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.