To a technician, every word is a technical term, but to a philosopher, every word it a gateway to a universe. — unenlightened

Hmm. Is this philosophy as practiced by academia or the kind of “philosophy” that believes in crystals and scented candles?

Seriously. Show me the philosopher who treats every word as a gateway to a universe.

The term 'inertia' is often used to describe a kind of irrational resistance to change in individuals or institutions.

http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/464/778

The social definition of inertia; demonstrated here as “meaning is use”. :lol:

Next demonstrate your comprehension of today’s set word by using it successfully in a whole sentence. Tomorrow, we can try using it in a paragraph. In a blue moon, you can employ it as the subject of a reply adequate to the discussion. :clap:

Then he demonstrated with the cosmological argument, that it is impossible for any potential to be eternal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you have a source where it is clear that is the argument?

The Stanford article I cited on the prime matter issue fits with my view that Aristotle never fully worked it out, even if he left us with most of the essential tools.

In other passages too Aristotle seems to leave the question of whether or not there is prime matter deliberately open.

The issue with respect to "matter" is that matter is itself just an idea. This might be hard for you to grasp, because "matter" is exactly what we assign to the physical world as what is independent from us, and therefore not an idea. But as "matter", is simply how we represent the physical world. It is our idea of temporal continuity, what persists unchanged in time, represented in science as inertia, mass, energy, etc.. In reality, what exists independent from us is changing forms, and we represent the aspects which are consistent, constant, as "matter", and this is the basis of the temporal continuity which is called "Being", — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with the first part but not the second. In my semiotic view, time as a continuous thread of Being is also emergent.

And physics supports this. The Cosmos has a thermal history that locks in its future direction. It is a space of possibilities that becomes increasingly constrained as it expands and hence cools.

So yes, we apply psychological models that see a world divided in into matter and void (the spacetime coninuum]. With Newtonian modelling, this becomes a system of laws and measurements. We have an Aristotelean division into material and formal causes.

But physics has kept marching on until matter and void, space and time, etc, are all unified as aspects of a universal substance - a theory of quantum gravity, if we can pull that off.

And spacetime would have to be emergent in that scheme, just as would mattergy - relativistic mass.

When he supposedly refuted idealism, by denying that potential could be eternal, he also refuted materialism, because materialism is actually just a twisted form of idealism, substantiated by the concept of "matter". — Metaphysician Undercover

Is this your interpretation? I don’t think he had the mission of refuting idealism as even Plato is not really an idealist - especially by the Timaeus.

Instead I would say the issue was resolving the issue of hylomorphic substance - how substance could be the co-production of formal and material causality. Or as systems science would put it, bottom-up construction in interaction with top-down constraints.

you'll find a similar concept in the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal. This eternal infinite regress is logically repugnant for a number of reasons, best demonstrated by the absurdities produced by the principle of plenitude which dictates that in an infinite amount of time, all possibilities have been actualized. — Metaphysician Undercover

Peirce’s logic of vagueness resolves this initial conditions issue as I have outlined before. I realise you don’t agree.

Here we have divergent courses of study. You would say that we ought to put aside this notion "God did it", stick with the demonstrably deficient and faulty scientific conceptions of temporal continuity, and ignore the vast wealth of accumulated theological knowledge of this subject. Thus you adhere to that prejudice which assumes a "naturalistic resolution" is possible, regardless of the mounting evidence against this possibility. On the other hand, we can take Aristotle's lead and proceed toward understanding the teleological nature of the universe, discovering the completely different understanding of temporal continuity, Being, which is explored in Neo-Platonism and early Christian theology. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. That is why I wanted to check how much scholasticism you are projecting onto what Aristotle actually says (as much as we can rely on the curated version passed down by history).

, mass is better understood (more useful...) — Banno

Lol. Why are you trying so hard to avoid talking about inertia? What is that when it is at home in your naive realism paradise?

The biosemiosis perspective is similar to mine because it is based on the same empirical evidence. The slight difference is that I view this underlying substrate as not unformed, homogeneous chaos, but a substance with complex patterns of supradimensional flux we have not yet even approached modeling — Enrique

That seems more like a huge difference. :grin:

but that amounts to trillions and trillions of pockets of quantum causality in an Earth lifeform, which make nonlocality the predominant ingredient in many facets of the organic world, a reality we have not yet deeply tapped into scientifically and technologically. — Enrique

I get the impression from a small amount I've read about semiconductors that the mechanism of "wave" propagation might amount to quantum tunneling/entanglement. — Enrique

Do you see how one contradicts the other? We have tapped into quantum tunnelling/entanglement in a big way with our technology. So it has certainly been delved into deeply.

A more fruitful approach might be to look at mass rather than substance. — Banno

Err no. Mass is not a simple matter of a weighing a kilo of stuff when you get beyond schoolboy physics. It is defined in terms of inertia - resistance to acceleration. You need to get out your ruler and stopwatch. And that is while you are still working within a Newtonian metaphysics where references frames are inertial.

It is bad to spread this kind of silliness just because of some ancient Scientistic prejudice against “metaphysics”. It betrays a lack of familiarity with both physics and metaphysics as academic disciplines.

