"Strong emergence .... It's a very popular way of hand waving because of seemingly intractable problems with physicalism defined under causal closure. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see I have already attempted to explain this to you ... how biosemiosis is indeed a way to close the explanatory gap, and how mechanicalism is involved in a surprising way.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/667548

And these further flesh out the thesis...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/67659

Most of the pragmatism that occurs on these forums is not Peircian — Leontiskos

This may be true. Philosophy ain’t a strong suit on PF.

Pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870, and now presents a growing third alternative to both analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who first defined and defended the view, and his close friend and colleague William James (1842–1910), who further developed and ably popularized it.

A second (still termed ‘classical’) generation turned pragmatist philosophy more explicitly towards politics, education and other dimensions of social improvement, under the immense influence of John Dewey (1859–1952) and his friend Jane Addams (1860–1935) – who invented the profession of social work as an expression of pragmatist ideas (and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931)

Also of considerable importance at this time was George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), who contributed significantly to the social sciences, developing pragmatist perspectives upon the relations between the self and the community (Mead 1934),

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/

Mead of course leant into the “anthropological theory of cognition”angle with his symbolic interactionism.

Natural selection would never ensure that phenomenal experiences don't drift arbitrarily far from whatever the world is actually like because the contents of awareness have absolutely no bearing on reproduction if they don't affect behavior. It's self refuting. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such confusion. Talk of "phenomenal experiences" is just the standard sin of reifying a process as a substance. Tell me what process you might have in mind here and we will get a lot further. Consciousness is a pragmatic modelling relation with the world and not a "thing" or a "state of being".

And even if you reify the ability to act mindfully in the world – to have a flow of experience that constitutes a semiotic Umwelt – it is always going to have a bearing on reproductive success in a biological creature that depends on reproduction to exist.

Yours is the argument that self-refutes. The semiotic approach indeed explains how our phenomenology indeed does "drift arbitrarily far from whatever the world is actually like". The world is not actually coloured, is it? The redness of a rose, the sweetness of its scent, are neurological constructs rather than material properties.

Our primate eyes are tuned to making a sharp red~green wavelength distinction for the pragmatic purpose of ecological tasks like making the very slight reflectance difference of a ripe fruit "pop-out" of the green background of a forest's foliage. Evolution inserts a hue difference that leaps out in a binary fashion when a more "realistic" reaction would be seeing two barely distinguishable hues of grey.

The mind doesn't need to represent the world in faithful Cartesian fashion. It in fact wants to ignore the world as much as possible so that only what matters in terms of significant information "pops out" in ways we just can't miss.

All the worthwhile theories of mind are based now on this semiotic principle. Perception itself is an encoding of telic purpose. What matters in an evolved information processing sense is built into the structure of our sensations let alone our cognition.

All we have is multiple competing "suggestive" theories, none of which can gain currency. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Friston's Bayesian Brain seems to have taken the field by storm. We were discussing it 30 years ago when it was still rather radical and leftfield. Now he has the field's highest impact rating – even if a lot of that is due to his work sorting out the analysis techniques needed for functional brain imaging.

On the other hand, if a theory allows for something along the lines of "strong emergence," to get around these problems, I have no idea why we would be talking about mindless entropy gradients and intentionality as good in a remotely univocal or even analogous way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Strong emergence is just reductionism plus supervenience. A complete non-theory. A way of hand-waving rather than actually explaining.

Goodness, as we experience it, would be defined in terms of an irreducible intentionality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good luck with that. I thought you were here to discuss pragmatism in some way.

All of what you're saying may well be quite accurate from a scientific perspective, without amounting to a metaphysics. — Wayfarer

The truth of this relies on you being an expert in what counts as metaphysics. So...

By the way, and as we're now discussing science, have there been any updates to the declaration from CERN some years back that the Universe shouldn't exist? — Wayfarer

Sources of CP violation have indeed been found. Just not enough.

Rather than just react to catchy headlines, you ought to invest some effort into learning about what you just hope is good verbal ammunition.

Entropy is perhaps (that is, as far as we can tell) a global tendency, not a purpose. — Janus

Which is what I said and why I cited Salthe as the source.

The idea that the Cosmos is governed by some overarching (transcendent) purpose is necessarily a theistic idea, — Janus

Yep. It elevates the realm of human concerns – the purposes of a confused species not long departed from the life of an ape – to some transcendent "Mind of God" status.

I prefer a deflationary metaphysics that brings us humans back down to the Earth – the reality that we need to do a better job of tending.

The fastest route to non-existence is not a teleological explanation, sorry. — Wayfarer

You're talking bollocks. Science is based on the axiom of the principle of least action. It is enshrined in Newtonian Mechanics, Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Field Theory. And guess what, it appears in thermodynamics too once it is upgraded to dissipative structure theory.

You only understand thermodynamics in closed and gone to equilibrium terms. The Heat Death as it was understood in Boltzmann's time. But the Heat Death is now a de Sitter spacetime story. The Comos expands and cools eternally as a story of constant growth (and contraction). It does come to a halt in eternalised fashion as it hits its Planck scale quantum limits. But hey, that is the effective end of time too.

This journey has a start because the Planck scale defines the "hot and small" that could be the Big Bang's beginning in terms of the reciprocality of its Heat Death – the Heat Death being 1/hot and small, or the inverse in being the "vast and frigid".

So – as biosemioticians discussing cosmic pansemosis would put it – there is a natural tendency, an arrow of time, built in. And all of physics reflects that in its grounding on the (rather metaphysical and holistic) principle of least action.

Listen up. You are critiquing old model thermodynamics which is just a model of equilibrium balances. You need to catch up with dissipative structure physics which shows that equilibriums are something different from the point of the view of something as large and growth-predicated as a Cosmos.

Closed systems are Gaussian equilbriums. Openly growing ones preserve their balance by maintaining a log/log or powerlaw direction of action.

