What he's calling 'an epistemic problem' is actually the metaphysical problem of appearance ('world image') and reality ('what we call the real world'). So I don't see that as 'resolving' the idealist-realist distinction. — Wayfarer

Why not?

To precisely demarcate what personal conscious is is not to define one's personal consciousness in ways that are measurable. Nor does metaphysics mandate that what is shall itself be measurable. — javra

You do a lot of weaselling to avoid supplying a definition to the term that I must give a yes or no answer on.

I’ll help you out. Do you mean something more than attending and reporting if I agree I am conscious of the text? If more, what exactly?

But then, in this thread about the science of consciousness you’ve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether “I am conscious of this text” is a truth-baring proposition. — javra

I gave you the answer. Your question suffers from logical vagueness. Affirming yes or no would make no useful difference.

It remains up to you to define consciousness in terms that pragmatically means anything measurable if you are indeed talking about “the science” of it. Or even just it’s metaphysics.

Everything here is lost to history within about three posts. This is a safe space for misplaced confidence. :grin:

Why the "similarly enough"? Why did the universe or human history need someone Coltrane-ish? Why did it need jazz at all? — Srap Tasmaner

I didn’t say it did. I was taking @plaque flag at face value for the sake of his argument.

From the point of view of the Cosmos, what matters is that we humans work to accelerate the entropification of its realm. And even that doesn’t matter in any strong sense. It just has the tellic force of “inveterate habit”. Being effete matter and all.

So I’ll let others explain their own views as best they can, — javra

You did a splendid job of misrepresenting what biosemiosis claims. :up:

Simply put, semiotics resolves the antique dilemma of realism vs idealism by inserting the epistemic cut of the “sign” between the world and its interpretation.

That is the familiar epistemic first step.

Then semiosis becomes also an ontology by pointing out life and mind instantiate this epistemology as their Bayesian modelling relation.

No claims are made about pansemiosis in this. Life and mind are defined by instantiating a modelling relation within a world that has its own unmodelled reality.

And then things get more interesting. Physics starts to discover that physics is more lively - it houses self-organising dissipative structure. Quantum mechanics makes this fundamental by tacking on statistical mechanics and introducing decoherence/holography.

It gets a bit pansemiotic as there is somehow an “observer” baked into the physics. There is no model and no localised sign relation. But metaphorically there is interpretance - what quantum folk call contextuality. Dissipative structure has the kind of holism where every “wavefunction” collapse is read by us, as modellers, as a system of sign. The physical events that mark histories of interactions and destroy quantum information are “the cosmos measuring itself into ever more definite being”.

So it is metaphorical. But better than the reductionst and atomistic metaphors we were using to account for the “weirdness” of the quantum realm.

Then biosemiosis as a new science crystallised when Peirce’s introduction of a mediating sign as that which connected mind to world was replaced by Pattee’s introduction of a mediating switch.

Life is founded on mechanical switches or ratchets which physically link the informational and entropic aspects of a living and mindful dissipative structure.

Pattee had this crucial insight in the 1970s. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that enough of Peirce’s work had been recovered and understood well enough for Pattee to make the connection that his hierarchy theory and modelling relations approach was semiosis under another name. After going quiet for a few years - having fended of the arguments of myself among others - he suddenly emerged as a rebranded biosemiotician in a blaze of statement papers.

Then roll forward a decade and the other shoe dropped in terms of biophysics showing how biology indeed exploits quantum effects so as to be able to create an organised metabolism using the information bound up in enzymes and other kinds of ‘molecular motors”. Pattee’s mechanical switches and ratchets.

So biosemiosis makes contact with physical reality by that shift from the still rather nebulous idea of a sign to be read to the completely concrete story of switches to be flipped. Biology uses a mechanical interface to mediate between biological information and environmental entropy gradients. The combo is the system we call an organism with a metabolism.

As my interests are more on the mind side than the life side, I am focusing on the higher levels of semiosis that are founded on this basic biological level of “energy capture”.

instead the necessary tradeoff involved in having any finite personality. — plaque flag

But that is how you could even construct a grounding sense of selfhood. The existential crisis in life is not finitude but vagueness. Our job semiotically is to conjure up meaning in a fruitful dialectic between the self and its world - the world it is pragmatically producing. What you say is finitude is what I call the complementary limits on possibility that make being - as dynamical balance - something crisply measurable.

What we want to escape is vagueness. Where we want to arrive is in a realm of crisply expressed possibility.

Finitude doesn’t even exist. Although we may be bounded by asymptotic approach to a horizon.

To be what I am is to also to not be what someone else is. — plaque flag

I don’t get this. You can’t be something definitely different unless that is a contrast to how you are generally the same.

You are saying the existential crisis is realising you can only live the one life, follow the one path. Or perhaps nearer the bone, you can only be exceptional by sacrificing all else to one thing.

I’m just not seeing the logic of that. But I think maybe there is here a buried dichotomy of whether your one life is largely a matter of accident or choice, Does it lack meaning even to be exceptional when it was just a matter of chance, a win in the generic or cultural lottery? Does It only count if we are self-made creations?

If we understand ourselves as natural beings - the product of evo-devo balancing acts - then the hope is to become pragmatically adapted to our environments. You seem to have more Nietzschean aims in mind. You would have to clarify why “finitude” is a bug rather than a feature from a pragmatist point of view.

I agree with you in the abstract, but in practice there is just too much detail for the finite individual to master. The world has too much richness, too much depth. — plaque flag

But you seem to understand the "in practice" in terms of Cartesian representationalism rather than Peircean semiosis. You want every pixel lit up, every information point displayed. Only by "all the bits" is the whole properly understood.

But I say the opposite. The effort is not to master every detail. It is to learn to be able to ignore as much detail as possible.