“What a thing means is simply what habits it involves.” CP 5.400) :up:

First, reductionist is a technical term. Second, you are well recognised as the name caller and scoffer in chief around these parts. :hearts:

How many times do we have to scratch the same itch. :smile:

The process of “definition” is circular. For a reductionist like Banno, that is a bad thing. But for a holist, the circularity is actually hIerarchical or cybernetic. The iterations don’t lead you around in a meaningless chase. They should zero in on a functional state of meaning.

So this is pragmatism 101. Meaning is use. Our understanding of a word (as a meaningful sign) is uncertain.

I say to you “frepp”. Whatever could I mean?

We would discover that by the extent to which it pragmatically constrains my behaviour.

So we could never completely eliminate your uncertainty about all the ways frepp could be defined, all its possible connotations. But we could certainly constrain that uncertainty to a degree that is reasonable and pragmatic.

As a start, you might ask “animal, vegetable or mineral”. You would work your way down from the most general constraints towards the sharpest distinctions.

So “frepp” is inherently vague - capable of meaning anything as all signs are. And we can corral its meaning by the binary exercise of asking “what is frepp?” by virtue of its logical corollary - “what then is not-frepp”.

We seek a definition in terms of the differences that make a difference. And we are satistified our interpretation is sufficiently constrained when the differences no longer make any practical difference.

It is all bog standard semiotics. No mystery even if Banno wants to recycle it as some great metaphysical quandary for the nth time.

Molecular machinery internal to an axon of course must differ from the properties of for instance a copper wire, but some kind of transport chain including tunneling and entanglement is probably involved, similar to photosynthesis, not solely the diffusion of ions. — Enrique

I’m unclear as to what you mean. But tunneling and entanglement don’t seem relevant even if axons were understood as copper wires with a flow of electrons.

Classical wave mechanics gives the conceptual model for how it works. The wire is like a tube stuffed with charged particles. Give it a shove at one end and the disturbance will propagate. Each electron - or ion - will be move a bit, like happens with waves in water or air, and then that collective motion itself becomes a wave of change travelling elastically at speed.

In a good conductor like copper, the electrons themselves move a short distance at a drift speed of 1% the speed of light and the resulting wave or pulse at about 90% the speed of light. This is all explained in mechanical terms rather than by invoking any quantum properties (and so any putative qualia weirdness).

In axons, you of course have an even more clearly classical mechanical story in that the charged ions are sluggish and not in such a conductive medium. And to create any kind of speedy travelling wave as a collective phenomenon requires further levels of actual molecular machinery.

The structure of the wire is critical. It is like a series of switches - or a chain of rat traps that trigger each other. Nothing quantum about the triggering or conduction. And speed is created by spacing the gaps between the sites where membrane depolarisation is happening. This is saltatory conduction. Myelin insulation spaces out the nodes and so - which may be the point you were making - the signal is carried a distance by an elastic ripple of conductive disturbance in a “tube” packed with charged ions.

So the whole story is complex. However that is because of all the extra biological engineering that constructs a classical machinery for propagating a signal. It is not about amplifying some quantum signal. It is about constructing the possibility of a mechanical signal out of materials whose quantum uncertainties have been suitably constrained.

The structure of computers is based on models of information processing, so in that case it is an apt term, but analogy to brains could be flawed. I'd be interested to get your definition of information in the context of biosemiosis. — Enrique

Yes, I agree that simple notions of information are flawed. The difference with biosemiosis is that instead of assuming that the substrate of nature is this mechanically definite stuff - stable substantial atoms of matter - the ground of being is instead a fundamental uncertainty or chaos. A quantum potential. So machinery is something that has to be built on wobbly foundations. Machinery in fact exists only if it can constrain or stabilise its own foundations.

So that is the difference. The information processing is all about imposing a classical order on an underlying unruly chaos. A computer of course is imagined as a device with no entropic connection to reality. That is why it is free to compute abstract patterns. It doesn’t even know it needs to be plugged into a socket to work.

But life and mind are computational patterns that are plugged directly into the job of stabilising the world that is their entropic power supply. All the information processing is tied to that basic purpose - maximising an entropy flow. The machinery exists to regulate material instability and create an organically structured process of growth.

That perspective is why biosemiosis can both accept the quantum basis of everything - uncertainty is the fundamental ground - but then build in the expectation that the machinery of life and mind exists as mechanism to stabilise this quantum ground.

Panpsychism on the other hand wants to treat the quantum realm as a definite substance. It sees it as a weird nonlocal fluid - a spread out coherent field with substantial properties, including qualia. And the machinery of life and mind would somehow have to be doing the job of amplifying the weak or dilute signal contained in the field effect.

So pansemiosis is about the top-down regulation or constraint of uncertainty as the paradigm. And the new biophysics gives the scientific story of how molecular machinery manages the delicate quasi classical interface where the thermal decoherence takes place.

Panpsychism is about the supposed amplification of a weak signal. And in its quantum version, it relies on early versions of quantum theory where nonlocal coherence seemed the new loophole in nature. But now thermal decoherence tells us that, in practice, everywhere that loophole is closed. The universe itself prevents any quantum instability from running out of hand.

Biosemiosis has been confirmed by science. It’s prediction that the quantum is regulated is what we find.