There is thus a good reason why we find the Universe tumbling headlong into a heat sink of its own creation. That is how the Universe manages to exist as a process that persists. If there was not this tellic trick of heading towards its own inverse, we couldn't be here to inquire about it.

What is amazing about the Big Bang is how the Cosmos has kept up its doubling and halving powerlaw equilibrium despite a number of major phase changes brought about a dropping temperature and expanding space. Through Darwininan competition, new modes of thermalising keep self-organising and so keep the larger game going.

Radiation gets replaced by matter as the fuel. Then as matter splutters out, dark energy is able to take over.

Telos is there in natural selection fashion. The critical mass is maintained even through huge material disruption.

But all this is perhaps "too new" for you to realise how old hat your views of thermodynamics is?

I just cited Salthe's tellic hierarchy of tendency/function/purpose a few posts back. I've also cited it to you half a dozen times at least over at least a decade.

If you have an argument against that approach – other than it is not what a Platonist/Buddhist/Idealist/Ordinary Person/Whatever would mean by final cause – then trot it out.

And it doesn't even matter if Aristotle did not unpack the point. It is a distinction that has only become possible because of modern science and its understanding of what actually grounds the Cosmos and where negentropic complexity might fit with that in a holistic and hylomorphic fashion.

Stop asking me to do your homework. I've learnt it is a thankless exercise.

Systems science takes Aristotle as its founding figure. It expands on the holism and organicism of his hylomorphism, whereas regular science riffs off the atomistic causality of Aristotle's earlier Organon. (Francis Bacon got modern experimental science rolling with his publication of the "New Organon".)

To which a Platonist response might be: so what? — Wayfarer

To which natural philosophy would reply, so what? We're Aristoteleans.

Have you never heard of natural philosophy as a metaphysical tradition then? :roll:

https://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/NatPhil_of_entropy.pdf

In what sense can anything be "good" "from the perspective of the Cosmos?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

And how can the Cosmos be self-organizing while lacking any self? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are trapped in a search for meaning in an ordinary socially constructed use of these terms. You are not receptive to a technical redefinition that could make good metaphysical sense. So the discussion will just loop.

Stan Salthe is a natural philosopher and biosemiotician who defines three grades of telos sufficient to span the range of natural systems from the physical to the biological to the cognitive.

The Cosmos would have its entropic tendencies. Life has its telic functionality. Cognition can be said to have its deliberative purpose.

So there is a hierarchy of systems. Those with self-organising constraints and gradients, but no informational codes. Those with biological codes. Then those with the benefit of neural codes, and in the case of humans, the sociocultural level of semiotic self hood and telos that comes with verbal and numeric codes.

This is what makes biosemiosis a natural philosophy. It puts us firmly in the Cosmos with its general thermodynamic constraints, but then is a theory of the negentropic freedoms that levels of encoding and world-modelling can buy.

Everyday language is shaped by its need to function as a way to organise everyday society. You need to develop a more technical use of language to have a more technical understanding of our situation as semiotic creatures riding thermodynamic gradients.

For one incomplete example, lies can be very pragmatic (in the sense of, "with a great deal of usefulness") — javra

But this is not a theory of truth. This is not the application of the Peircean process of rational inquiry - the truth towards which a community of reason would tend. This is just lying for selfish interests.

The point of pragmatism is to transcend individual minds and overcome solipsism by following a method of evidenced argument. You are talking about social manipulation as “being pragmatic”. Something else entirely.

I think it's possible that you're overlooking much of what the terms good and bad signify in everyday use. — javra

I am happy to have a technical discussion about epistemic method. If you want to talk about the social construction of everyday terms, that again is a quite different inquiry. No point mixing the two.

By some, sure, but how would this relate to the Good as that via which we, for one example, discern that a correct argument is good and an incorrect argument is bad? — javra

What else is pragmatism about as a ground for a theory of truth?

For instance, is Nature bad/evil that must be conquered or is Nature good and goodness that ought to be aligned with? This issue regarding control over nature has little if anything to do with being in the flow. — javra

Nature is its own self-balancing flow. And there is room for us in that.

It is not me that is defending good/bad as valid terms. I’m just pointing out why they are so reductionistically deficient.

Using the word “control” was obviously a bad move on my part. You have seized on the same reductionist connotations to drag this discussion into what I see as irrelevancies.

Why should stability be valued - aka be deemed good - to begin with? — javra

Again, you are wanting me to defend wordings that I don’t advance.

If “good” is pragmatic balance, then stability-instability has some good balance. There is indeed the plasticity-stability balance as is modelled in neural network learning models and other models of neurocognition.

It is how brains are known to work. They must learn easily but also not learn too much - add too much destabilising novelty to their hard won memories, habits and skills all at once.

Is it good to have brain that works efficiently, that can both change its mind and have a mind in the first place?

If you agree with this definition of goodness, then it is mathematically supported by models of cognition. Organisms live in the flow of their worlds by having this kind of neural balance.

Here, you're trying to rationalise 'goodness' in terms of physics, where 'serving the Second Law of Thermodynamics' which is like the scientific replacement for 'serving God's will'. — Wayfarer

Or putting something mathematically grounded in a jokey fashion.

You were. I am here applying what I take to be the implicitly maintained common sense interpretation that all of biosemiosis is taken to be fully governed by pansemiosis - hence, to be perpetually governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics in part if not in full, this without exception. — javra

I was pointing out that negentropy seems antithetical to entropy, but a systems approach explains why it ain't.

From a human point of view, negentropy might be celebrated as good and entropy bad. That is a position normally seen. But from the Cosmic point of view, negentropy only exists to the degree it better organises dissipation. So it is also good from the Second Law point of view. And probably bad from the human point of view to the degree we let out structure building civilisations run out of synch with the larger environmental entropy flows that must be their "liveable contexts".