That is the principle of reality modelling, of pragmatism, of Bayesian Brains, of the Batesonian difference that makes a difference ... of consciousness as the focal attentional/intentional view of the world as it has been rendered by a host of habits acting from their ingrained "self-centred" perspective.

Think of the game of 20 questions. Bivalent inquiry is logarithmic in its progress because it can throw out half the total information on each well judged guess.

In 20 steps, you can turn a million possibilities into 1 certainty measured against a backdrop of 999,999 bits of ignorable noise. Information is meaningful as signal to the degree that information has been discarded. Treated as random backdrop "whatever-ness".

So in practice, it is the ability to discount reality in advance that allows you to control it to your advantage in the present. Wisdom is knowing how not be bothered. Your global habits have already assimilated all possible surprises the world might have.

You can't tell genius from crackpot until you have built up skill at discarding the crackpot with automatic ease. Get to that and the genius pops out, catches your attention, with similar practiced skill.

Even though I see a construction of a grand metaphysics as still possible and worthwhile, such a construction has to be a severe lossy compression of the world. It's not obvious whether it's better to be a Hegel, a Coltrane, a Chappelle, a Napoleon, or just a person who puts their parental role before all else, etc. — plaque flag

Exactly. Except lossy is the feature and not the bug when progressing from analytical intelligence to synthetic wisdom. That is how you can climb the ladder of abstraction and see the wealth of deterministic-seeming detail turn into a simpler statistical array of the accidental. A local blur of baseline fluctuation.

And why also frame this as what kind of historical individual would you like to be? Knowledge is collective. Peirce defined truth as the limits of a community of rational inquiry. And the more complex the world is as a state of emergent hierarchical order, the more the top of the tree ought to be inhabited by synthesisers than analysers. Contributing to the putting together is more impactful than contributing to the breaking apart.

But the systems view is both are needed. They are mutually complementary roles rather than mutually exclusive. This is what allows a system to be a scalefree dynamical balancing act – a system with an inbuilt ratchet of growth and repair.

So do you want to be famous to history or a great dad? I would reply a good life is going to understand that these ought to be complementary goals, and that we should start by being satisfied by striking the right dynamical balance. And if one is the limit on its other, that's fine. It is how it should be if they are actually dialectical oppositions that need to be resolved for the win-win outcome.

Were Hegel, Coltrane, Chappelle, Napoleon good dads?

Of course in practice that doesn't really matter either way as their few offspring were immediately swallowed up in the anonymity of a much vaster pool of population growth. But likewise, even their achievements were something else someone would have done - or at least done similarly enough not for it to count as a material difference in the unfolding of larger human history.

So there isn't such a strong excuse for being a bad parent because you had more important stuff to do – unless that stuff fed back to improve parenting as a general social skill. That thought ought to focus your question more sharply on the actual point of what is good for "the rationalising system" which is all about its accumulating habits and feedback loops.

What I'm looking at is how the metaphysics might model its own creator and how it accounts for its own role. For instance, does the correct metaphysics accelerate the heat death ? I like to see how theories account for their own engendering. — plaque flag

I've talked endlessly about this. Anaximander and his Apeiron. Peirce and his cosmic growth of reasonableness. The Big Bang as a symmetry-breaking of an "everythingness".

In the beginning is a vagueness. The nothingness of an everythingness. But everythingness includes all its contradictions. And much of it must cancel because it is "too symmetric".

If you can move a foot to the left, you can move a foot to your right, and you are back right where you started. Everything has changed and nothing has happened.

But that then sets you up for an emergent residue of what can't be cancelled away as it dichotomous or asymmetric. It is a difference that makes a difference. You can grow or you can shrink. Once you start heading in those kinds of opposite directions, it tends to become more a permanent symmetry breaking. It takes much more time and energy to cancel out the move you might have made.

So a simple translation or rotation can just as immediately self cancel. That is what we say virtual particles do in the quantum vacuum.

But then growth and shrinking are complex symmetry breakings which are moves towards complementary global and local limits on being. You can go a long way from your "other" and so make it a long way to get back.

Again this is quantum field theory and its path integral or sum over histories story, understood in terms of the thermal decoherence created by a universe that cools and expands. With global growth and local energy dissipation baked into its fabric, the universe creates conditions where particles that start off as left-right coin flips – the symmetry of particles and anti-particles – get pulled far enough apart from each other in terms of distance and energy that they simply fall out of the entropic flow.

The virtual vacuum fluctuations crystallise as fundamental real particles. Quark, electrons and neutrinos. They become the dust of localised matter that can no longer stream at lightspeed and so are frozen into one or other of their original symmetric states. Asymmetry of scale has stranded them.

Only at the end of time will the Universe complete the cycle by in fact giving all this matter dust the time to find its way back to a state of virtual existence as the information content of cosmological horizons. Symmetry from the particle fluctuation sense will be restored. But that is now baked into the asymmetry of a de Sitter heat death void where the Universe as a thing is now the heat sink without its heat source rather than the Big Bang's story of the heat source without yet its heat sink.

So "time" is the energy difference that is used to set up this thermo-spatial asymmetry. The Planck scale measures its "smallness" at the start and "largeness" at the end. Reality exists because everythingness contained its further possibilities in terms of symmetries that could very quickly be discarded and thus – in Darwinian fashion – discover the symmetries that couldn't so easily be self-cancelled to universalised nothingness quite so fast.

There were the global dimensional asymmetries that explain the existence of spacetime extent and energy density content as the general gig of the Universe as an "existing by persisting as an expanding~cooling system" story. And there were the local or gauge asymmetries that could cause isolated particles to condense out of the radiation flow and become negentropic dust that made an atomistic mess of the otherwise pretty clean void until eventually enough time past for this dust to catch up and self-erase.

So metaphysics since its recorded dawn has offered this kind of self-organising tale based on a logic of vagueness, the dichotomies that then can break the symmetry of a vagueness by their asymmetric structure, and the complex hierarchies of negentropic eddies that can form on top of the general downward turbulent entropic flow.

