he could arrive at his Bayesian mechanics. Extract the essence of generative neural network models and marry them to the thermodynamical reality that a biological organism is intending to regulate.

I went off instead to see how theoretical biologists were handling all this at the level the genetic code. Friston aims to generalise his Bayesian mechanics so it can capture this level of semiosis as well.

So this is a huge research project in the life sciences. Cracking the code in a way that can then connect information and entropy as they apply to the description of an organismic state of being.

Your comments simply brush that major project aside. More Markov blankets please.

From my perspective on quantum, subatomic particles have definite positions all the time (and when you zoom in), they just have random motion (the randomness less apparent as you coarse-grain). Heisenberg uncertainty is a property of the statistical distributiond regarding those particles. From my perspective, no point was talked past here. — Apustimelogist

You believe things that other folk don’t believe in. Positional certainty may be matched by momentum uncertainty. However the reverse also applies.

So either you are basing your metaphysics on a self-contradiction when it comes to your notion of zooming in, or you have to turn that bug into the feature and agree it means that reality is scalefree so far as the zooming across scale goes. It is a story of fractal or log/log growth.

What you see going larger or smaller is the same fundamental physics, just boosted in terms of your reference frame. The Big Bang cools because it expands, and expands because it can cool. Whatever scale you then inspect it on, you find the same thing. A doubling of the volume and a halving of the density.

If the Planckscale defines one limit in terms of a maximum heat and a minimum distance, then the Heat Death is its inverse as a minimum heat because of a maximised distance.

So the HUP enshrines this duality as a unit 1 start point. And decoherence speaks to the scalefree fractal symmetry of a cosmos that doubles and halves its way to eternity. By the end of effective time, the whole deal will be inverted to become the coldest and largest void possible under quantum law. The blackbody de Sitter solution of a universe now merely the bath of radiation emitted by its own event horizon.

Your position relies on classical views about reality that have been debunked. Although of course I accept that treating the Cosmos as a Newtonian clockwork is perfectly acceptable on pragmatic grounds when one only wants to model processes in a rather narrow middle ground range of momentum and position values. All the other complications can be allowed to drop out of the picture for epistemic simplicity.

I want to emphasize that I think all of the descriptions are "just models" or at least, none are any less so than others; but, they are all being applied to the same reality — Apustimelogist

Sure. :up:

And I was talking not about particular models but about the model of modelling relationships in general. That is what Friston, Pattee, and anyone concerned about epistemology would have an interest in. What can it mean for physics to also contain a point of view?

Also you were earlier posting your beliefs about this. Which is what I have been challenging by arguing that modelling is generic to life and mind. The point you were making here is covered by reality modelling being a nested hierarchy spanning four levels of semiotic encoding in modern humans. Genes, neurons, words and numbers. A hierarchy of increasing modelling abstraction. But all with the same epistemic structure. All with the same ontological grounding in dissipative structure theory.

Models, and any word meanings for that matter, are nothing above the cause and effect mediated by people's implicit neuronal processes that drive the generation of future experiences in the context of the past. The equations in our theories written down on paper and the words we physically say cannot actually do anything independently of the minds that generated them and do things with them; neither is there necessarily a determinate way of expressing models and theories which is not contextualized by what is deemed acceptable by people in the context of their cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures. Therefore, in this kind of view, minds and cognition are only as deep as our experiences and the momentary unfolding of their dynamics.

Well this role is taken on by Markov blankets but is much more general than what is implied by Patee. — Apustimelogist

You are just talking past the distinction between information and dynamics. That mechanics can impose network behaviours is relevant. But that is what emerges from information being used to organise dynamics. Neurons form Hebbian networks. That is functional. But also only possible because cells with dendrites and axons are physical structures that genes can encode.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle is referring to constraints on probability distributions regarding the behavior of statistical systems — Apustimelogist

You again talk past the point. Fine graining in the real world means not just cutting smaller and smaller in spatiotemporal scale but going hotter and hotter in energy scale. Whatever seemed to exist in the form of topological order at your coarse grain scale just got melted as you zoomed in.

Is your order, then, Ramsay-like an inevitable accident? Or is it something else? — tim wood

I’m talking about dynamics. Dissipative structure, far from equilbrium systems, maximum entropy production principle. That class of self organisation in nature.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/783285.Order_Out_of_Chaos

Are you aware I advocated the free energy principle and active inference a few posts ago? — Apustimelogist

Yeah. But the brain isn’t literally minimising free energy is it? It is minimising information surprisal.