So good/bad can be grounded in this larger thermodynamic view. That was my point.

Not all. Control of Nature is coveted by some. Others seek to be at one with Nature, often utilizing (consciously or otherwise) different metaphysical interpretations of Nature from those who view Nature as a given to be taken control of. — javra

Being in the flow is just being well balanced as you scoot down the slope on a pair of skis. It is the effort of control minimised so that the outcome has maximal efficiency.

You hit a tennis ball harder by relaxing all the muscles that would otherwise coarsen the silky skill of the shot. Semiotic modelling approaches just make this deep principle explicit.

Yet the Cosmos is constituted in part of sentient beings - rather than being in any way metaphysically ruptured from sentience. — javra

Words like sentience are a problem unless you can provide some pragmatic definition. I know what you are vaguely gesturing towards. But by contrast, biosemiosis is a model of the modelling relation itself. Friston's Bayesian Brain even cashes it out in differential equations these days.

The two (biology and physicality) are in Peircean interpretations entwined, rather than distinct. — javra

Peirce of course was a creature of his age and there is a lot of residual religiosity in his writings.

Also the genetic code wasn't discovered in his time. He was still working at the level of protoplasmic biology – the striving life force of Naturphilosophie. He couldn't anticipate how deeply correct his pragmatism/semiotics was going to be once science properly could get to the bottom of the secrets of life (and mind).

So sure, he left hostages to fortune like "effete mind" – which is still perfectly fine as a metaphor, only inadequate as a specific metaphysical claim. Unless you still believe in "spirit stuff" ontologies.

You can dilute a substance. But what is the equivalent when it comes to a process? Especially a process as rigorously modelled as biosemiosis now is, cashed out as I say in Bayesian equations and a general systems science architecture.

Process philosophy as an umbrella school of philosophy tmk simply affirms that all things are in flux, hence that there is no thing(s) which is eternally stable. Which also brings to mind the view you seem to endorse that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is eternally stable, whereas Peirce would at the very least entertain the notion that this law of nature (here granting this human appraisal of what in fact is an unquestionable verity) too progressively evolved and yet evolves together with the evolution of the physical cosmos (i.e., of the effete mind). — javra

Again, Peirce did reflect his social constraints. We know his father, the way Harvard was run, his reliance on a religiously-motivated sponsor, the general New England fervour. As someone who didn't fit in, he had to at least try to fit in somehow. Imagine Peirce supported and set free within the context of a German or British university in the same era.

But anyway, if all things are in flux then that is how stability is what then evolves from that. It gives stabilising constraints something pragmatically useful to be doing. Giving a concrete persistent shape to existence as a process (of cosmic expansion~cooling, or thermalisation).

It is the mechanical view of reality that has the problem of starting already substantially stable and existent. It is just there, and has nothing then to do. Purpose of any kind – even the most basic thermal imperative kind – is left out of the metaphysics.

If so, then your affirmation here is a reflection of your own personal proclivities rather than a defining factor of process philosophy. — javra

I use "process philosophy" in tongue in cheek fashion as the best known process philosophers are those who are the bad examples. Peirce was the only proper process philosopher ... as he was really a structuralist. Sort of an in joke here.

First, this - because it by all means seems to affirm that all biosemiosis is governed by pansemiosis — javra

Semiosis is a hierarchical systems model so speaks of top-down constraints – the structuring regularity or synechic continuity that emerges from the chaos of tychic Firstness, to use Peirce-speak.

It is the mechanical view that sees laws governing all action. The systems view says the global order only places limits on local action. And what is not forbidden is free to happen.

Constraints are essentially permissive. And indeed – as they are themselves part of what must emerge from a balancing – they must persist because they leave exactly those freedoms that are the most constructive in terms of building the system in question. Constraints must "do good" in terms of shaping the parts that go on to (re)construct the system - the system that is defined by these self-same contraints.

So the causality is very different from the causality you are criticising here. A global balance between synechism and tychism is what makes for a system that can exist because – like an organism – it can repair and reproduce itself. It has the entropic metabolism that means as a Big Bang cosmos, it can persist until the end of time itself. Or until it arrives at its own reciprocal Heat Death state, in other words.

yet either a) denounces any valid ontological occurrence of the Good which sentience ought to aspire toward or, else b) affirms that the Good is pansemiosis's very end-state, in which, in part, all awareness ceases to be, thereby again equating the objective Good to non-being (problematic for reasons mentioned in my previous post: it endorses means toward non-being in as quick a time-span as possible via, for example, suicide). — javra

Again, you are reading my words through the wrong causal lens. As well as doing what I completely reject, which is ontologising this unplaced and reductionist notion of "the Good".

That is the misstep I set out to unpick by wheeling in a better causal model of "existence".

In everything from neo-Platonism to Buddhism wherein the end-state we all "ought to seek" is deemed to be beyond notions of existence and nonexistence - an end-state yet described as complete and perfect bliss and, hence, wherein awareness of bliss is yet necessarily present (even if necessarily devoid of any I-ness) - balance between ready occurring opposites is antithetical to the obtainment of, or else closer proximity to, the Good as these set of systems can be interpreted to appraise the term "the Good". — javra

Once more, the mistake here is expecting an answer in words other than "it is a critical balance".

Analysis progresses by dichotomising, but must then continue on to the proper answer. We can't separate the world into the good and the bad, then treat one as the only real thing.

Psychology tells us that what is mentally healthy is to be "in the flow". So not just somewhere between orgasmic bliss and nihilist despair as the two limiting poles of experience, but instead always smoothly surfing the possibilities of the world in terms of well-honed skills.

Being in the flow does feel like acting at the level of unthinking habit, but in pursuit of some generally pragmatic conscious goal. We want to feel "good" and "in control" by having mastery over actions as we move through a life. And we want our communities and societies to be organised by the same flow psychology.