Metaphysics got there early. Physics is catching up fast.

Again, it depends on what kind of thinking you want to do. — Janus

I thought that was “philosophising”. But if you are arguing that philosophy ought to be radically open to all comers, then I would agree. No problem with there being a competition of methods … as pragmatism will in the end win out. :smile:

I would accept that I am talking about “metaphysicalling” or even “natural philosophising” in terms of the kinds of thinking that are effective.

The mouth of the funnel can be as wide as you want to imagine. It is all going to narrow down to the method of pragmatic reason - the semiotic modelling relation - in my view.

Artists may also create novel cultural concerns. — Janus

Sure. But what I am stressing is that art is not a solitary enterprise. It doesn’t exist unless it is shared. The novelty - as in the informationally surprising and revealing - is to be found in the paradigm shift that the wider social system might undertake.

Anyone can splash paint at a canvas to create an accident of pattern. It takes the shock of an audience to give the work its meaning. It becomes art because it is a sign that can be read as expressing some socially-contexted message … like the modern socially approved trope of the artist saying look at me, find me in this canvas by the characteristic violence and randomness of my dripped trails of paint.

“Doesn’t this abstract expressionism truly assert the artist as its central presence by simultaneously removing their presence from the work of art? This has to be the ultimate self-portraying. That will be $50 million thanks. Ker-Ching!”

So it is the conspiracy between the artist and the audience which is the space in which salience can arise. The artist comes up with novel signs that audiences are then encouraged to read in terms of established cultural habits.

Do most works art really challenge society or simply conform it in its habits of throught? The degree of actual novelty is very low. In modern art, isn’t it largely just a story of needing ever more extreme was to assert the Western values of romantic individualism.

Look at me, I’m different and new! And isn’t this novelty what we collectively most value? Ker-Ching. Another artwork sold.

I’m only stressing the social game that constructs our hierarchies of cultural value. And questioning who really produces the socially meaningful novelty in this life of ours.

Art is probably more part of the conformity creation I would argue. Hence poetry’s role in mythologising the human condition, making the historical facts fit the self-affirming narratives. Empires build monuments that speak of their transcendent right to power. Art galleries likewise enshrine the social ideas that matter - history told as dialectical story of progress from the pagan to the religious to the aristocratic to the romantic to the bare existential.

Technology, as logic paired with fossil fuel, is what has actually put human society on its exponential path of becoming the global planetary organism. The domestication of the Earth with a metabolism of concrete, cows and corn.

Philosophy barely talks about this with any insight. Economics and sociology are only waking up to it.

It has been the topic of conversation in ecology since the 1970s. But only recently have even the biologists understood why the industrial revolution was again nauture doing its biosemiotic thing. Colonising entropy gradients with metabolic technology.

There is a metaphysics here where biology > physics.

Now that is what counts as a paradigm shift and a social surprise. But also one that aligns with mind > matter if you squint just right and understand this in terms of Peircean immanence rather than Cartesian transcendence.

But if it's the basic metaphorical creativity of the mind, I think it is indeed core. — plaque flag

Well yep. And is that then pattern recognition, generalisation, abstraction? It is an interesting question to ask how really to pigeonhole this fluidity of thought that can spot the telling sameness behind the arbitrary differences.

Poetry may be training for that. But not for me at least.

I lean toward agreement, but I consider that technology wins and is valued, as if scientific norms shine by reflected light. — plaque flag

That is my argument. Technology wins and science or poetry is valued only to the degree it pragmatically contributes to that fossil fuel-based current project.

So I start by accepting this as the organismic reality. It is where society and its economic metabolism is at. From this harsh truth we could start asking “but what else instead?”.

There are rational answers rather than poetic ones. We could price environmental capital and social capital into the current economic equation. We could properly evolve towards being a technological organism by closing ourselves for materials - recycling - like a real organism, and living within the limits of the planet’s ability to transfer waste heat to deep space. Boring but pragmatic stuff like that.

Cooperation is of course and advantage for the group of humans or group of organs. But there's always an outside, right ? Life 'is' exploitation. I say this amorally, trying to think that basic boundary. — plaque flag

Biology gives more hope. Bacteria managed to close the planet in terms of its atmospheric gas balance. They evolved a circular economy where photosynthesis eats the CO2 and respiration eats the O2. Everyone can then settle down and live together in mutualism, riding the daily rising and setting of the Sun.

It bacteria can learn to stabilise the planet to their liking in Gaian feedback fashion, why not us?

All social structure is based on the mutualism of competition-cooperation. Humans are fighters but also traders. It is the combo that has produced civilisation. The problem is that the shift to global governance is a project moving too slow while the rate of global entropification is motoring too fast.

Let me come at it another way. In our differentiated society, we expect people to develop in all sorts of ways. — plaque flag

Yep, the division of labour principle of Adam Smith and his pin makers. It is indeed the core principle of systems thinking and hierarchy theory. Self-organisation involves the mutualism of integration and differentiation. Each grounds the other. So we absolutely know why this works and is essential to any structure that grows.

Another approach: is it better to be Homer or Achilles ? Can one be sure without impossibly taking both paths ? — plaque flag

I see it different in that my approach is that you can’t see the grand integrative sweep unless you make a matching effort to drill down into the concrete details. The process of inquiry is based on going to both these extremes.

Taking both paths is a necessity. Big ideas need to be checked out in every small way possible. The practical question is how to put yourself in that position as a paying proposition.

I'm not sure I completely agree with this: I can see it being applicable in the case of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, but would you say it is true of the Presocratics? — Janus

Yes. Thales brought back geometry from Egypt, Anaximander was his pupil, then a teenage Pythagoras is said to have travelled to Miletus to learn from them.