So Friston is talking about the modelling relation just like the biologists. An epistemic cut has to be involved. An observer has to be inserted into the physics as the rate independent information creating the non-holonomic constraints on the rate dependent dynamics or environmental entropy.

Something unphysical is going on even if it must also have its physical basis. And whether you fine grain or coarse grain the physics ain’t going to make no difference.

On the other hand, toss a Bayesian inference engine into the mix - armed with the need to repair and reproduce itself on the basis of an informational relation with the world - and then you will see something novel start to happen.

Surely it would make more sense to spend your time elsewhere on this forum? — AmadeusD

Schop keeps requesting my presence. No matter how many years it’s been. It seems to energise him judging by the caps lock shouting.

(And this thread wasn’t even about antinatalism.)

I suspect schopenhauer1 regrets pulling you into the thread. — Leontiskos

He loves it. It feels like old times. :grin:

You have proved yourself incapable of reading a simple response. AS always, proving you're not a serious person. It gets easier and easier. Maybe if you stopped behaving in a way that squarely fits th definition of trolling, you'd say something sensible. — AmadeusD

You say this kind of thing so much that it has no bite. You can't seem to decide whether to love everyone or hate everyone. And all your accusations seem better fitted to describing your own behaviour.

Why not just chill and enjoy the friction of lively debate? Let the quality of your arguments be your testament. It is not as if anyone can win or lose in an internet forum where no one is really invested in the outcomes or any independent party keeping score.

my guess is that anyone who holds it on purely intellectual grounds could be dissuaded in time. — Leontiskos

@schopenhauer1 would seem proof this ain't so. :grin:

As I have said multiple times, many explanatory frameworks are important. — Apustimelogist

OK. A pragmatist would have to agree. A pragmatist – for want of something better – would wind itself back all the way to raw instrumentalism.

But perhaps the surprise is that there is a totalising metaphysical discourse that arises from all our many models. Perhaps this is why some of us get excited about semiotics and systems science.

If you have no larger interests, fine. I just say that folk like Peirce – who established pragmatism as an epistemology – continued on to show how semiosis could be matchingly totalising as an ontology.

The point is though that such simulations as alluded in the first quote above should be possible in principle if we had the computational power, and able to reproduce all possible events of reality above the fidelity of its description. If all biological processes are composed of things like particles moving in space then this should be plausible. I don't see why not. — Apustimelogist

You keep saying you don't see there is a problem. But the sciences of life and mind exist because physics can't even model physics with a computational notion of laws and initial conditions, let alone jump the divide once semiosis enters the chat.

Have you read Schrodinger's classic What is Life? He understood the issue and so was already able to guess that organisms embody not just their rate dependent dynamics – all the stuff you want to simulate – but also their rate independent information. He said there must be a negentropic memory structure – an aperiodic solid – to encode the constraints on the entropic flows of organic chemistry.

But sure. You don't care. The rate independent dynamics is the whole of the story according to your preferred metaphysics. Anything beyond that is just another model at a different level you protest in epistemic plurality as you fall back on that familiar reductionist ontology that all systems are essentially a collection of atoms in a void.

Its about the idea that in principle all of the possible information about reality is only attainable if it is maximally resolved, if it isn't coarse-grained, if details are not ignored. — Apustimelogist

And how does that pan out given Heisenberg uncertainty?

What would you see as the adjudicating factors between the two conceptions? — Leontiskos

Well it would really be nice to know how Plato conceived of the Khôra in relation to the Eidos. Was it more a void or an Apeiron? Was there some move he began making from the transcendent imposition of structure on the material world to the immanent emergence of structure by way of privation?

All this seems in play in Plato and Aristotle. And everyone interprets according to their preference. But that is the basic difference I would say. A dualism of transcendence or a triadicism of immanence.

Yep. Once you have heard it said, you can never unsee it. :chin:

Just for fun, here is a phenomenological discussion of why new car colours suddenly look so weird and wrong.

Favorite philosophical insight: Life presents itself chiefly as an opportunity. :wink:

You pretend not to be involved in a discussion about language but your view hinges on your use of a single word. — Banno

It seems more an effort to discuss at the level of neurobiology. And so the "language" or semiotics of perceptual experience.

Of course hue discrimination appears in our language games too. Ask any interior decorator. They have 100 names for shades that are nearly white.

But words are the currency of a socially-constructed level of world-modelling. Neurobiology concerns the far more complicated science of neurobiological world-modelling.

You keep mixing these categories, or just in fact bluntly pretending there is nothing worth talking about beyond your narrow comfort zone. But without a neurobiology of perception, there can be no social game of comparing beetles in boxes. The private/public distinction would be metaphysically moot as the grounds for it would simply fail to exist.