The pragmatic definition of "good" is really very simple from a psychological, sociological and ecological viewpoint – the view from the scale of the self, and the semiotic levels that bracket this selfhood.

But we have absorbed this mechanical metaphysics of being helpless cogs in a world machine. We believe in a causality that is flawed and so get confused about how to live a life in practice. Or at least when we get out of the flow of our well-honed daily existence and start to philosophise, then we can confuse ourselves as all the habits and words are wrong for the task.

Semiosis is how to straighten out philosophy from the ground up. Peirce is the touchstone because he created a consistent metaphysics from mathematical logic to psychological phenomenology.

Śūnyatā is not a metaphysical posit. — Wayfarer

Rejecting metaphysics is still metaphysics. The clue is in the use of logical imperatives such as the word "not". A dichotomising epistemological claim is being made.

But all definitions within a system are circular. — Treatid

Incorrect. They are dichotomies. They are reciprocally connected by the constraint of being mutually exclusive yet jointly exhaustive.

So take a basic definition to any vague notion of "a system". It is hierarchically divided between its local and global scales of being. It is bounded in measurable fashion in that the local is defined as that which is the least global, and the global is that which is the least local. Or local = 1/global and global = 1/local.

What you call going around in a meaningless circle – a rotational symmetry adding no information – is always in serious metaphysics an effort to split possibility towards its mutually complementary aspects. And this is the basis of science as it is the basis of measurability. We place reality between limiting bounds that are then each the proper measure of the other ... even when the reciprocality is between the infinite and the infinitesimal.

So circularity can be a problem for some folk. But dichotomies have been going strong since ancient Greece and now stand as the metaphysical foundation for our scientific descriptions of nature.

I was listening to a talk by Michel Bitbol yesterday, in which he tore strips off Frithjof Capra (in a friendly way): 'the language of physics is mathematics, and that of Buddhism is Sanskrit. The only thing they have in common, is that most Westerners don't understand either of them.' — Wayfarer

Buddhism, Continental philosophy and quantum mysticism have so much in common. Claiming you understand is the proof you don't understand. Truth has to be placed beyond the grasp of mere reason to secure the prestige of the priesthood protecting the holy fire.

I think 'Pierciean semiotics' is a metaphysics - a kind of scientific alternative to the creation myth, with the second law of thermodynamics being envisaged as the kind of driving force. — Wayfarer

It is a metaphysics of systems science for sure. It speaks to the triadic holism of Nature. So rather than a myth, it is a specific architecture of how Nature self-organises into the Cosmos we can recognise.

If you want to argue against it, you need to engage with its specific claims, not just shake an angry fist in the air.

But in Buddhism, the 'driving force' is neither a Biblical God nor a physical law. Beings are bound to the wheel of birth and death because of avidya, ignorance, which is another difficult thing to fathom. — Wayfarer

Again Buddhism (like Continental philosophy and QM mysterianism) is stuck on the ground floor of dualising paradox and has failed to climb up to a clear systems view of reality.

There is a murky view of the triadic structure to be found in co-dependent arising and that sort of stuff. Just not the crystal clarity of Peircean semiotics.

One can always cancel away intellectual progress by pointing to the existence of contradictions that seem to defeat the mechanisms of reason. Science can't explain mind. Yadayada.

The systems view is what lifts reason beyond this conventionalised impasse.

I mean even quantum mechanics clicks into place when you place it within the Thirdness of its thermodynamic context. Decoherence sorts things out pretty fast.

But then, where the non-occurrence of one's self as that which is in any way aware to be claimed as the objective good in the "true pansemiotic point of view", this would then rationally run directly contrary to all aspects of life which seek a continuation of awareness: everything from self-preservation to greater, else deeper, understanding regarding the nature of Nature. — javra

Humans are complex creatures. We could just as well celebrate the idea of live fast/die young. Teenagers often do.

And I thought I was clear there is a difference between biosemiosis and pansemiosis.

Humans model their reality so as to control it. That is what creates the complexity of choices. We can burn through our genetically allotted span in any way we can freely imagine. Fast and loose or slow and steady. Goodness lies in whatever is the suitable balance. And that in itself is a vexed question because we have not yet lived long enough in the highly accelerated modern world we have created.

The Cosmos by contrast just is its own model. It does what it does. Whatever its entropification balance, that is the one that has evolved and thus proven itself.

the quoted perspective rationally reduces to an endorsement of suicide in as short a time-span as possible — javra

This misses the point that in the process philosophy point of view, all things are a balancing act. There is no such thing as "existence", just persistence.

And while humans can develop some grand ambitions when they find themselves surrounded by entropic wealth, resources are finite. The Second Law awaits in the long run. Humans can accelerate the Heat Death as a choice. But they can't outlast it even by the most frugal and uneventful of lives.

So the human pragmatic task is to define good as a balancing act within a realistic appreciation of that larger Cosmic (pansemiotic) context.

Sounds a little zen, no? Eternalised equilibrium. The end of restless change in a pure state of Sunyata?

Abolishing the target of practical reason ends up destroying all of reason. You can't knock out this leg and still expect theoretical reason (whose target is truth) to stand. Eliminating the good ruins reason as a whole. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem is that pragmatism spits out two answers in terms of what it means by "goodness".

On the one hand, you have some notion of functionality or reasonableness. Peirce's idea of the good was about living as a thinking community that was able to sustain its being in evolutionary fashion – the biosemiotic idea of goodness. Making life work for us as humans and part of a biosphere.

And he wanted to extend this human-centric definition to the Cosmos as a whole. The Universe is good in the sense it is a universalised growth of the quality of functional and self-organising reasonableness. Logic could apply to the structuring of a sustainable existence.

We could call this principle of the good, as applied to the Universe, pansemiosis. The reasonable universe inhabited by its reasonable creatures.