Before the presocratics, ancient thought was mythic. It was comfortable with casual explanations that mixed up personal and impersonal ways of thought. The gods were both real people and animistic forces in a way that made a narrative sense, but not a logical sense.

Anaximander in particular changed this. He say the Comos as a natural evolutionary system, closed for causality and thus driven by its own self-organising dialectic. There was one universalised cause. And it was a symmetry breaking of the Apeiron, a state of Peircean logical vagueness. You could wind back from the world as it is today to discover how it had to evolve from the first symmetric breaking of the hot and the cold separating out and causing the Apeiron to start to be materially structured.

So Anaximander had already nailed the general cosmic story in terms of a Big Bang symmetry breaking. He had made the leap to thinking of nature as a single developing system with an internal organising logic. The Pythagorean move to mathematical proof of geometric necessities was in a way a reductionist step backwards to the holism and dynamism of Anaximander, as was the metaphysics of the atomists.

So the story zigs and zags. But assuming a logic of rational development - a Cosmic causality - was the big presocratic step.

Of course modern reductionism sees them as fumbling about for a story of the fundamental substance, not the fundamental dynamics. Was it air, water, earth or fire that got things going? Anaximander instead gave a reason why all four emerged as a set of mutually-defining contrasts. Each the logical quantification of its “other”.

I think it is as important to stimulate the imagination and the emotions as it is to satisfy the intellectual desire for rigorous understandings. — Janus

Is intellectual desire an emotion? Is rigour not partner to the imagination in being the constraint on its degrees of freedom?

Imagination is our Bayesian ability to forward model the real world. It has its evolved and naturally constrained purpose were it comes to thought as a process.

Generally i would argue you are using confused psychology here. It is the Romantic fiction of how brains should work rather than the pragmatic and validated model of how they actually work. And so this can’t be a recipe for how to do thinking better.

Can you teach imagination and creativity? Not very well if you try to apply Romanticism as the psychological theory.

So sure, who could argue with stimulating the emotions and imagination as opposed to constraining and stifling those things. But that framing isn’t itself true to the psychology of rational inquiry.

But I am also drawn by the arts, by the idea of creating one's own life (in the sense that Foucault advocates) and I think for that we may need to let go of some of the rigour and mechanistic thinking and allow ourselves to mythologize (while also being careful not to take myths too seriously or literally). — Janus

That is a much more moderate statement and much harder to disagree with.

It is indeed part of the modern political and economic dialectic that we are required to construct our own uniqueness to have value in the ruthless social marketplace.

What does art school teach but how to cultivate a personal mystique by learning how to distill down a viewpoint that resonates with some generic cultural concern. It is the manufacture of provocative artefacts marketed by social networking.

Another interesting thread in all this is how humans can only escape the dominance-submission game that keep social animals in their place by collectively becoming submissive to an abstract or transcendent principle.

Fukuyama massive three book review of political structure makes this clear. Societies depended on granting legitimacy to a god, a king, eventually just rational principle so as to accept being ruled for the collective good. The divine was a necessary belief just to close the human system as a collaborative rather than competitive space.

So there is a genuine pragmatism in art in that it serves this political function. We agree to a collective awe which makes us all equal under the force of some higher power. We need a god equivalent even if we might - as greenies - call it nature,

Human psychology is a fascinating but explicable thing.

I'm not sure it enjoys as high a status today as it did at other times, speaking generally of course. — Janus

Probably true. I was thinking also about its “other” of essay writing. I don’t hear much celebration of that these days. And you can tell I found that the highest art when it come to language use.

I think poetry (understood as metaphor, analogy) still organizes the use of numbers and logic. — plaque flag

Aren't metaphors and analogies about communicating structure of relations? "This is like a version of that in terms of its essential form or organisation."

Poetry might make use of them for the same reason, but in the hope of communicating psychological parallels rather than philosophical or scientific.

Philosophers have feelings about Derrida and Wittgenstein, etc. Blue team, red team, purple team, black team. — plaque flag

Sure. Humans play human games in anything they do. But science has the claim of a method that transcends these games in the long run. I would also want my philosophy to aim at the same goal – and yet not take away the fun of also playing the social games in appropriately ironic fashion.

It's an attention economy out there. We have no choice but to dance to the beat if we want to be part of it.

I lean toward Brandom's inferentialist semantics — plaque flag

I was checking that out only the other week. But its completely gone out of my head again. That's the second time now. I'll have to have a third go I guess.

One can institute quantitative metrics, but this is a political process, involving rhetoric. — plaque flag

I would say I am riding Peircean semiotics to a much more general destination where politics becomes just another aspect of an organism and its metabolism.

Societies have political structures that are triadic once they become fully connected and self-stabilising – as in the particular case of British parliamentary democracy. You need the three elements of a state machinery (the mediating system of law), the transcendent ideal that symbolises the wholeness of the organism (the position given to a "divine" monarch as titular head of state), and the feedback from the ground floor in terms of a democratic say (the material degrees of freedom that are the mug public).

So politics becomes yet another thing that is made explicable in Peircean terms. That just is the way systems must organise to stabilise instability, to have a metabolism that digests its world.

I am a structuralist. Or in these times, a post-post structuralist. :grin:

Should I pursue serious metaphysics (live a logocentric life) in the first place ? — plaque flag

That is a big issue. But pragmatism gives its answer. If the problem is that your philosophy feels like it leads to passive representation, then that is a little Cartesian. It should lead to practical action.

The caveat – which is something I'm currently defining more carefully with this focus on metabolism as the deep structure of an organism – is that a lot of what we might get caught up in intellectually has less and less to do with the metabolism of our society. It is indeed off the point and uninvolved. A proper model of the metabolism (its political and economic structure) would tell you exactly when and when it wasn't the case.