This question addresses the subject of moral concern: actually living, present persons, n o t possible, future persons (which is AN's category mistake). — 180 Proof

I think AN can only be understood as a social tactic to justify ineffectuality. One is a victim of life itself and so can't be held responsible for ... anything.

The choice to have children is a big responsibility. So let's reframe that as a fundamental ground of victimhood. The original sin of society and its large collection of consequent responsibilities. All that must follow from being born.

That's like saying that a phone encodes the information passing down it. — Ludwig V

Or more like saying a street plan encodes a functional map of its world, the city. If you want to move about, there is some habitual pattern that gets you from a to b in an efficient fashion.

A phone line transmits information. A phone system can start to encode the world it serves in terms of its functional pattern of highways and back alleys.

Even our machines can start to have organic form as they become intelligently organised into a civil engineering infrastructure. A system designed on dissipative structure principles.

So a single phone line doesn’t embody much semiotic meaning except that I might want to talk to you. But our infrastructure systems become the meaningful structure of our modern existence as a civilisation level super organism.

Biology is not reducible to physics because a living body, though it is a physical object, cannot be explained without reference to concepts that have no place in physics. — Ludwig V

Biologists like Robert Rosen would argue that biology is larger than physics as it includes all the ways matter can be shaped by form. It includes intelligent form along with inanimate form.

So biology makes physics one of its subsidiary disciplines. :razz:

What I was implying is that all of the events that led to the development of neuronal structure- whether on an evolutionary or developmental scale - can be in principle described purely in terms of particles and how they move in space and time. In principle, such a thing could be simulated using a complete model of fundamental physics - it would just obviously be orders of magnitude too complicated to ever be possible to do. — Apustimelogist

Describing wouldn’t be explaining. Simulating wouldn’t be capturing the causality in question.

You won’t read it, but here is how Pattee covers that..
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221531066_Artificial_Life_Needs_a_Real_Epistemology

Yours becomes a really odd position when physics can’t even settle on an agreement of how a classical realm emerges from a quantum one. Or how a non-linear system can be reduced to a linear model.

Coarse graining is needed because fine graining can’t deliver. Physics delivers only effective versions of “fundamental reality”.

Of course for my position, as an Aristotelian hierarchicalist on causality, that is what is expected. The systems view of causality is that nature is all about global constraints shaping up the local degrees of freedom in evolutionary fashion. Atoms emerge due to the constraints of top-down topological order being imposed on quantum possibility.

But that is another - pansemiotic - story alongside the semiotic story I’ve been outlining here. I’m just pointing out that reductionism doesn’t just fail when it comes to life and mind. It is inadequate for physics itself.

Although of course, for the purposes of building machines, building technology, reductionism is perfectly suited to that task. Mechanics is the right mindset for imposing a mechanical causality on the physics of nature.

Because obviously, in principle one could describe the entire process of cell development and the entire history of the world in which evolution occurs in terms of particles moving in space - it would just not be tractably comprehensible by yourself. — Apustimelogist

I am asking you to ground your account in its causal principles. Because your physics is reductionist, you can’t deliver on that. You can only assure me you could reconstruct the world as some kind of simulation of its shaped material parts. Some set of atoms arranged in space and moving “because” of Newtonian laws.

As a reductionist, you can’t in fact reduce at all. You can only enumerate parts. You can’t speak to the causality of the whole. The only compaction of information you can offer is a mechanics of atoms. The offer to simulate is given in lieu of what is meant by a causal account.

Our observations about reality are grounded on and instantiated in the most zoomed-in scale, fully resolved, fully decomposed — Apustimelogist

You mean reality resolves into its fundamental atomistic detail at the level of the Planckscale? Of the quantum foam? Of quantum gravity?

Yeah. How is that project going exactly?

It takes more mental power to get at the meaning of "philosophy" than "photograph" even though both words contain the same amount of letters. — Harry Hindu

Sure. But then our brain is an expensive organ to run. It uses glucose at the rate of working muscle. On the other hand, that is a constant metabolic cost. There is little change when we daydream or go to sleep.

And the goal of the brain is also to reduce all thoughts to learnt habits. It we figure things out, then our mind can just shortcut to our routine definitions of those words. So what you call mental power is the effort of attending to novelty. But once we have reduced some thing to a habit of thought, it can simply be unthinkingly emitted. It becomes so remembered formula that just needs to be triggered. The metabolic cost of rewiring the brain has been paid.

I could argue that the display of the peacock's tail says something about the Big Bang, as there would not be a peacocks if there wasn't a Big Bang. — Harry Hindu

You could read that into a peacock tail. But two peacocks just have their one instinctual understanding.