Quantum consciousness must predict the opposite. More and more unlikely ways must be found to explain how quantum coherent states escape their own inherent instability. Biology must somehow channel things so that thermal decoherence is held at bay. And yet, biology not only is generally bad at that on the macro scale, we have found how it is actually designed to manage it on the nano scale.

So yes, the quantum realm is harnessed in many ways. But by an “information processing” system of molecular engineering. Photosynthesis, respiratory chains, sensory receptors and everything else are proteins able to micro-manage quantum instability for purposes encoded in a system of semiosis - the regulatory habits encoded in levels of genetic, neural and (in humans) linguistic machinery.

This is what Aristotle claims to refute with the "cosmological argument", the idea of "emergent actuality". — Metaphysician Undercover

Surely what he wanted to refute was an efficient first cause to the Cosmos. And this led him to claim that the actuality of Being must therefore be eternal.

So he got something wrong. We now know our Universe started in a Big Bang. There is a data point to be dealt with.

But his own theory of substance include finality - a prime mover. And if you put aside the suggestions that “God did it”, then his contrast of immobile celestial spheres and an actuality that is thus driven in circular motion Is not too bad a stab at some kind of naturalistic resolution. It is a fact of quantum theory that spin exists as a fundamental degree of freedom because the classical spacetime universe provides the motionless reference frame that makes it so.

Noether’s theorem at work.

I wouldn’t exaggerate the fore shadowing. But Aristotle was heading in the right direction.

So Peircean firstness, and the metaphysics which follows from it, is not at all consistent with Aristotle's metaphysics, because it adopts the very principle which Aristotle claims to have refuted. — Metaphysician Undercover

An efficient cause is only so if it is efficient. And a fluctuation is defined by being a difference that doesn’t make a difference. Or only the weakest imaginable difference.

So Peirce was making an argument along the lines of modern symmetry breaking and chaos theory thinking. The old butterfly wing effect. If things are poised and ready to tip, then even the least disturbance, any old action no matter how small or undirected, will cause the system to go in its finality-serving direction.

You can’t really attributed some grand causal power to that fluctuation as any old fluctuation Could have done the same trick. And yet a fluctuation was also a necessary ingredient. The first accident. The first difference to make a difference.

You really can't just overlook the fact that Aristotle replaced the concept of "prime matter" with "prime mover", as the foundation of his ontology — Metaphysician Undercover

He rejected a first efficient cause in that particular argument against Atomism and the claim that the Cosmos could be created rather than eternal.

But here we were talking about prime matter - that is material cause, not efficient cause (even if I agree the two must be related).

So for example we have this in the Stanford article I cited...

Another key passage where Aristotle has been thought to commit himself more decisively to prime matter is Metaphysics vii 3. Here we are told:

By “matter” I mean that which in itself is not called a substance nor a quantity nor anything else by which being is categorized. For it is something of which each of these things is predicated, whose being is different from each of its predicates (for the others are predicated of substance, and substance is predicated of matter). Therefore this last is in itself neither substance nor quantity nor anything else. Nor is it the denials of any of these; for even denials belong to things accidentally. (1029a20–26)

Although the word “prime” does not occur here, Aristotle is evidently talking about prime matter. A natural way to read this passage is that he is saying there is a wholly indeterminate underlying thing, which he calls “matter”, and it is not a substance. Those who wish to avoid attributing a doctrine of prime matter to Aristotle must offer a different interpretation: that if we were to make the mistake of regarding matter, as opposed to form, as substance, we would be committed (absurdly) to the existence of a wholly indeterminate underlying thing.

Conversation?

I asked you a question that you can’t/won’t answer. I supplied the reference to how modern physics would quantify substance.

Play or go home. Whining is undignified.

You had your chance to reply. And...

Banno didn't. — Banno

I wouldn't. Banno did.

What else did you think I was picking out here?....

What are your units of measurement now? Are you going to rely on a pair of scales or a stopwatch and ruler? — apokrisis

...and that leaves me thinking that there is something disingenuous about your replies — Banno

You mean that I just exposed your own disingenuous game here. Yes, you can buzz off now.

It's what you said. And it seems legit. :grin:

Again, you are far too clever for me... — Banno

I mean it could be that you are just trolling, or lazy, or something else. But I don't mind if you believe it is this.

But we agree why that is so.

We agree then. :ok:

What do we use for the unit of substance? — Banno

I realise you are not interested in the real answer here. But physics has arrived at its most general way of measuring units of substantial being - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGh_physics

Serious metaphysics would consist of a discussion over why the Planck scale has this particular triad of physical limits.

The usual lumpen riposte. How heavy is your 1kg mass in outer space? What are your units of measurement now? Are you going to rely on a pair of scales or a stopwatch and ruler?

Every community has its own understanding of what it means to flourish. The way to cut through relativism is through scientific analysis based on evidence. I can confidently argue that ISIS's project of a new Caliphate was wrong and immoral and contrary to human flourishing — Thomas Quine

Great. I’m just pointing out how it contradicts your broad generalisation in the OP. You now need to modify your statement to claim only a community of ideal rational thinkers can be sure of arriving at a morality based on human flourishing. And flourishing as you define it In terms of a quasi Human Development Index.