It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. — Janus

I don’t mean this in a boundary policing way but it seems obvious that poetry is from the oral level of human cultural organisation and philosophy is from the logical. Each might be the high art of its respective domain, but they speak in different codes and organise different levels of social metabolism - or ways of organising people in ways they can exist in their world systems.

Poetry was mythic tribal memory. A way to capture an identity narrative that made sense in the pre-literate age of foraging and early agriculture.

Then the step from verbal semiosis to technological semiosis took place - with literacy coming along with the ride. Philosophy was born out of numbers and logic, its version of words and rules. Although the Ancient Greeks still mostly used poetry as the form of expression. It was the familiar way to set out a case in memorable fashion.

But then philosophy left the oral tradition well and truely behind. And poetry as social practice had its own new turn with the Romantic reaction to the industrialising world organised by number and logic. It affirmed something in the face of something - even when now mass produced to be silently read from a book.

So how could poetry take philosophy somewhere new, somewhere further, than numbers and logic?

Does it point to feeling and value as that which the age of machinery has forgotten? And even if it is a call back to society’s more basic level of oral order, is mechanistic reason not capable of delivering a point of view on feelings and values that is itself suitable for a world as it is currently being made?

So sure. More poetry. Why not?

But as an extension, a corrective, a natural progression, a necessary reclaiming?

Poetry has high status. But I would hesitate to say it has any greater role in philosophy just because of that. Pragmatically what is to be gained (except by a suppression of the pragmatic?).

Fair enough, but I have observed in your case that your approach to philosophy has been that it provides alternatives to Cartesian for the purpose of modelling and understanding organic life, rather than for its own sake. I mean, your over-arching model of the primacy of the second law of thermodynamics basically reduces life to an efficiency measure, don't it? — Wayfarer

That's your narrative and you are going to stick to it.

But no. I take the natural philosophy and systems science route by pragmatic choice, having discounted the less pragmatic alternatives

A pragmatic epistemology does of course do the natural thing of seeing the world in terms of a pragmatic ontology. But hey. What do you know? It works better than the other options.

Rather than putting us outside the world in frustrated realist/idealist fashion, it puts us into the world as we are trying to make it for ourselves. We can find the world that indeed contains "us" as its complementary "other".

It is the view from the organism. It is the model of reality as a metabolism. It places us at neither a first person, nor third person, POV, but instead right in the thick of the meaning-making that is our semiotic Umwelt. It puts our hands on the controls in way which is focused on the process that is constructing "us" along with our "desired kind of world".

So the Cosmos does have its own "pansemiotic" metabolism – the one that thermodynamics (upgraded from second law equilibrium narratives to the new science of dissipative structure theory) describes.

But life and mind stack up their further levels of actual semiotic metabolism on top of that – as negentropic exploitation of cosmic entropy gradients.

Science and philosophy are products of the fourth level of semiotic code. Their metabolic reality is the rational structure that began with the Greek mathematical/logical turn and found itself eventually hitched to the rocket ship ride of fossil fuels and the industrial revolution. That is the dissipation-accelerating metabolism they serve.

This becomes easier to see, in a history of ideas fashion, when you start off down in the basement of biology where the algorithmic trick of semiotic regulation/the modelling relation/the epistemic cut first got going.

There is an organic thread from the start of life to where we are in history today.

So pragmatism is bigger than philosophy and bigger than science. It accounts for these dialectical practices in terms of an actual evolutionary history. They exist in their annoyingly culture-bound fashion as that "self" is a part of the "world" that is being fashioned as the new planetary metabolism – the arrival of the (likely short-lived) Anthropocene, as we are calling it.

Indeed. I've tended to favor the Germans because they try to account for existence as a whole. — plaque flag

And the Russians. The Brazilians. Er ... anyone not Anglo? :chin:

The cosy "history of ideas" view on this would be that the Brits/Dutch were unified populations, secure in their community and seeking to express their individuality, while the Germans were having to forge a nation from its scattered people. French rationalism argued for a politics of state centralisation, hence Hegel's excitement about Napoleon as "the world spirit on horseback". The Brits, as a nation of shopkeepers, were more into the politics of decentralising liberalism.

Another example of how philosophy, like science, rather reflects its cultural context in terms of what is fashionable and talked about.

Boomer philosophers went through the hippie years. Eastern thought became high fashion in the "counter-culture" and still lingers here and there.

There is always a narrative to be told. And the telling is what reveals its own inconsistencies and contradictions. Even what I just said here should raise a storm of "buts".

And funny how philosophy came into focus as this kind of dialectical conversation. Then science fetishised it as epistemic method. It is almost like our brains operate on some kind of Bayesian reasoning algorithm, hazarding guesses to discover their consequences.

This sense of the division of self-and-other, the Galilean division of primary and secondary attributes, the Cartesian division of mind and matter - these are huge influences in today's culture and commentary on them is voluminous. It is not bad history, it's simply history. — Wayfarer

The history of the dialectic that pragmatism resolved – even if it is a Cartesian divide baked into modern culture for its own pragmatically comprehensible and historical reasons.

So the epistemic fix is in. That is the facts of philosophical history. The Cartesian divide continues in popular thought. That is the facts of the more general history of ideas.

You are ignoring the one and perpetuating the other.

But that is no surprise. There has got to be a reason why science is taught in the science block and philosophy is taught over in the humanities block, right. The culture wars are baked deep into even our institutions of free inquiry. They other the impressionable from the get-go.

I myself was disconcerted to find that my university treated psychology as either a BSc subject or BA subject. But I had to do physics and chemistry to qualify for a BSc. Yet the fine print also let me go mix with the unwashed and add on some philosophy as some light relief.

As to my route after that, I've never not been working in a mixed environment where science and philosophy are complementary rather than antagonistic. I just don't recognise this culture wars divide at the coalface of ideas.