You have actual language and that makes a huge difference. Peacocks only have their genes and neurology informing their behaviour. No virtual social level of communication.

It's really just a difference in degrees. More complex brains can use more complex representations and get at more complex causal relations. — Harry Hindu

Your own argument says it isn’t if humans have language and a virtual mentality that comes with that.

Still can’t give a fuck. You’re all over the shop.

This might be a fatal mistake in your reasoning — schopenhauer1

Or else you have no idea what natural philosophy is - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/

The rest is just too dull to address.

Why is it reductionist if I explicitly talk about the importance of higher level explanatory frameworks? — Apustimelogist

I’m talking about ontology rather than epistemology. Life and mind as a further source of causality in the cosmos. The stakes are accordingly higher.

When are you going to refute the idea that all coarse-grainings of behaviors over larger scales are grounded on higher resolution details at smaller scales of space and time? — Apustimelogist

How can I refute that in the face of your refusal to engage with the question of how physics - coarse or fine - accounts for the functional structure of a neuron?

You haven’t yet made the argument. Only asserted your belief system.

Well, unfortunately that doesn't guarantee anything. — Apustimelogist

It at least means I understand more than the gist.

What you are trying to do is deny that there is a core principle, but that is exactly what I am pushing back on. — schopenhauer1

But that is just your failure to understand my position. My core principle is that there is always a dialectical balance in anything that could matter. A trade-off. And trade-offs ought to be optimised in a win-win fashion. That is the answer that is worth seeking.

Your approach drives you to angry dogmatism. My approach leads me to pragmatism. We do the best we can by reasoning. We should always expect a complementary balance to exist in nature. Complementary balances is after all how nature can even exist.

So my approach is rooted in natural philosophy. That is its metaphysical basis.

Yours seems to be some kind of Platonic notion of perfection. A one-note "good". A leap to an extreme that ends all debate.

The slippery slope fallacy, as I say. All answers must arrive in the one place, whereas for me they have many possible balancing points between two complementary notions of "the good".

It is good to take risks as it is good to get rewards. Pain is good as pain tells you what to avoid. Life is good because after that you will have plenty of oblivion in which to rest.

Nature has set us up genetically to think in this natural way. To understand life as a spectrum of possibilities that we must then navigate in a reasonable fashion.

The primary dichotomy of human social organisation is the balancing of competition and cooperation. Individual striving and collective identity. Both of these imperatives are good to the degree they are in a fruitful balance.

So perhaps my way of thinking is a little more complex. But not sure I have to make excuses for that.

The argument that he gave seems to me to be invalid, — Leontiskos

That's a separate matter. :smile:

I just like pointing out how the semiotic approach goes further in emphasising that our model of the world is also the model of "ourselves in the world". The witness and the witnessed are inseparable even in their separation.

So I wasn't meaning to correct you. Just having fun outlining the next step that people never quite arrive at. Rest easy with the covid. :up:

None of your scenario matters to the normative claim of the deontological basis being presented. — schopenhauer1

But that is because I am sensible and don't buy that as a basis. Wrong premise and thus a pointless argument.

It would be bad faith to pretend I went along with your scenario for any other reason than its passing curiosity value.

No, this isn't a slippery slope fallacy because the debate is at the normative level. Murder isn't somewhat wrong, it's wrong. — schopenhauer1

But what is murder? What acts fall into that category without involving shades of grey?

Perhaps you have a conviction in black and white thinking to a degree I cannot even fathom? I sort of suspect that deep down you must be kidding. That a little reasonableness will soon penetrate the pose. I'm still kind of giving credit to the possibility that you aren't completely in the grip of your own rhetoric.

I have said a couple times in the thread I see the importance of different explanatory frameworks on different levels but just seems to me all complex behavior are grounded on and emerge from the smaller scales as described by more fundamental, simpler physical laws or descriptions. — Apustimelogist

Sure. You've certainly said how it seems for you. But as a biologist and neuroscientist, I see this as question-begging reductionism.

This is partly because I am already very biased against attempts to reify meaning and against views that seem inherently strongly representational. The idea of symbols or signs in biology then seem to me something like an additional level of idealization and approximation that is another way of telling stories about biology, perhaps more intuitively - similar to teleology. But it doesn't seem fundamental to me compared to notions like blind selectionism which does not necessarily require things to be packaged up in terms of neat symbols and meanings. — Apustimelogist

This package of prejudices could not be more familiar.