But the problem is that the Universe lacks actual semiotic mechanism. It is not being organised by an informational code. Life and mind have genes, neurons, words and numbers by which to model existence and so stand outside the Cosmos so as to take mechanical control of its entropic potentials.

It is "good" in a pragmatic sense that a human community can feed and house itself, grow its numbers, repair and reproduce in the fashion of an evolutionarily functional organism. That is the pragmatist good that is easy to recognise. The ability to take sunlight, fossil fuels, or whatever entropic gradient is on offer and turn it into a world in which we can live.

But the Cosmos lacks this level of organismic purpose. It just is what it is. A physical system self-organising to dissipate entropic gradients – the Big Bang being the foundational gradient upon which all the material complexity is being constructed.

So from the Universe's point of view – to the degree it has one – entropification is good as a general goal as it allows the negentropic complexity that functionally accelerates that grand enterprise. A star is doing a cosmic solid in rounding up a dust of matter particles and wasting them to background radiation. It is a self-organising furnace serving the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a way that is "good" from the true pansemiotic point of view.

So pragmatism – as analysed by its founder – ends up giving two senses of good. There is the functionality of constructive reason and the functionality of entropic acceleration.

From a human point of view, this is why we are conflicted. We both love a fast car and appalled by a fast car. A Maserati is equally a thing of beauty and a thing of waste. It is good as an example of human reason bending fossil fuel to our collective will. And it is also bad as we fill up our world with Maserati's and start to encounter the communal and environmental consequences of chasing that particular entropy accelerating goal.

So yes, pragmatism certainly delivers clear answers on what is "moral" in an objective and measurable sense. But we have to then be sensitive to the dichotomy that the answer provides.

In the end, the goodness of reason-constrained entropification has to be itself a dynamical balance. We have to burn through our world to exist, but also can't afford to burn through it too fast.

This dilemma is usually at the base of moral codes. We kind of always know that trading the short term thrill of freedom for the long term value of collective constraint is the wise way to go.

But humans are immature creatures – in the ecological sense. We haven't lived long enough in the world created since the industrial revolution to develop a collective code – one respected across the whole planet – that will indeed provide the pragmatically functional and good way of life.

The concept of "outside the universe" is null. It doesn't mean anything.

Your concept of "outside the universe" is part of the universe. It is inside the universe. — Treatid

My position is formally an internalist epistemology. I'm a Peircean pragmatist. So problem dealt with. :smile:

Language and mathematics don't have a secret backdoor access to an objective viewpoint independent of the universe. — Treatid

You seem to be arguing rather passionately employing what you consider to be "good logic". You talk as if this is giving you a secret backdoor access to truths others don't grasp. So a little contradictory right there.

Pragmatism deals with the essential subjectivity of reasoning. Structuralism is then the ontology which emerges from applying that reasoning to the world at large. As Peirce argued, the "best logic" is the one with which we would both think and the one that itself organises the world.

And it is that pragmatic logic – the holistic logic of Peircean semiosis – that would help you deal with the emergent and evolutionary nature of Being. In terms of mounting a physicalist inquiry into the nature of Nature, the structure of an expanding~cooling cosmos, it leads you to thermodynamics and dissipative structure theory.

Particle physics, for example, is all about how the Big Bang fell into inevitable gauge symmetry structures as it expanded and cooled.

Electrons don't exist. They are the irreducible residue of a process of "universal" constraint on possibility itself. In the beginning was everything. Then what survived were all the possibilities that didn't get cancelled away by their opposite possibilities. In quantum jargon, the wavefunction of the Universe is the sum over all its possibilities. It was so hot, everything was possible at the start. It will be so cold that almost nothing will become possible by the end.

Peircean holism – as a fully internalist perspective – gives you a very different way of thinking about the questions of existence.

What is the simplest possible building block? What is the simplest possible component of change we could apply to that building block? — Treatid

An electron is not composed of other particles. ... If an electron is 'composed' of position, momentum, spin, charge and mass; aren't these properties more fundamental than the electron? — Treatid

Well an electron is an emergent composite and not fundamentally simple in some reductionist/atomistic sense. It exists as the result of a chain of symmetry-breaking events that leave it as a particle that has indeed hit its lowest possible mass state, so exists"fundamentally" as it can't decay further, while also representing the specific world-building property of "a negative charge". It has a property that is cosmically meaningful because it can stand in relation with its partner-in-crime, the proton.

So to think about it in a holistic, structural, emergent, evolutionary, thermodynamic and systems sense, the Big Bang is a cosmic dissipative structure that organises itself to dispose of its entropy by expanding and cooling. It undergoes a whole series of phase changes – like steam to water to ice – as it globally restructures in ways that minimise its entropy. Like a cooling iron bar, it can suddenly lock in a global field that creates an emergent state which then has its own second-order excitations or "particles" doing their own second-order entropic thing.

An electron is what you get left with at this stage of the Universe when it has cooled and expanded to almost zero in energy density and almost unbound in effective distance scale. A baked-in defect like you find topologically trapped in a crystal.

To exist as the distinct and fundamental thing it is, an electron had to be produced by the Higgs symmetry breaking. Before the temperature of the Universe fell to the 160 GeV range, electrons were chirally broken, left and right, Weyl particles. Gaining mass from the Higgs field glued the two halves together to make a whole electron – turn it into a Dirac particle, along with creating electromagnetism with its photons as part of the whole reorganisation of the cosmic topological order.

This only got us as far as a hot soup of electrons and positrons though. A stew of matter and antimatter creation and annihilation which lacked any great particularity of the kind we would associate with "a particle". Location and momentum were just an averaged blur within the general thermal confusion of a charged plasma, not really anything individual.

But more symmetry breaking saw a slight excess of electrons (as the negatively charged matter particle) being left over and positrons (as the positively charged antimatter) being eliminated from the cosmic topological order (being wasted to hot photons that made up the fast-fading CMB radiation background).