No great scientific mind says "shut up and calculate" – except in the Newtonian spirit of vaulting some metaphysical chasm to reach the next paradigm shift. The critical question from the scientist's point of view is the philosophical one of "what should we next pick as our measure?".

The supposed divide between science and philosophy is over-blown. Even PoMo got its impetus from anthropology and linguistics.

I was simply asking for clarification of unfamiliar jargon and technical idioms — Gnomon

You cut and paste all this stuff you don’t understand. That is why you can’t follow an informed discussion about it.

Natural philosophy, in that context, acts with the implicit presumption of the division of subject and object - hence the emphasis on objectivity and replicability as the sole criteria, assuming a correspondence theory of truth. — Wayfarer

But this is more “bad history”. Pragmatism arrives at a theory of truth based on the usefulness of a way of looking at the world. It finesses the dilemma of the epistemic cut by saying that it is the feature and not the bug.

Science took off when Newton threw up his hands and proclaimed “I feign no hypothesis”. The idea of gravity as action at a distance made no sense. Descartes battled on with the “realism” of aether type theories of jostling corpuscles. Newton moved forward by leaving the metaphysics a blank because the equations worked.

This was a key psychological moment. But of course science still found metaphysics necessary. It came back to try to fill in the blank. The latest go is gravity as an entropic force. However it did make a break that allowed science to understand its truth-making in terms of pragmatic modelling.

All this is relevant history that ought to change your position here. I point this out because the problem is not the application of history to philosophical argument. It is the pushing of narrow views of that history.

Of course one can always point to “Scientism” that butchers intellectual history by telling the story from its winner’s point of view. And that creates the losers who identify as “other” in their memory of what had happened.

But even history is an institutional discipline that evolves its habits of truth telling. To give an accurate historical account of Peirce - as a juicy example - would involve a heck of a lot more genuine engagement in the “history of ideas”.

You questions were incoherent.

I won't say that institutional science doesn't have its shortcomings and its blindspots, but that's just the nature of institutions. Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. — Srap Tasmaner

An intellectual institution must be large enough to contain its contradictions … because dialectics. :razz:

Besides -- it sounded like you'd be disappointed if I thought what you said I did. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, that's not bad. I've figured out what philosophy really is dozens of times, but I'm starting to think you can just not do that. — Srap Tasmaner

If one were to reject a "history of ideas" narrative structure for philosophy, what could one replace it with, and why?

Are you claiming to have no horse in the race? You seem to have gone through dozens and now deciding "whereof one cannot speak...", or something.

It's your thread. I was just expecting more clarity to justify historicism as a target here. You seemed right in fingering the problem of using it to close down debate. And I replied that it is what also keeps debate open by being the bookmark which tells where the great adventure has now got to.

Does it boil down to whether you view philosophy as a progressive project or just one damn cultural trope after another?

you could embrace the ephemeral nature of philosophical struggles and shortlived victories and take giddy pleasure in it -- after all, you needn't worry about having any lasting influence! — Srap Tasmaner

Absolutely. But why? Because we don't have any certainty to convey... — Srap Tasmaner

Certainly. When I was young, I read philosophy in a believing frame of mind, acquiring ideas I could endorse or not. Got older and for a long time have read philosophy with little interest in the 'doctrine' at stake. I enjoy Wittgenstein primarily because we have such an extraordinary record of an interesting mind at work. I just like watching him go, and I think I've learned from how he thinks. I've enjoyed watching Dummett at work because his command of logic is formidable and he sees things I have to work through slowly. Sellars also has an unusual mind. I even like the tortuous way he writes. He's every bit as intricate as Derrida, but not for the same reasons at all. — Srap Tasmaner

What I haven't heard yet from anybody is some sort of full-throated defense of, I don't know, 'decentering' philosophy in philosophical discussion, not taking its self-image seriously, and treating it instead as only a part of Something Bigger, something like the history of ideas, the Great Story of Culture, whatever. — Srap Tasmaner

To which I pointed out that Peirce is often categorised as an idealist ... the idealist or metaphysical aspects of Peirce have become deprecated in favour of a broadly scientific (dare I say scientistic) attitude to philosophy. — Wayfarer

I agree the historical context is important to showing how philosophy follows fashions. It could be said hemlines rise, hemlines fall, thus philosophy reveals its essential cultural arbitrariness. It isn't a progressive enterprise building elaboration from solid foundations.

But that broad flip-flopping should be easy to recognise as the natural dialectic of lurching between extremes, as polar opposition makes ideas crisp in terms of all that they can "other". So for good metaphysical reason, we can see why there should be this kind of Hegelian history unfolding in philosophy as a discipline.

Furthermore, we should be expecting the triadic balancing act of a resolution that does build the solid foundations for the next level of elaboration.

And this brings me to the problem I have with your historical approach to contextualising Peirce.

You understand the historical development in terms of a simple realist vs idealist ontology. And you have picked a side that ought to be monistically the winner in the end. So you seek to assimilate Peirce to that reading of the necessary answer to final philosophy. But you don't really appreciate Peirce as in fact the step that finally helps resolve the realism vs idealism dichotomy in Western metaphysics. Your history telling is wishful rather than factual.

So a close historical reading is the way to go. There was the big set-piece debate of realism vs idealism dominating Western philosophy. And its resolution in the triadic systems relation of pragmatism/semiotics was very important – and still unfolding in radical fashion, now spilling openly into scientific thought.

To seize on Peirce as a scientist who was a closet idealist is just shutting your eyes to the historically significant event taking place within philosophy at that time. You will never appreciate his place in the history of ideas.

Relating this to the OP, @Srap Tasmaner sounds to want philosophy to be an open and unstructured kind of thing. A pastime with no real purpose or stakes. It is talk that is free and not to be constrained by grand ends.

I instead can see why a historically-rooted approach is correct. We are dealing with a grasping after something that defines the limits of our being, and have been doing that with surprising success since Ancient Greece woke up to the idea of living in a Cosmos that must express some universalised cause.