The claim becomes both more defensible and less general.

...even within the local context it would be hard to make an argument that the activities of ISIS promote human flourishing. — Janus

Sure. That is why I used that example. As a great big question-mark counter to the OP's generalisation....

Any community of human beings who have collectively agreed that such-and-such an act or course of actions is moral, — Thomas Quine

If Isis collectively agreed that its course of actions was moral, then – per the OP – they must have done so because, in the final analysis, they believed these actions to be in the service of human flourishing.

Which is why I then say, hmm, let's define flourishing shall we?

I go with the dictionary definition of "flourishing", it's nothing mysterious. To do well in a hospitable environment. A human community is doing well when there is personal safety, healthy lifespans, economic security, healthy environment, reasonable opportunity for personal growth, adequate water and nutrition, fulfilling work, etc.There are global wellness indicators out there. — Thomas Quine

Again, I don't disagree with the commonsense approach of accepting folk definitions - except if I were to be claiming to be doing actual moral philosophy that wants to avoid building its conclusions into its premises.

Is there an objective definition of flourishing that would avoid us smuggling in our own culturally-subjective agendas? Isis would be an example. If it represents a community that believes humanity would be better off without the presence of the infidel, how do we rule out that as a valid definition of "flourishing" in its eyes?

If you were to bring in our own Western scientific and enlightenment tradition, then yes, flourishing can be defined in terms of things like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it seems both sensible and empirically supported.

I could then cite even more abstracted models of flourishing like Ulanowicz's Ascendency. That would really strip away the cultural and subjective wrappings. It is where biologists would arrive at when they have to define "flourishing" in terms of ecosystems.

I think population metrics are a better yardstick by which to measure human flourishing, in the same way if we ask whether bison are flourishing in Yellowstone, we don't track the life history of an individual bison. — Thomas Quine

Or indeed, we might ask how the bison herd contribute to the flourishing of Yellowstone as an ecosystem. But you seem to agree that it is right to ask about flourishing in that more generic biological context of life in general?

Again, flourishing as a term does smuggle in these naturalistic connotations. It does rather question supernatural imperatives. We would be quick to say Isis is wrong-headed as its morality all based on religious mumbo-jumbo.

Which is fine. I'm all for naturalism. Once more, I merely point on the work still to be done to carrying on and cash this all out in a notion of collective flourishing. I already agree that flourishing in some sense is the right answer. It fits my prejudices wonderfully.

The other reason I like the term flourishing is because it seems to me a more active verb better suited to creatures like ourselves who have a certain agency — Thomas Quine

Yes. As captured by Maslow and self-actualisation as the highest good.

Merely speculating, but I think its important to avoid excessive bias towards a precedential model of brains as no more than a bundle of neurons wired together. The brain is actually 90% glia, which are closer to conventional, nonconducting cells in their structure, provisional of function that may differ dramatically from neuronal streamlining for purposes of electricity transmission. — Enrique

Always looking for the loopholes that might lie in what we don't know? :razz:

In fact we do know plenty about glia.

And you keep talking about electricity flows as if the brain were switch a current of electrons. But charge is carried by ions. And it is only because of the "informational" structure of the axons - the molecular machinery of ion channels - that a wave of anything can flow down a neural "wire". What "flows' is a bunch of these pores opening and closing in a chain reaction that propagates like a wave.

So there is just nothing to suggest the brain is engineered for any kind of naked electrical activity. The energy of actual free electrons would blow its delicate molecular machinery apart.

Thanks for digging out the bit you had in mind.

We have of course been through this hoop before. Not that I mind a re-run. :razz:

As this Stanford article argues....

Aristotle does in fact use the expressions “prime matter” (prôtê hulê) and “primary underlying thing” (prôton hupokeimenon) several times ... The mere fact that he uses the phrase is inconclusive, however, since, he makes it explicit that “prime matter” can refer either to a thing’s proximate matter or to whatever ultimately makes it up:

Nature is prime matter (and this in two ways, either prime in relation to the thing or prime in general; for example, in the case of bronze works the bronze is prime in relation to them, but prime in general would be perhaps water, if everything that can be melted is water). (1015a7–10)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/#PrimMatt

...and as I've argued before, there is this confusion between prime matter and primary substance - between the primacy of whatever could constitute the material aspect of hylomorphically-emergent actuality, and primacy that is then the actualised or enformed being which is thus the substantial substrate of further change and development.

So "potential" - quite rightly - has this double sense that needs to be addressed.

There is what I would consider to be prime matter as Peircean firstness or vagueness. Or indeed, the apeiron of Anaximander. This is just the raw possibility of a fluctuation. The least "formed" or "enduring" or "purposeful" notion of a substantial material action or efficient cause. A difference that doesn't make a difference. A mark that is washed away as fast as it is made.

It seems clear that for anything to be, you do need that kind of general ground that is the radically unformed - a kind of chaos without pattern - which can thus become the prime matter which is in fact formed up (enformed) into some kind of substance, something that is a concrete particular.

And then the second sense of potentiality is the potential for the now actualised substance to be the subject of further developmental change. Iron can be forged into swords, flesh into dogs. You just need the formal/final cause that gives the iron or flesh its functional shape.