So we have this fundamental kind of thing that we call "electron-ness" which only emerges as everything else gets more crisply and counterfactually suppressed. The Weyl left-right difference has to be welded together to create a Dirac particle which is now divided at the higher topological level of being a matter or antimatter particle. Then the electron must outlive the positron to create a general negative charge difference – the one that the proton on its own symmetry breaking story is heading towards to become the positively charged “fundamental particle” that is its counterpart in turning the Universe into a realm dominated by electromagnetic radiation as its most visible thermalising characteristic.

Even when we get to electrons as the negative charge stamped out as material form, we still have to have it decay through its three mass generations – taus, muons, then electrons – to arrive at the thermal bottom rung simplicity of a particle that can decay no further ... at least not until black holes eventually sweep up all mass particles and themselves evaporate to leave an empty Heat Death void.

So the holistic or structural take on this is that we have the general thing of a heat sink cosmos winding its way down its entropic gradient. That is the fundamental relation, the fundamental thermal context. Then as it cools, it also goes through major phase changes that each throw up the local topological features – the excitations that obey the symmetries – which characterise that stage of organisation.

The reason the rather mixed and complex brew of radiation, electrons and protons seems such a "fundamental" state of order is that these indeed proved to be a suitable ground for the nuclear chemistry of atoms, the atomic chemistry of materials science, the material chemistry of biological life, etc.

By comparison to the lifetimes of stars, planets, mountain ranges and haircuts, photons, electrons and protons do fit the ontological bill of "atomistic materials existing in an acausal, large and frigid, cosmic void".

But photons, electrons and protons are all topologically composite particles that happened to land in a place where they formed an electromagnetic level of entropic organisation. They are only fundamental to the degree they are Platonically inevitable mathematical structure – a place a cooling cosmos had to arrive at because thermodynamics can't avoid being self-organised by the maths of its own symmetry breaking.

A ton of other "particle stories" also condensed out of the Big Bang, but add so little further to the complexity and wonder of nature that even if they contribute much more actual entropification to the total dissipation budget, we don't think of them as being "fundamental" it the same way. They don't carve a history of individuated and counterfactual events. Stuff like the CMB, dark matter, dark energy, blackhole evaporation, are just background stuff to us, given our very human concerns when it comes to metaphysical story telling.

So in summary, our very notion of "fundamental" is rather screwed by our natural psychological prejudices. But physics does tell us about dissipative structure, topological order, gauge symmetry and all the stuff we need to be able to see through to what is really going on. The Universe is a heat sink rattling through a series of phase changes on the way to its eventual heat death. The present moment is an especially complexified mid-stage with its stars, planets and life.

But even that accounts for a few percent – a round-up error – in the matter budget of the Cosmos. And if we include all that exists, then black holes are already the dominant "particles of being" and themselves on the way to be shown the door as they are swept up and exported over the cosmic event horizon, leaving a pure void near absolute zero apart from the faintest rustle of dark energy blackbody radiation – the least interesting fluctuations possible in the most empty spacetime possible.

Given your interest in nodes and edges, or information-centric, accounts of all this, this is a way of telling the thermodynamic story using a topological mathematics. There is a reason to think this way for the practical purpose of modelling.

But then you have to dig into the logical atomism being built into the models to be able to step back to the larger metaphysics you might want to frame. Atomism succeeds by simplifying – by severing the immediate from its evolutionary history and self-organising tendencies.

Reality is a fabric of relations. But the simplicity of nodes and edges is the constructive simplicity that emerges from self-constraint. It is what you get – like photons, electrons and protons clattering about in an electromagnetic void – when a heck of a lot of other possibility has been cut away to leave only that as the material stuff you want explained.

The deeper question becomes how does causality and logical counterfactuality even arise as something so apparently simple and inevitable? That is the where systems thinking and other forms of holistic metaphysics comes in.

For those interested in the history of these kinds of political projects - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

You've got to be kidding. Reciprocal? — jgill

OK. Inverse if you prefer. And from there, the multiplicative inverse.

In a very rough sense of the word. Not mathematically. No coastline is patterned the same upon closer and closer examination. — jgill

Again you are talking about the absolutism built into the maths model and not the world of physical process that it then only roughly models.

Reality ain't a computation or a simulation. Coastlines aren't actually generated by an iterative algorithm.

No reason to assert that "dynamical balance" is not mathematical. — jgill

There you go again. Maths in its casual absolutism can provide pragmatic models of reality. But here you would need to start to think about how reality itself might be more deeply described.

The continuous is the limit of the discrete. The limit definition of the common integral does the job. — jgill

And how are you defining the discrete? What grounds claims of there being a difference? Why is differentiation reciprocal to integration?

I agree maths likes to sweep its metaphysics under the carpet. And here you are on a philosophy site, doing just that. :roll:

Don't need fractals. There is no intermediate case. — jgill

You are missing the point. The real world of natural processes is pretty fractal, ain't it? Mountains, coastlines, rivers, earthquakes. Anything described in the language of dissipative structure.

So mathematically, we have an interest in modelling the fact that nature is indeed organised by emergent dynamical balance. It is not one thing or the other, but some equilibrium fluctuation around its opposed tendencies.

The earth's crust is a balance between cooling crust formation and weathering erosion. A coastline is irregular over every scale of observation because it is a dynamical balance between smoothness and roughness. Or "integration and differentiation".

Fractal maths showed up in that link as the kind of bug that the patch of "absolute continuity" is designed to fix.

But maybe the Cosmos just ain't a computation as maths would like to demand, and instead dynamical balance – self-organised emergence from symmetry-breaking – is the logical core of its being?

So I'm asking, what is the point in describing anything as relative if that 'relative' aspect can be defined completely synonymously in a way that most people here seem to describe as an example of absolute? — Matt Thomas

But to be absolute is a relative thing. The absolute only exists in terms of reciprocal bounds that mark the limits on being. Thus no thing itself can be absolute. All things are relative to those bounding limits.

I know, not quite what you mean. :cool: — jgill

But note how fractals neatly express the intermediate case between the continuous and the discrete.

Dialectical reasoning covers this by making two opposing limits relative to each other. So you have pairs of absolute limits that are related by their reciprocality. Each is defined in terms of being as little like its other as possible, in dichotomous fashion.

A bunch of familiar metaphysical dichotomies have been organising Western thought since Ancient Greece.

Take for example the oppositions of stasis and flux, chance and necessity, matter and form, the one and the many, the discrete and the continuous, meaning and nonsense, atom and void, local and global, etc, etc.

Change can be measured in terms of a lack of stability. And stability as a lack of change. That is, applying the law of the excluded middle - the dichotomy defined as that which it is both mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive - stability = 1/change, and change = 1/stability. There is an inverse relation that defines its own absolute measurable limits. The measureable lack of one is the measurable degree of presence of its “other”.

So problem solved. We seek opposites that have metaphysical strength generality. And use them as our yardsticks to measure reality.

To be discrete is to be absolutely broken apart in some fashion. To be continuous is to absolutely lack that characteristic. We then can relate these two absolute ideals by the inverse operation which can tell us that how far or near we are from those bounding ideals in any particular case in question.

In reality, nothing could be absolutely continuous as it would indeed just break the yardstick. It would claim that the absolute simply existed in a way that made its opposite pole of being - the discrete - not even a remote possibility.

But we can still stay within the measurable bounds of possibility if the amount of discreteness being claimed as part of our continuous “whatever” is infinitesimal. That is, we are infinitely distant from a state which we would label as discrete.

So you get both the relative and the absolute out of a dichotomy for all practical purposes. Two poles are related in a mutually self-measuring fashion. And that relation is absolute to the degree it conforms to the constraints of the LEM.

Continuity and discreteness can have an absolute limit state description even if it is one based on the asymptotic approach to those limits via acts of relativistic discrimination.

Thanks. :up:

For instance, phenomenologically informed enactivist and autopoietic approaches in cognitive psychology are based on such a conceptual shift, and new materialism ( which is different than pomo) interprets the results of quantum field theory through a different metaphysics than older materialisms. — Joshs

Interesting. Do you have a handy link to this?

You mean you arent familiar with the philosophical history of structuralism — Joshs

I meant that I don't do gibberish. And I certainly don't regard the PoMo version of "structuralism" as a solid foundation for a proper structuralist metaphysics.

I'm a systems scientist/holist/Aristotelean when it comes to a structuralist causality. Kant and Hegel, along with Schelling and whoever, were the heirs to that tradition.

And where I depart is in recognising that organisms have their root in the physics of dissipative structure, but their intentionality in the mechanics of semiosis.

So nature wants to self-organise entropically. And life and mind can arise as further informational structure that lives off that dynamics.

The philosophical history of structuralism continues to be written. By science now.

We could argue the toss about who was informed by the mechanistic holism of Kant, who by the idealistic holism of Hegel. But it is still the same thing of taking the developmental perspective seriously. Perception as an embodied habit rather than a disembodied display.

As Derrida writes: — Joshs

I don’t speak gibberish. Perhaps you could translate into plain language?

One example is the eventual embrace of the ideas of American Pragmatists and Phenomenology within psychology. — Joshs

But wasn’t the pragmatism a reflection of early psychological research - the work of Helmholtz, Wundt, Donders, Fechner and the rest? Psychology started off enactive and embodied with its emphasis on habits, psychophysics, anticipation, etc - the practical how of modelling a world - and then got lost in the wilderness of Freudianism, Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Personality testing, etc, for a long time.

In my reading of the history, you have Cartesian representationalism and British empiricism creating the familiar disembodied notion of mind as a clutter of sense impressions and ideas. The justification of phenomenology as the method of inquiry.

You then have pragmatism arising out of the new scientific spirit of inquiry where the mind is all about modelling, habits and judgements - constrained by the fact of being in the world rather than being remarkable for standing apart from that world.

After that, psychology swings back to a confusion of approaches that speak to the old Dualistic concerns with representation and sense data. The “problem” for psychology becomes again the contents of the private individual head rather than the more general one of how organisms relate to worlds in meaning constructing fashion.

See this quick intro to Peirce’s theory of object recognition as a shift from the representationalism of sense data to the enaction of perceptual judgements.

https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/9037/NZAP%28Dec2014%29.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y

So enactivism was alive and well in 19th C experimental psychology. And Pragmatism arose in that context. Both were informed by the holism of German naturphilosophie.

But then the reductionist Anglo world came crashing in and claimed psychology as its science of the mind. The story of a container with its private content. The whole field got metaphysically screwed for another century.

Perhaps it could be argued that consciousness is 'the capacity for experience' in an allegorical manner to energy as 'the capacity for work'// and that physical matter, in the absence of consciousness, lacks the capacity for experience. So that the emergence of organisms is also the emergence of the capacity for experience, which is absent in the non-organic domain. — Wayfarer

So what is it about organisms that is so special? What characterises them beyond what the bare physics of matter can tell us?

The scientific view is that organisms display intelligence and behavioural autonomy because they use semiotic codes to construct a “selfish” or enactive modelling relation with their worlds. That is what can be seen plainly written into the structure of their nervous systems. It is not a mystery.

So what is the alternative you are trying to float here? That a by-product of starting down that path is that living bodies somehow … tune into a karmic plane of being, or something?

They are like fleshy receivers of cosmic signal? Having a metabolism not only allows organisms to do work but also download, glimpse, incorporate, something or other, a kind of “experiential energy” that radiates from some source beyond the physical realm?

Be specific as you like in answering. What ontology do you wish to commit to here?