I personally find ideas like active inference and the free energy principle have more clarity, eloquence and mathematical grounding than the Howard Patee stuff, in addition to being prima facie simpler to couple with my enactive inclinations. The epistemic cut idea also seems to draw from ideas in quantum mechanics which I just do not believe to be the case — Apustimelogist

This just shows that you haven't read or understood the stuff.

I'm sure it will make no difference here, but an irony is that I was deep into theoretical neuroscience in the 1990s and meeting up with Friston when he was still trying to find his angle of attack. Back then, he was thinking in terms of dynamical coupling and neural transients. The non-linear dynamics of folk like Scott Kelso. I was prodding Friston about the importance of switching to an anticipatory-processing based point of view.

Friston was already clearly the smartest guy in theoretical neuroscience at that time. And events have since confirmed that. But it was because neuroscience and complexity theory still seemed so far from the proper way of thinking about the mind as an enactive process that I went off and stumbled into the path that theoretical biology had already blazed. The systems science, the hierarchy theory, the infodynamics, the dissipative structure, the epistemic cut, the modelling relation. All the parts of the puzzle that come together to form a general theory of life and mind.

So I was hanging out with that new crowd for a decade. I was there as it realised how theoretical biology had been recapitulating the metaphysics of Peircean pragmatism/semiotics. The idea of the sign relation.

A further irony was that Pattee resisted this new biosemiotic turn in our discussions. After all, I guess, he had already made the same points more sharply. He had had the benefit of the genetic code being cracked and so focusing attention on the practical issue of how a molecule could be a message.

Pattee went off radar for a few years in what seemed like a bit of a huff. But then he surprised by suddenly releasing a flood of papers proclaiming himself a biosemiotician. He sharpened what this should mean and so put a couple of the other pretender camps in their place.

So you may talk from your experience, but I talk from mine. The question you deny is even a question is a question I've been academically engaged with for a long time.

For fun, let's test the pragmatic limits to your antinatalism.

So you say you are a signed-up member of the AN charter. Being responsible for a birth is deemed a sin as it is impossible for the resulting infant to have given its explicit consent to this reproductive act in advance of the fact.

But having sex is always going to carry this risk. Even contraception – as a sign of your good faith – can fail. So does your AN charter need to add the clause of no sex at all as that is putting you at risk for breaking the faith? Do you need to go out and get sterilised because you could always get drunk one night or duped into performing a service for some cunning natalist?

One could go on seeking such risks to your hardline AN stance. The risks might be diminishing, but even a vasectomy fails 1 in 10,000 times. At some point do you not eventually get a pass on this? Does even the AN extremist accept that imperatives have their pragmatic limits?

Well if reason is allowed back into the conversation, this becomes the point where we can start winding back towards the practical notion of risks being balanced against rewards. We can get back to my commonsense position that what matters in regard to approaching reproduction ethically is not whether the prospective parents can have the baby sign off on the whole exercise in advance, but that the parents are wholeheartedly engaged in making it a turn of as a positive choice.

One can have a productive ethical debate where there are two complementary imperatives in play – like risks and rewards – and so the way that we "ought to behave" is in the way that aims to arrive at an optimised win-win balance.

But if you set up your ethics on the side of a slippery slope fallacy, then why would you expect that to be useful or persuasive?

It would have shown less bad faith if you had responded to what I actually wrote.

Once you get into a mindset of looking for problems, you are never going to find an end to problems. — apokrisis

If one is simply recognising problems then that is a quite different mindset. But once you declare no line can be drawn, no balance of interests can exist, then that becomes reason eating itself.

If you have an argument against that argument, rather than some further deflection, I’m happy to hear it.

Not to sound rude, but did you actually read my reply? — AmadeusD

It could have been better written.

Recognizing, not seeking. If you do not accept this, that is pure bad faith. — AmadeusD

Well who gives a fuck when you put it like that.

It's speculative. — Banno

You can tell without even reading? Impressive. How mighty are the arguments you make on PF. How you make your foes tremble when they hear the soft padded approach of your wombling form before you turn, fart and waddle off with a small pleased expression.

I can certainly recognise problems when I see them. And going looking for problems is a problem that I can recognise.

If you think looking for only problems is not a problem, then you would have to supply your argument for why this lack of balance is not in fact problematic.

You are no lightweight, but what you serve is also opinion, hidden. Speculative physics mixed with rewarmed dialectic. — Banno

I just served you with a paper by Howard Pattee. Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One of the three sharpest thinkers I've had the privilege of learning from.

I accept that you find the task of following the paper's argument rather too daunting, even if it was written as a kind of introduction to the problem.

But is all the spit and splutter really serving any purpose? Shouldn't you be waddling off to bruncheon by now. You seem to have run out of jibes.