So when we talk of Being preceeding Becoming, we are talking about Primary Substance - the dog that can become dead, the iron that can become sword.

But when we talk of becoming preceeding being, we mean the Anaximander's apeiron or Peirce's tychism - potential as the pure spontaneity of unformed material fluctuation. If we had to describe such a general grounding to Being, it would be a materiality with the least possible substantiality. And even then, we should be imagining it as just naked "becoming" as "prime matter" with any materiality has already crossed that threshold into the realm of actualised Being.

This may sound an esoteric distinction. But it is of course vital to grounding the metaphysics of modern physics. How else can we understand "quantum potential" or "the Big Bang"?

I have. Although it’s been a while. Which quote or paragraph did you mean?

I think you are in essence right. The problem is how do you then define flourishing?

Isis flourished in some sense as a community bound by shared precepts.

So flourishing is a nice word, redolent with positive affect. But that means it could be just a bait and switch where values taken for granted as “moral” now get submerged in an unexamined notion of “flourishing”.

This sounds like the work you mean to continue on to.

Which passage did you have in mind where he labelled it a fiction?

Sorry, I misread your "primary substance" as "prime matter". But then I'm still not sure which you have in mind here.

However I would see Primary Substance as the meat in the hylomorphic sandwich. So it is substance that is indeed enformed - that is, the accidental constrained by the necessary. Or material possibility constrained by formal requirement.

This is the hierarchical order by which some particular dog - let's point to Rover over there - is a "dog" by some kind of higher formal necessity. Dogginess is an abstract idea that is real because it really does serve to limit the scope of material accidents.

Rover might have three legs and still count as a dog - if he lost one by accident. Or he could even be a robot - if for good reason, the fact of being factory-made rather than biology-grown was regarded as incidental. A material particular or material accident.

So the Aristotelean approach to substantial being recognises that the world attains its enformed state of solidity and concrete object-ness because globalised necessities constrain local material possibilities in a sufficiently robust fashion.

And in this scheme, we can thus arrive at...

What's "going on" is Potential (Virtual), the statistical possibility of Actual (Real). — Gnomon

...but it is actually a Peircean triad of the accidental, the actual, the necessary. Actuality is emergent as a formal constraint on mere material accident. And so actuality is itself statistical or probabalistic.

Rover is that substantial being, that enformed concrete particular. But also, on closer examination, Rover represents some generalised idea of "dog" that is being honoured in the exception. If Rover loses his leg tomorrow, that counts as an immateriality. Not enough has changed to alter his "essential being".

But keep chipping away, and it will. The leg, for example, no longer fits the bill of being our pet dog.

Aristotle was uncomfortable with Plato's notion of supernatural Forms, yet he still applied the same term to natural things. And the distinction is moot, since he used the metaphysical term "Soul" to describe the "form" component of all beings. — Gnomon

Yes, but what was Aristotle - as a naturalist - really meaning? He wasn't a proto-scholastic after all.

Today, he might talk of the genome rather than the soul. We now have better ways to talk about the formal aspect that distinguishes life and mind as distinctive elements of nature.

So for sure, life and mind have a regulating form - one that constrains material accidents in a very strong way. We have informational machinery - cellular membranes, genes, neurons, words - that are the semiotic machinery to encode "schemas" and impose their designs on raw physics.

Rover is Rover because of his genetics, his immune system, his neurally-encoded memories, the fact that he is socially constructed as a pet within my family setting. There is a huge weight of information to enform the Primary Substance that goes by that name, preserving a constant thread of identity as he sheds hair, loses legs, or undergoes other material accidents that the schemas don't count as information - ie: differences that make a difference.

Substance was used before mass was properly identified and defined. It is now no more than philosophers continuing a bad habit. — Banno

So "mass" has been properly identified and defined? Or did you mean "massiveness"?

Oh dear. Back into the good old metaphysical debate about "substance" I guess. :lol:

Maybe instead of panpsychism, this paradigm can be thought of as something like transpsychism, — Enrique

Trans means "beyond" and so that would be a claim of dualism. Pan is a claim of monism. My own approach is semiotic and so triadic - about a relation between a system of interpretance and the world it models via a machinery of signs.

Is reality all a single dual-aspect stuff? Is it composed of two essential and unrelated substances? Or is "mind" an informational model born out of the necessities of a entropy-regulating process?

These are the positions as I see them.

I'm not familiar with exact science behind the brain's electromagnetism, but I imagine it could simply be emergent from tens of billions of neurons conducting voltage simultaneously, and this EMF along with brain matter might have coevolved so that cellular mechanisms of additive superposition in entangled wavicles are integrated with saturating and perhaps finely modulated radiation as our qualitative perceptual field. — Enrique

A bunch of people, like Pockett, McFadden, many others, have tried to suggest that consciousness is just some kind of global EM field. But it isn't neurologically plausible.

The brain exists in a world with far more powerful EM fields than can be generated by the whole brain, let alone the trillion or so sub-fields down at the synaptic level that would represent the "modulation" of some kind of collective outcome. Your cellphone would zap your brain in a big way.

And so the evidence that it takes a really big jolt - kilo-volts - to pulse your brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation, should be enough to show the brain is in fact a poor conductor and pretty resistant to forming any kind of global EM pattern. It just isn't designed to do that kind of thing. If it were, it would be obvious from the biology.