The greeks worked their way to a dialectical method of inquiry that helped produce ever sharper focus. It was the logical machine that generates integration and differentiation, generality and specificity, in equal dichotomous measure.

Philosophy as a discipline emerges out of that self-structuring dynamic. It is properly Hegelian and has a historic destiny in reaching its ultimate limits. So a sense of how the debate has progressed is a crucial to placing yourself in the "now" of philosophy as part of this arc from its past to its future.

Peirce's triadic systems logic is an obvious milestone of thought in this regard and shouldn't be trivialised by claims he was "really a closet idealist all along". He was the first proper semiotician and not the last prominent idealist before the dark tide of scientistic logical atomism swept through Oxbridge and outlawed metaphysics for a generation or two.

QBism expands upon the notion of "participatory realism", that quantum physicist John A. Wheeler postulated back in the '60s. From the perspective of Materialism, it may sound like anti-realism. — Gnomon

The less woo understanding of this Bayesianism is that the human measurer can construct the mechanical constraints on a prepared quantum system so as to decohere it to the degree it answers to a classical counterfactual description.

This is biosemiotic. The basis of biology itself is the ability of cellular machinery to decohere the quantum nanoscale realm of chemistry to ratchet the available energies in the desired metabolic fashion.

An enzyme mechanically grips and forces two reactants into the exact conjunction that gives them no choice but to bond. A respiratory chain gives a hot electron no choice but to quantum tunnel down its mechanically structured pathway.

In effect, this biological machinery is making quantum measurements. The fixed shaped of proteins assembled by genetic information prepares the world in a way that quantum wave functions are left with “no choice” but to collapse in the counterfactual fashion that the biological machinery is insisting on.

So ontologically, the physics of the world can always be “quantum”. You don’t need actual collapse. You just need systems of constraint that limit the possibilities to the degree that the state of a mechanical switch is “almost surely” flipped. On the side of the physics, it is still a probabilistic world. But encounters with the mechanical structures built with genetic information can make those probabilities asymptotically close to 1.

Humans in labs are simply doing the same trick at a much larger energy scale. Biology lives right on the quasi classical border of the quantum realm, milking its potential for tunneling, superposition and other holistic actions. Labs use special gear to create states of coherence over metres that can they be decohered by mechanical structures which enforce measurements that then fit their models of quantum physics.

So the key here is to realise that the physics takes place in a decohering environment. There is no “collapse of a wavefunction” needed. But you get the effective collapse because environments certaintly reduce the uncertainty of quantum probabilities in a historical fashion. The holism of contextuality means the Universe does develop classical looking structure in terms of its statistics.

And then life and mind can apply mechanical logic - the counterfactuality of informational structure - to impose its schemes on the physical world. Genes code for biological molecules which can “make measurements” and entrain chemistry at the nanoscale to an organised metabolic network. Human scientists can likewise create informational theories that are a recipe for the electronic devices which can likewise entrain the quantum realm to a technological level of metabolism - the sapiens-feeding metabolism of the modern global economic system organised by its micro-electronics and informstion flows.

So you would agree, then, that the appearance of organisms is also the appearance of intentionality and agency? — Wayfarer

Sure. That’s what semiosis explains. The feeling of being a self in its world by being a prediction machine with its collection of interpretive habits.

Desired by whom? — Wayfarer

The bleeding organism. The system with the metabolism. Don't pretend this is some tricky mystery.

There seems an implied agency here — Wayfarer

Implied? It's a fucking theory of teleology.

if molecular structures are ‘the bottom’, what is the origin of the ‘top down’ constraints. — Wayfarer

Read what I said. Criticality itself "others" the possibility of its own stabilisation. By molecular chaos being the rule, semiotic constraints become that which could then take maximum advantage of this material lack of constraints.

With the sciences -- geez, with medicine especially, it seems -- it's becoming commonplace for half of what you learned in school to be falsified by the time you retire if not much sooner. — Srap Tasmaner

To be fair to science, how much free thinking does society really want or need? Especially at the introductory level, you want to impress a certain useful rigidity of thought on all those who are only going to need to apply learnt algorithms on the grown-up world.

And those who do philosophy at university only need to come out with a useful facility for critical thought and perhaps show some comfort with uncertainty in the grown-up world. The history of philosophy is not relevant in the job market.

Medicine became engineering applied to biology and then got corrupted by Big Pharma and Big Food. So no surprise it is what it is.

Again, how should philosophy be taught? That winds up being answered by whether it serves some useful purpose as far as society goes.

I think this is an excellent specific reason for reading original texts, but then that only throws into sharper relief my original question: what does the history of ideas contribute to such an experience? — Srap Tasmaner

You're right. If you aren't looking for a totalising world view, then browsing other smart minds is at least a pleasant diversion. I like reading crackpots for the same reason. It is useful to be able to tell the one from the other via intimate literary acquaintance.

But one could also be seeking that totalising world view that both philosophy and science have as a selling point. And a history of ideas – in both spheres – is important to that project.

Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.? — javra

This is monism. This is reductionism. So how I think of things – how Peirce thought of things, how systems science thinks of things – just doesn't share your ontological commitments. You are trying to jam square pegs into round holes.

Forget it. Until you stop and think about why your questions are wrong, you can't begin to learn how to think in holistic terms and ask questions that are meaningful in light of that ontology.

But I'll cut the crap. — javra

Then stop excusing your lack of effort by claiming I haven't ever said anything in reply.

Isn’t that a reductionist (i.e. bottom-up) model? — Wayfarer

It is semiotic. The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction.

The biochemistry is the bottom-up degrees of freedom in this systems equation. But the point of the nanoscale is that it is a special zone of energy convergence. The ordinary type of physics you might imagine – a world of neat determinacy – is instead turned into a state of radical instability or criticality. It becomes exactly that which the most minimal "informational" nudge can push in any material direction chosen.