I dismiss Chalmers by reducing his claimed concern to the general epistemic issue that science can only proceed by way of testable counterfactuals.

That applies to anything science might investigate. It is not special to “consciousness”. It is why science has special contempt for “theories that are not even wrong”.

Which is the class of theory popular with crackpots who like the idea that the Hard Problem gives them licence for their furious speculations.

The refrain of “no one knows” is being heard often. And yet the neuroscience exists.

The unification and stabilisation of perception is what falls out of the Bayesian Brain and its predictive modelling. Learning to ignore the world as much as possible by learning to anticipate the world as much as possible is what both solves this “binding problem” and also produces the sense of the still self at the centre of its coherently unfolding world.

Before you turn your head, you have already sent out the “reafference” pattern as the motor command to be subtracted from the resulting perceptual experience. You will know it is you that turns and not the world that suddenly lurches as that is the uncertainty which you just cancelled out in advance.

A lot of BS is being cited here about what “neuroscience doesn’t know”. Chalmers and Koch are perpetuating a giant public con. You are falling for it.

And as I’ve also said, that is not something which can be framed in scientific terms, because there’s no ‘epistemic cut’ here. We’re never outside of it or apart from it. — Wayfarer

You don't yet understand the epistemic cut. Perhaps I should rename it the epistemic bridge for your benefit.

The cut is the mechanics of a sign, a switch, a ratchet, that gets inserted so as to make the modelling a reality. Brains do that at their level. Societies do that at the next level up.

You are being too psychology-centric. You think only of the minds of "individuals". But organisms can become entrained to social levels of reality modelling. Ants and humans are the "ultrasocial" extremes of this development, as they could insert the further systems of sign in the form of pheromone signals and verbal signals.

There is the presumption that their findings are observer-independent i.e. replicable by anyone, They’re ‘third person’ in that sense. It’s an implicit assumption. — Wayfarer

It seems the explicit part of science as epistemic method that this "independence" is what is being socially-constructed. It is the realist position on indirect realism. :grin:

All the defenders of the Hard Problem and "what it is like to be a first person point of view" make the mistake of not understanding that selves arise within neurobiology as "other" to their perceptual/cognitive realities. The Bayesian Brain and psychology's "enactive turn" summarises the "how" of this. This is the concrete advance since Chalmers and Koch had their little self-aggrandising bet.

So the first person POV is "subjective" in relation to its neurobiological Umwelt. It objectifies the world as the "other" of its ability to forward model it environment. The self is that part of the brain activity which stands as a goal-organised predictive model of the world. The world then becomes for the organism that part of its wider reality which is the recalcitrant or unpredicted. By further processing that updates the running Bayesian model, the world gets assimilated to this "selfish" first person point of view and so woven in as a stable "consciousness" of "how everything is" in terms of a self~world relation.

Science comes along as humans eventually realise the modelling game being played and say we can do better. Through language, but better yet maths, we can implement a model of the modelling relation in such a way it would be like experiencing the world from a God-like view from nowhere. A transcendent third person point of view.

This is made concrete by a process of theory and measurement.

We can state publicly in formal terms a structure of thought that encodes predictions about states of the world. We can share a model with every other mind within our cultural orbit such that we can be sure we are thinking the same – because the rules of this thinking are captured in a rigid mechanical fashion.

And then the predictions are cashed out by reading numbers off dials. We become third person observers by making measurements – measurements that codify degrees of surprise or prediction error.

So whether we talk about "consciousness" as neurobiological awareness or socially-constructed knowing, it is the same epistemic process in action. Cognition as predictive modelling aimed at creating a self in control of its world.

The first person self becomes contrasted with the third person self only as the feature, rather than the bug, of the advances of human epistemology. We took nature's modelling relation to its next semiotic level. We found that we were embodied in our "private" worlds and so found the ladder that could get us out into a public space of theories and measurements.

At the deep metaphysical level – the one that speaks to the ontology of fundamental structure – the structure is the same. A self constructing itself as the prediction maker within what becomes its predictable world – its semiotic Umwelt.

So sure, one can bang on about ineffable feels and homuncular mind's eyes. That reflects an older technical point of view. It reflects the social technology required to impose stable order on the "world model" of cultures based on agrarian empire building. It produced the level of self-regulation that organised the world as a hierarchy of peasants, bureaucrats, priests and kings.

But now we live in industrialised societies where science is the new social technology. We can aim to regulate our lives in ways that have an impersonal rationality. We become ruled not by some transcending sense of God or generalised notion of the divine, but by something even more Platonic and impersonal than that. Laws of nature. And what a clock and ruler can tell us about that in terms of mechanical acts of measurement.

And sure, one may think this impersonalised form of mindfulness is a bit much. It's not real in the sense you might think your neurobiology of the "self and its world" is. The first person view stands clearly opposed to the third person view as the first person view is "the place which you actually inhabit".

But facts are facts. The first person view is just as much a modelling relation as the third person one. It is only that we find ourselves developmentally rooted in the first and making a conscious choice about the second.

And if we are going to be debating things "philosophically", we need to remember that between the neurobiology of the the organismic self and the social construction of the scientific self comes that middle period of being the peasants within an agrarian era with its organised religion and useful ways of having its folk think. There are good historical reasons for why the Hard Problem resonates with a theistic point of view – why Cartesianism still reigns with its crisp dualism of mind and body.

The objective point of view doesn't take the subject into consideration - it is only concerned with what is amenable to quantitative analysis from a third person point of view. — Wayfarer

That would be a grave misunderstanding of Peircean semiotics. Or indeed, post-Kantian epistemology in general.

Nolan goes on to explain that “the color scenes are subjective” and “the black-and-white scenes are objective. — Wayfarer

The difference between being there “for real” and being there as if watching the displaced historical newsreel record of events.

A simple but effective narrative trick by the sound of it. Not sure it supports your idealism very well though.