Science is good at finding this kind of stuff. We know fish can indeed generate electric fields as a form of radar.

Electric fish generate these pulses using special cells called electrocytes. These run in rows along the length of the animals’ bodies. These cells pump positively charged sodium atoms, called ions, from inside themselves to the outside. Then the cells open gates to let the sodium ions back in. The flood of ions back into the cells produces an electrical pulse. The voltages of all the electrocytes in a row add up. It’s similar to how the row of batteries work to collectively power a flashlight.
An electric fish uses its weak pulses like radar. Those pulses create an electric field around its body. This acts like a bubble of electric current. When another animal enters that space, the fish detects a distortion in the electric field.

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/shocking-electric-eel

So EM fields can be harnessed by biology as a tool of its information processing. It uses regular neural hardware - the ability to create pulses of ion exchange across membranes. The technology is there if consciousness did have something to do with generating EM fields. And so by the same token, we can see this is not what the brain is normally trying to achieve.

Instead, electric eels turn EM pulses - generated by batteries of electrocytes - into a way to attack rather than just sense other fish. It blasts them so hard that their muscles are spastically contracted.

Thus any EM-based account of brain function has to deal with the fact that brains don't seem in any way designed for sustaining fragile EM patterns. Instead they are designed for robust information processing once the necessary delicate physical signals have been transduced.

This is in fact the central feature of biosemiosis, as I have explained. Information becomes possible as its own thing because physical signal transduction does reduce the "mind's" actual physical contact to the world to the smallest possible scale.

The eye can detect single photons just about. The nose tells you there is a rose from connecting with one corner of some stray organic molecule floating about.

It is not an accident that we sense the world in terms of its faintest sensory traces. Models must stand apart from what they model. The mind - as what the brain does - has to be as far removed from the actual physics of the world as it can so as to represent the world using its own neural language of "synaptic switches".

The map is not the terrain, as they say. So the mind is formed by the machinery that first gates the physics of the world so as to make it possible to start building an informational picture of it.

And to the degree that the world is quantum or electromagnetic or whatever, the brain must filter out that raw physics as a first transduction step. And by the same token, that means that any mark recorded - some neuron in the eye or nose gets triggered in threshold detector fashion - becomes a significant or meaningful feature of the resulting mental map of the world that is being composed.

Biosemiosis is all about the need for an intermediating transduction step - the one that makes physics controllable. That is how organismic nature imposes its desires on a physical environment.

Panpsychism is flawed from the get-go because it is all about avoiding what Howard Pattee - the theoretical biologist who laid the best groundwork for biosemiosis - calls the "epistemic cut".

That may be all a bit technical still. But it is important that science has considered panpsychism in all its guises and has good reason to find it wanting. And now the evidence has really stacked up in favour of the biosemiotic approach to life and mind. The recent findings in biophysics seal the deal.

So the cryptochrome example would go to my point. The nanoscale is where quantum effects can be harnessed by molecular machinery. The claim is that is how a physical energy - variations in the earth’s magnetic field - can be turned into an information processing signal.

So consciousness is what comes from the information processing side of the equation - the reality modelling activities of a lifeform’s nervous system. The quantumness is just part of the necessary balance where the physics of the world becomes a bistable switch. Information processing has something it can work with - a switch to flip - just like a computer needs its transistor gates.

When our laptop does its thing, we don’t consider that quantum computing even though a transistor gate is a quantum device down at the level of the flow of electrons in the semiconductor matrix. In the same way, the fact that the brain relies on exquisite quantum balances to transduce the physics of the world into neurally encoded signals doesn’t mean the resulting conscious state is fundamentally quantum. It is instead fundamentally information processing.

And the same argument applies if it is shown that ion channel dynamics seem better described in quantum terms rather than classical terms.

From a biosemiotic point of view, the quantum and classical descriptions are two crude ways of saying the same thing. What is actually going on only comes into sharper focus with a quasi-classical level description where we are modelling the way some kind of molecular machinery (the information processing aspect) is harnessing some kind of entropic potential (a physical flow that is poised at criticality and so amendable to switching and other forms of useful regulation).

So a panpsychist is imputing consciousness to the quantum substrate and seeing the molecular machinery as some kind of amplifier of that flow of “qualia”. Subjectivity is basically physical.

But the biosemiotic view is that the quantum physical world is only relevant as a zone of exquisite dynamical balance that lends itself to the new thing of being mechanically switchable. The microphysics can be controlled by informational processes - like whole systems of neural switches doing signal transduction and reality modelling.

Consciousness - like life in general - is a semiotic relation that is made possible by the physics but happens because of the processing.

Panpsychism has thus been refuted by science now. Or at least we have the explanation of how “mind” and “world” can interact at a fundamental level. There is this special thing happening at the nanoscale convergence zone. Physics becomes switchable. And so life could arise as the molecular machinery doing some self-interested switching.

But Aristotle's Primary Substance was described as more like immaterial Essence (intrinsic quality necessary for existence; Qualia -- mental stuff). — Gnomon

Surely what Aristotle meant by prime matter is one of the most fraught debates in metaphysics. But it can’t be cashed out as mental stuff. Nor even, immaterial essence.

It is more like a fluctuation or the least possible notion of a material action or efficient cause, in my view.

Peircean Firstness or tychism in other words.

It has to be the case that the matter~antimatter symmetry couldn’t actually cancel away, and so some latent asymmetry exists. This has been confirmed by a number of examples - under the banner of the quest to solve CP violation - and there are theories about uncovering more.

So understanding the question is a live one and has started to be solved. It has to do with the way that nature in fact has to break down multiple possible such symmetries, and then different breaking processes get snarled up in each other in ways that introduce asymmetries.

The famous case is how Higgs symmetry breaking creates an asymmetric breaking of the electroweak SU2 symmetry. Three of the bosons gain too much mass and become the weak force. The photon is left to emerge as the massless boson underwriting electromagnetism.

So everything might be trying to cancel to zero and then one process hangs up another process. You get the world we see as the outcome.

At least in the short run. In the long run, the Heat Death says all the crud matter left floating around will get swept up into black holes and evaporated away as the simplest possible matterless particles - a quantum sizzle of photons.

So matter will join anti-matter via a further natural process - black hole evaporation. The end will be an arrival at maximal nothingness. The blackness of a completely generalised 0 degree K thermal cosmic “glow”.

In essence can a mathematically sound theory of everything really be achieved or is there always "uncertainty" or intangible information thus an impossibility of any true equation being acquired. — Benj96

There is certainly a logically sound approach to metaphysics at this level - the dichotomy. And that can be cashed out mathematically - ie: measurably - in the notion of reciprocal limits on Being.

So if you have always an irreducible uncertainty in nature, then that uncertainty can be scaled in terms of its polar opposite - certainty.

The uncertainty = 1/certainty. That is, uncertainty - as a thing - is defined by the degree to which it actually lacks any certainty. And likewise, certainty is measured the same way as 1/uncertainty, or uncertainty reduced to its ultimate limit.

So the shift is from treating uncertainty (or certainty) as states that simply exist as clashing alternatives. We need to reformulate these concepts in the language of mathematical limits. In that fashion, each become measurably tied to the other. The lack of one, becomes the presence of its dialectical "other".

And neither really exist. They are our modelled descriptions of the opposing limits to Being. They are the complementary boundaries on possibility, and hence the constraints which in fact give emergent rise to Being itself.

This is exactly what physics has found in the Planck-scale that encodes the limits of our actual Cosmos.

In brief, the Planck-scale is defined by the three constants of h (quantum uncertainty), G (strength of gravity or classical certainty), and c (the speed of light, the central scaling constant that bridges the two).

And again broadly, h or uncertainty is defined in terms of 1/G. While certainty is defined in terms of 1/h, or a matching reduction in uncertainty. You have a reciprocal deal actually in the heart of the maths that is at the heart of physics.

This "weird" duality is why the Plank-scale defines the limits of reality both in terms of its spatiotemporal smallness and its energy density largeness. At the Big Bang scale, the most thermal uncertainty is confined to least possible classical extent.

And hence you have the encoding of the cut-off point that defines the Big Bang as being a tad larger than a true classical singularity - nothing starts from zero uncertainty. A quantum measure of uncertainty already had to be present as "the least amount of uncertainty physically possible". Just as - contrariwise - there had to be at least that amount of classical certainty (the expanding spacetime point that could start drain off this maximal heat density) present at this shared starting moment.

So we can measure all this with startling precision and identify the balance of two opposites - certainty and uncertainty - that have to both exist to get things going. Or rather "exist" as the bounding and mutually-determining limits on being.

The way I see it is that ultimately the universe must be finite in the sense of energy and information — Benj96

Energy and information - or better yet, negentropy and entropy - would be another way of describing things as the complementary limits on being. And the finitude comes in that they do limit being in that self-referencing fashion of a dichotomy (mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive). Each is measurably present to the degree the other is absent. A reciprocal relation.

But if such system operates with inherent spontaneity or uncertainty then I cannot see how an equation could ever be applied at most just a set of statistics and probabilities that would enbale only semi accurate but never true predictions/ algorithms — Benj96

But with quantum theory - as a maths that embodies this reciprocal dynamics - you have a physics that predicts the world with the greatest precision. You can calculate physical properties like the magnetic moment of an electron to a ridiculous number of decimal places.

So it is by being able to quantify fundamental quantum uncertainty, and tossing it in with the classical model of an electron spinning like a top and generating a magnetic field, that you get an answer that lies within the constraints of both empirical bounds on Being - on what could be the lawful case in our Universe.

The randomness or indeterminism is a completely necessary part of the picture because otherwise, its opposite - the classical determinism - would have nothing definite to anchor itself to as the reciprocal contrast state. The other ultimate limit creating finitude in the other direction.

One couldn't exist without the other. And both can only exist as a dichotomous relation.

Initially, electrical properties in aggregates of tissue such as the brain needed to be robust enough that a stable supervenience of electromagnetic field (EMF) was created by systematic electron fluxing. — Enrique

But the brain doesn't run on electricity. The "fluxes" are at best ionic gradients across axonal membranes - sodium and potassium. And these are all regulated by molecular machinery, transport channels, so are classical rather than quantum in nature.

Quantum effects in molecules of the body are sensitive to trace EMF energy sources, creating a structural complex of relatively thermodynamic mass containing pockets of relatively quantum biochemistry integrated by sustained radiation. — Enrique

The crucial point of the recent biophysical revelations is instead that biology exists because it has the classical machinery to regulate such quantum effects. It is imposing order on chaos. So the logic is the other way around.

For example, oxidative respiration releases enough energy to "blow up" a mitochondrion. But these cellular energy factories harness that by trapping the "hot electrons" in a transduction chain.

Mitochondria have respiratory proteins with a string of iron-sulphur receptors that can "milk" an electron of its energy in nine gradual quantum steps.

So yes, the system is quantum. The iron-sulphur crystal clusters have to be spaced by exactly 14 angstroms so that the electron stays captured by the chain as it makes its (most probable) quantum hop.

But much more importantly, that quantumness is strait-jacketed by the fact the protein complex imposes such precise constraints on its path. It is all about the limits being placed on the quantum freedom in order to extract usable work.

Quantum features of biochemistry have likely been refined evolutionarily so that mechanisms by which relative nonlocality affects organisms, mechanisms of EMF/matter interfacing, mechanisms targeting particular environmental stimuli via functionally tailored pigments along with further classes of molecules and cellular tissues, and mechanisms for translation of stimulus into representational memory all became increasingly coordinated until an arrangement involving what we call ‘intentionality’ emerged, a mind with executive functions of deliberative interpretation and behavioral strategizing, beyond mere reflex-centric memory conjoined to stimulus/response. — Enrique

Again, what biology actually shows is the opposite. Yes, quantumness does provide a necessary ingredient - a fundamental uncertainty at the base of physical being. But the point then is that is why classical machinery - a structure of semiotic regulation - can in fact impose a useful organic order on the "quantum chemistry". An essential lack of order is what paves the ground for an evolution of ordering machinery.

So biology/neuroscience evolves not as a magnification of quantum "coherence" but as the hierarchical imposition of "mechanical" certainty on quantum uncertainty. It is all about the harnessing of variety - levels of regulatory constraint.

Could all phenomena be substances? — Benj96

Note the definition of substance is about that "which stands behind everything". So you can consider the reverse proposition. What if "stuff" is the emergent outcome rather than the foundational being?

Could all substances be phenomenal? :grin:

It is useful to flip the assumptions being made. Everything that seems "substantial" to us at our very human-centric scale of observation turns out to be quite "other" to that once we get digging with our scientific tools.

Any solid object is mostly space - as you say. And yet any empty space is also "substantial" in having a temperature, a gravity field - the various other measures that suggest the presence of material properties.

So our standard reified notion of substance has to be treated as suspect and broken down into whatever could cause such solidified existence to emerge.

And hey, Aristotle already did a good job of that with his own investigation into substance or ousia.

His idea that being is emergent from the combo of formal and material cause (as the broad generalisation) holds up pretty well.

If freedom were merely binary, then it would cancel itself out, yes. But what if freedom had no limits, was far more than binary? Would it still cancel out? — DanielP

That is rather the point. Freedom without limits has too much symmetry. Once you make everything equally possible, then its own negation is just as possible and you wind up with nothing. Your freedom self-cancels in binary fashion.

So there has to be some asymmetry built into this business of freedom somewhere. There in fact has to be some limitation in play to have freedoms that are defined in terms of the "everything else" that is the forbidden. To have a figure, you need also the ground.

This is a deep issue for current fundamental physics. A naive quantum calculation of what should exist tells us either nothing (as all quantum possibilities add up to self-cancel), or instead an equally unhelpful infinity (if every quantum possibility instead just sums and results in an "ultraviolet catastrophe).

The world we observe is the result of critical freedoms in fact cancelling to just about zero, and yet not quite. There is just enough asymmetry in the underlying symmetries of quantum spin, for example, to mean that a tiny bit of matter avoids being annihilated by all the anti-matter also produced during the Big Bang. The CP violation phenomenon.

So what I'm saying is that your OP ain't silly. It is an issue that is central to an understanding of fundamental physics.

Whether it's social status or business/wealth or romance competition is pervasive in human affairs and the losers suffer real, serious consequences. Life is often a high stakes competition. — BitconnectCarlos

Yes, there is always pain and pleasure. But the cooperative end of the spectrum is also experienced in these terms.

Who enjoys feeling constrained and having to play by the rules? Who loves paying their taxes - until they need a hospital? Who in their right mind would want to be in the army - until it is in defence of their home town?

So living has real consequences - pleasant and unpleasant. But competition and cooperation deliver both in their own ways.

Balance would be then whatever could be a happy medium that achieves the most overall good - however we then decide to measure that.

The losers don't necessarily deserve it, either. There's an element of randomness to it ... I think there's an element of tragedy to it that cooperation doesn't quite have. — BitconnectCarlos

But how much is this a modern cultural mythology - the image of the striving hero battling against fickle fate? You don't have to go far to see counter-stories where the tragedy is to be cast out of the collective bosom.

So we can play this both ways - a sign that this dynamic truly exists as a mirror reflection of its own self.