So it is the tradic story of the semiotic modelling relation which bridges the "explanatory gap" – the question of how a model of the world could influence the world. A ratchet describes this. It is the switch that imposes the informational asymmetry on the entropic flow. It is the central "how" of how the whole causal story works.

For ordinary bottom-up engineering, building structures amidst raging thermal storms and quaking quantum uncertainty would be what suffers from an explanatory gap. It would seem blatantly the wrong choice of material foundations.

But life and mind are natural systems – organisms implementing modelling relations. And the edge of chaos is what they can colonise precisely because there exists a maximally tipable state of material fury.

Life evolved its handling of chemistry until it could harness the most violent available chemical process – redox reactions. This should blow the mitochondria apart. But respiratory proteins can dance a hot electron down a chain of precisely aligned receptors, dragged along by quantum tunneling effects towards the oxygen atom waiting at the end.

What is then bottom-up, if you like, is that the metabolic system the genes stabilise can then become the platform for building further levels of life and mind. Neurons can play the same trick by stabilising the flux of a sensory world. Language can stabilise the flux of a psychological world. Logic can stabilise the flux of a rationalised world.

It all rests on the ability to use the instability of the nanoscale as the right kind of material fashion. A zone of maximum switchability – that occurs only in a watery solvent on a Sun heated planet – which in itself makes a system of mechanical switches the next most probable evolutionary step.

Information can have maximum meaning where maximum entropy or uncertainty is present.

But first, the material itself has to be a dissipative flow. It is useless trying to milk action from a dead equilibrium. The material realm has to be in a critical state as Hoffman describes. And then the lightest of touches can bend it to your will, from the organismic point of view.

As in something that ontically occurs. — javra

Yes. But what are the ontic commitments of this term "real" that you employ. Or what has become now the term "ontic" that I guess is supposed to mean "really real" or "fundamentally real" or "monistically real".

I'll tentatively interpret you meaning that matter is the constitutional makeup of any given (what Aristotle intended by "matter") - and that consciousness thereby supervenes on its own constituents. — javra

I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.

So your line of argument goes wrong from there. I am not a reductionist. And you don't seem to have a clue about what else that leaves.

real? — javra

Really what? Really an idea? Really material? Really semiotic – as in the modelling that connects the two?

If you want a conversation, I don't need you to be polite. But you do have to do some work setting out your counter-position. If you just make the plaintiff cry, "you haven't made me understand", then you will stay stuck in the back seat with all the other time-wasters bleating on about "are we there yet".

How can I be an eliminativist given I spend all my time arguing for holism against reductionism? You are just talking out of your arse because you can't be arsed to make a proper effort.

If you feel like you are in kindergarten, it is because that is the level at which you are prepared to engage here. You could keep that up all day. Now impress me by stopping, thinking, coming up with dissent or agreement in terms of the ideas I have presented in some depth.

You might need to brush up on the philosophy and science I've cited. But you could then engage in a way where you learn something, and I might learn something too, which is the outcome that usually comes from talking to people who are up to the task of an informed dialogue.

My bad for assuming you might have had the curiosity and knowledge to follow arguments already much simplified.

Ask javra.

Ask RogueAI.

:up:

Remind me which one you are again?

What don’t you understand about an F grade? Too many syllables? :grin:

C - Semiosis is the specification of the general function. What folk call consciousness is this function implemented at four levels of semiosis within a suitable “world”.

F - Go back and read your texts on social construction and Vygotskian psychology if you hope to stay on this course.

When do you think that will happen? — RogueAI

For you, never. But thanks for asking. :up:

You don't have to answer if you don't want to of course. — bert1

I did answer. It was how I would start to deflate an over-inflated term.

You can class that under clarification if you like. You could class it under theory if you noticed that biosemiosis was the theoretical framework I employed. You could class it under definition if you wanted to note how I somewhat sarcastically used dictionary style conventions of defining a whole in terms of its component parts.

What's so hard to understand here?

This is true, but I would put it this way: philosophy curricula more closely resemble literature curricula than they do the sciences or mathematics, and that's slightly odd. — Srap Tasmaner

That seems a better question then. How could one restructure the pedagogy to reflect a different approach? Oddly, I can remember exactly how my introductory philosophy classes started, but not the science ones. But the air of certainty and present tense is definitely what was intended to be conveyed.

And I don't think you would want philosophy to exude that kind of authority where the right views are already there to be learnt?

So does the historical approach not go very well with the mature practice of philosophy?

Kant only matters to us because his ideas are interesting; his ideas aren't interesting because he's the one who had them. — Srap Tasmaner

I certainly agree with that. And you can only make an academic career by having ideas of your own that your peers find interesting. Even if it is just offering a revisionist telling of philosophical history.

But what you learn from close reading of the big names is as much the way they thought as what they thought. You can get into their thinking and attitudes and so discover the habits that work in the philosophical game.

Yet how would you set up Philosophy 101? It would have to be some kind of map of the field that oriented students the right way. It would have to use some surprises to get the kids gripped and thinking.

The most philosophical moments for me came in fact from my first psychophysics class were the professor used the example of the Mach bands that give sharp outlines to all boundaries in our visual field. I walked outside and for the first time noticed the contrast edging around the dark buildings against the bright sky. Or at least understood the neural mechanism responsible for what had seemed a defect of clear vision and the processing logic behind it.

The things I would have in my introductory class would be the epistemology of modelling and dialectical ontology of metaphysics. So Kant and Anaximander would be useful historical starting points. But a quick sketch of the context in their times would be enough.

Then one could add a review of comparative philosophy – pay the necessary lip service to theology and PoMo as cultural traditions, along with science, Eastern traditions and the general theory of socially-constructed belief systems. :grin: