Why did you erase your mention of terror management theory?

I thought it funny that you again wheel out a theory about the extremes that people will go to to avoid confronting an end to their lives when you are so busy trying to claim folk would universally be happier never to have been born.

How do you "divine" Natural Law would be the first question. — schopenhauer1

As I agreed with Darth, in the end there is a choice. Either you go with the subjectivity being expressed by all you anti-natalists - where your personal preferences are treated as a self-evident moral ought - or you are prepared to follow the natural philosophy route that became the pragmatic scientific method.

So mine is the evidence-demanding approach that stands against your subjective articles of faith. :)

And yours also is the one that frames things in terms of laws - natural or otherwise. I keep telling you how my position is a natural philosophy one in that it depends on constraints and freedoms. Mine is the systems logic which has that inherent balance.

Am I do see you as an oracle, proclaiming the truths of reality? Of course I believe what I think is reasonable. — darthbarracuda

Yep. You believe that what you think is what is reasonable. The simplicity of the circular argument.

Seems to me YOU'RE the one who thinks they have special privilege to the whisperings of nature. — schopenhauer1

LOL. I listen to the science. Sue me.

Quite reasonable. — Thorongil

You give up on your lines of argument rather easily.

Reason and life do not always parallel each other, and when they intersect it's not always beautiful. — darthbarracuda

Yep. It does come down to me being happy to let nauture tell us what reality is. You have some invented image of rationality that you won’t even questioin. You know the right answers despite what nature might say.

Someone earlier referred to paths of least resistance. — tim wood

Yeah. So how does every particle, every event, know how to follow the path of least action? How do you accommodate this “weirdness” that infects even classical physics in your metaphysical picture?

But that is just the failure of language to accommodate the tree's living. It - the tree - doesn't follow; it doesn't go. It just is, from moment to moment. — tim wood

Science can talk of grades of telos - physical tendencies or propensities, biological function, psychological purpose. So finality or anticipation can be treated as something that comes in obvious grades of complexity.

Then you just need a general story on how complexity arises. That is where pan-semiotics slots in. There is information bound up in a system’s history of constraints that gives it the tendencies it will express in the future.

This only gets truly weird on the micro scale of quantum events where now - as in quantum eraser experiments - choices experimenters might make in the future can act as constraints on an event’s past. Time itself gets caught up in the least action principle.

But the point is that finality is profoundly part of physics. And it’s exact understanding still an open question.

It is not something to be dismissed. It is a forefront issue.

Yes, it is true that many people irrationally find life to be something positive. Yet people can be profoundly misled. — darthbarracuda

A billion happy people has no value when it depends on a single victim of torture. — darthbarracuda

Every single person who exists is a possible suicide. That's a fact. — darthbarracuda

No words.

Just as the torturer could make reasonable predictions about whether, on average, his victims will develop a Stockholm Syndrome such that they feel grateful to him. — Thorongil

Finish the thought. What would that reasonable prediction actually be in real life?

10%?

1%?

0.001%?

And then ask yourself how good is an argument that must rely on extravagant hyperbole? Surely it must be facing desperate times if that is the best it can manage.

I couldn't count "interaction", because that's what you left out. Look:
The whole shapes the parts, the parts make the whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

????

What is the point of having children as we approach the cliff off of which we will collectively fall? — Bitter Crank

Now you are talking about the actual world - the one where we would take a pragmatic decision. :up:

It's not fanatical to abstain from having children. People do it all the time. — darthbarracuda

What I said was that it is fanatical to take up absolutist positions. Not having kids can be a perfectly reasonable choice - "reasonable" meaning "on the balance of probabilities".

And I think you are using the term "reasonable" illicitly here, in that you effectively monopolize the term to refer to anything you agree with. — darthbarracuda

Huh? I used a general definition of reasonable - the pragmatist one.

I can just as easily say that reasonable people do not take unnecessary risks, — darthbarracuda

And that is what I actually said. We make pragmatic risk/reward choices based on a balance of probabilities.

In this form antinatalism is the logical extension of the common ethical categories (common-sense morality), and it's only because of the affirmative assumption that life and reason must never intersect that antinatalism is seen as unreasonable. — darthbarracuda

No. It is unreasonable because the facts are that the majority of people don't go through life wishing they had never been born.

Antinatalism is only logical to those who take a black and white absolutist stance on things. Any pain or suffering - even a papercut - makes existence structurally intolerable.

For most people, life is a mixed bag. And yet overall, they don't regret living. So if you are going to take on moral guardianship for the unborn, deal with the facts as they actually are out there in the world.

The reason as to why this assumption is so prevalent is probably evolution and the basic biological drive to survive. — darthbarracuda

No. Most folk can just see that antinatalism is another of those extremist points of view that are essentially unreasonable.

Yes. The arguments are made with black and white logic. But no. That is not reasonable.

"It" here, being the thing which causes, refers to constraints. — Metaphysician Undercover

You have two dichotomous elements, the parts and the whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Did you forget to count their interaction?

If we are reasonable people, we could make reasonable judgements about whether on average those babies will later feel grateful.

And being reasonable, it would be on average rather than absolutely. Practical reason also includes the principle of indifference. Near enough is good enough. We don’t have to be fanatics about these things.

Once more, you have simply ducked the question. Why should your personal "is" be society's collective "ought"?

A constraint cannot cause anything unless it exists. So it cannot cause its own existence because that would mean that it exists before it exists. — Metaphysician Undercover

It causes the parts that construct it to exist.

It's a feedback loop. The whole shapes the parts, the parts make the whole.

My outcome leads to no negative outcome for a future individual. — schopenhauer1

....is not an answer to the question: "Why should everyone have to serve your preference in this matter?"

What is it about the word "flourishing" that draws people like a moth to a flame? — schopenhauer1

Yeah. Why on earth would flourishing be a preference? Why would you want anything standing in the way of misery?

If we know of the "sufferings", why are the positives worth it when nothing had to be created at all? — schopenhauer1

Again, you have simply failed to answer on the issue. Why should your personal "is" be society's collective "ought"?

Because there is always tension between the individual and society... — schopenhauer1

Yep. Life never runs smooth. There is always friction. And yet at some sensible level, we are indifferent to that. It ceases to matter ... probably because we have goals and hence a balanced and reasonable view of what it would take to negotiate their achievement.

If you want to take some other simplistic/absolutist position on the structural intolerability of existence, that's your personal choice. I merely point out that is bad psychology and thus a philosophy constructed on faulty premisses.

Of course we conform to society's expectations/roles/givens, etc. We eventually learn to integrate. — schopenhauer1

Why always stuck with the one side of what I say? We also conform to an expectation that we are differentiated as well. And it is precisely that modern Romantic/Existential social expectation - you are a special flower - which is a primary source of much of the angst (for the average person in a developed country with food in their bellies, a roof over their heads, time to waste on the internet).

I say rebel against that conformist role! Rebel against being a rebel. Wise up to the self-absolving meme that is antinatalism. Fight back against the expectations of differentiation. :)

But why do we want this process to continue? — schopenhauer1

You might not. But why should I want what you want? Why should everyone have to serve your preference in this matter?

What is it about seeing new people navigate the social/physical world that is valuable to you that this needs to be procreated to a next generation? It is a legitimate question, but so fundamental you seem to think it should not be asked. — schopenhauer1

You just never listen to the answers. I don't think there is an ought involved. I've said it is fine as a personal choice. My reply to the OP was that one justification is that having kids makes you less selfish, more socially responsible and involved. And that in itself is fun and healthy for good natural reasons.

It is not as if there is some world shortage of humans. In the end, we can shrug our shoulders at antinatalism as a moral philosophy. So the only thing to object to is that it is a bad idea from a psychological health viewpoint. It becomes a rationale to hide behind.

Now from here, you take this IS and make it an OUGHT by PREFERRING to have future people that experience this dynamic of the individual and society. — schopenhauer1

Huh? I am asking you to justify why your personal preference ought to be the metaphysically general preference. You are the one claiming that the reality is structurally intolerable and therefore all of us ought not to reproduce as an ethical fact.

I instead start with situational choices and end with them. We can each make our own personal choices on the issue. And collectively, as a society, we will make some general choice. Who could complain about that?

But the other issue here is what to do practically if you are personally miserable and depressed about life. That is where you need the psychology rather than the philosophy. You keep mixing the two up.

You say this is a good thing and should be carried out because that is just what happens. Again, this is an is ought problem.... — schopenhauer1

Nope. My actual argument starts pragmatically with the preference to be achieved - the purpose you might have in mind. You want life to be x. And so what would be the steps to reach that?

It is a given, a scientific fact, that we are social creatures who flourish through the give and take of some balance of competitive and co-operative behaviours. We must be both sufficiently differentiated and integrated to thrive as ... social creatures. And everything else I say follows from this basic picture of the human situation.

Now you can dispute that scientific account of things. But I am asking what is it that you hope to achieve, and what are the given conditions from which that preference would have to be expressed. Some reasonable plan of action then follows.

So nope. That is the advantage of pragmatism. It takes both the preference and the situation seriously enough that reason can operate properly. A path can be found without the kind of collapse into helpless absolutism your approach always leads you.

Huh? My claim is that it is natural to be indifferent to this bumpiness when it doesn’t really matter.

It is your pessimism that demands the perfection of a frictionless existence. Or have you now abandoned that?

I dunno. Hit a Swiss watch with a hammer and likely it's destroyed. Hit a man with hammer, and unless you hit him pretty hard, he might just hit you back. — tim wood

So what I said then? Mechanisms are fragile because they depend on material stability. Organisms are robust because they are the management of material instability.

Deux et machina? If there's a hand, it must be the various physical laws and a lot of combining and recombining. If not that, then what is the hand? — tim wood

The usual semiotic stuff like genes, membranes, neurons and the other non-holonomic constraints.

Laws are holonomic constraints. They apply universally. Life arises because codes can encode for local and personal laws - habits in other words.

Trees - news to me - are apparently amazing, dynamic and engaging in behaviours often described in anthropomorphic terms. — tim wood

Life at all levels uses communal signalling. It’s important to microbial ecosystems too. So again, the same semiotic story of self organising constraints.

Well, it is simply a preference of yours. — schopenhauer1

It is an empirical account so it stands or falls on the evidence.

I’m asserting its psychophysics 101 as well as a familiar epistemic point of Ancient Greek metaphysics. So start with that. ;j

That's quite the assertion to start your line of thought with — Ilyosha

Assertion or psychophysics 101? It's just standard psychological science.

The problem is not reason - I think it's the insistence that reason must always be validated by, and in that sense subordinated to, human sensory capacities (which is what 'empiricism' amounts to). — Wayfarer

But even the experiencing eye is imposing an intelligible structure on the world. The Ancient Greeks knew that as well. Empiricism is simply the formalising of this semiotic business - the production of the signs by which we construct an orderly representation of the world as it suits us to understand it.

So the scientific method is just about making the epistemology of being "a reasoning mind" something that is explicit and thus perfectable. We don't have to hide behind direct realism. It is OK to admit that reality is a pragmatic interpretation.

And from that prosaic truth, you can always continue on to the exciting ontic implications. Reality itself might also operate semiotically - interpreting itself into being in a "mind-like" fashion as a set of definite signs.

(Every material event is evidence for something. And it turns out to be evidence of thermalisation in progress. Every event is a tick of the cosmic thermal clock.)

Reasoning: the provision of causes, motives, and explanations for what is, i.e. for being per se whether in whole or in part. — javra

But it would be a narrow definition of reasoning to identify it with just something people pursue as a method of inquiry. The primary datum of experience is that nature itself appears intelligible, or rationally structured.

And the principle of sufficient reason/principle of locality might speak to atomistic patterns of causal action. But physics also needs its matching holistic principles - of least action and cosmological homogeneity - for a complete description of nature's causal structure. It must see form and purpose as part of the total picture that would be a generalised Logos.

I’m again reminded of the pre-Socratic notion of logos, the reasoning pertaining both to the physical cosmos and to individuals which are aspects of it. — javra

Yep. And the Pythagoreans and Hercliteans matched Logos to Flux, Peras to Apeiron, Limits to Chaos. So they did the flip I suggest. It is reason - as in the reasonableness of orderly structure - that manages or suppresses the basic instability of "existence", or flux/apeiron.

Existence, in this metaphysics, is emergent actuality, the substantial state that persists long time because there is the organisation to channel the naked chaos into a steady directed and temporal flow.

With these musings in mind—which I don’t deny are themselves one individual's reasoning—I can’t help but speculate that at the deepest of metaphysical levels truth is the arational itself — javra

Arational suggests neutrality. And that would fit with an understanding of chaos or flux as a meaningless and undirected foment of fluctuations. It is essentially neutral in being neither formed nor having matter. And neutral as it cannot stand opposed to the rational structure that must inevitably arise from it.

To be irrational is to be already actually existing as an antithetical structure of some kind. It is essentially a dualist view of nature, like mind vs body, or spirit vs world.

And meaning is too young of a thing to [hold an ability to comprehend] it.” — javra

In the scheme I sketch, meaning becomes formally cashed out as mutual information. The logos and the flux must be in a meaningful balance - so not dualistically separated but semiotically engaged. And the mutual information of two variables is a measure of the mutual dependence between them.

apokrisis seems to think there is this smooth balance of the individual with the whole- as if human social relations are simply a machine. — schopenhauer1

Trying to drag me into yet another of your scab picking pessimism sessions? ;)

For the record, I would say organismic rather than mechanical. And so you are off track thinking I would need a frictionless mechanism.

What is important from a pragamatic and semiotic view of nature is a capacity to ignore the differences that don’t make a difference. Identity or autonomy is defined by what matters to an organism, and thus what also is a matter of generalised indifference.

That is what is balanced. Things don’t need to be magically smooth or frictionless. The system just needs to be smart enough that it knows when not to care.

Your rants about the structural intolerability of existence don’t get that. You complain about every bump in the road, no matter how insignificant.

It is you who desire the smooth and frictionless existence here. Funny that. Folk are always projecting.

Life is managed instability. So it is based on a separation of powers that establishes the third thing of a synergistic and complementary relation.

So Romanticism rather conventionally opposes reason and ... some antithetical version of unreason. The irrational, the felt, the spiritual, the animal, etc.

But life as a phenomenon is a fruitful combination of material dynamics at its most unstable or volatile, and then the overlay of reason, memory or control that can ride that wild horse in desired directions.

So life certainly answers to reason in the sense that there must be a stabilising hand that forms some bunch of unstable material potentials into a persisting organismic identity.

A tree, perhaps ironically, seems about the most managed, the least lively, kind of living thing. A tree is like sedimentary being, growth fixed in woody permanent layers. What we see is it’s logical structure - the shape that had the optimal fit to its small gap in the forest canopy.

Isn’t that how we respond to trees? They are nature’s greatest living sculptures. They impose a form on the life that lives within their forest.

Have you read what Heraclitus argued for?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_of_opposites

Why should there be this balancing in the first place. Putting the cart before the horse again. Taking an is for an ought. — schopenhauer1

You need emotional range to model the richness of the world. So you need this baseline balance as the neutrally poised state from which you can launch in appropriate fashion in countering directions.

So the ought is a logical necessity. If we want to express a full range of emotions, we ought to start from a neutral position. (Did you have an actual argument against this ought?)

but it is the same basic goal-categories: survival, comfort/maintenance seeking, boredom-fleeing). — schopenhauer1

You just make things up as facts to support your case.

I was talking about what you might genuinely feel as a baseline condition when all forms of thought and action are as stilled as possible.

Boredom is what you feel when nothing is exciting your curiosity. And thinking about it, curiosity is probably our most valuable trait.

Can we have communities of existential discussion? — schopenhauer1

But @Inyenzi nailed it. Not having children is to suffer a deficiency in an especially close human and community relationship.

It is thus funny - in a sad and ironic way - that you would want to scratch your itch for community in a community of existential complaint.

But then if there were such a philosophical community, it would only be valuable to the extent it was brutally honest. So it would have to take account of the psychological and sociological science, as well as the physical and cosmological science.

At the bottom of it is a sort of emptiness/boredom- a dull silence that we wrap more routines around. — schopenhauer1

Is that really the general case? It sounds like what a person with the flat affect of deep depression might say. But some people might say that perhaps there is restless anxiety. A person with a tendency to disorders of anxiety and obsession would have that as their most unfocused baseline state.

And then there is what I would think of as the balance between too flat and too jittery. The calm instability of a meditative state of mind - a state of simple vagueness. :)

So even at a pop psychology level, we can see that your argument for some generalised baseline condition - flat affect - is challenged by the facts. It may be what is true for you. But is it true for everyone?

And my point is that neurocognition tells us the mind depends on its dichotomous responses. It needs to be able to swing both ways with adaptive flexibility. It must be able to worry when worry is required, and to relax, when that is what is best. Be jittery or be calm. Be introspective or be outwardly engaged. Etc, etc.

So the richness of lived experience is the ability to move strongly in opposing directions as suits the needs of the moment. Joy and pain.

And that lability predicts that the resting state, the deep down condition, would be the kind of neutral instability, the sense of disengaged poise, that meditation seeks after. A continuous fertile bubbling of thought and impressions that you keep letting go rather than pursuing.

It is nothing like death or the void. It is not the abyss or the chasm or the terror that needs to be managed and suppressed.

It is ... a vagueness. It is basic mindfulness, a basic level of being in the world, all ready to go, but not yet going anywhere in particular.

And it is not even some super-state of mind or anything special. It is not pure individuation but rather its opposite, the most de-individuate state of mind we can arrive at.

However, it is what it would be like to be centred. It is the balance between being too flat and too jittery for comfort. Neutral and yet alive with the potential to engage.

So if we are going to start building psycho-philosophies, they ought to accurately identify what would be the natural general baseline condition of a well-adjusted mind. We ought to know what we are shooting for when making our generalisations.

Chance and necessity make a nice pair of terms in which to explain everything, but I would imagine you could tell a similar story with other pairs (or mores) of fundamental somethings. They all make me uncomfortable, but that's my problem. — Srap Tasmaner

Of course you need many dichotomies here. There isn't just a single dialectic. Discrete~continuous, flux~stasis, one~many, matter~form - we are talking about the deeper thing of the metaphysical mechanism that is dialectical opposition itself.

It would be nice to boil down the list to a single over-arching dichotomy. For me, I think it comes down to a pair of them - a dichotomy of dichotomies.

I would defend local~global and vague~crisp as the two key ones. One talks of the hierarchical structure that is what you have when you have something definitely developed. Then the other talks about the fact of development - the move from a monadic potential through a dichotomous symmetry breaking that gets you to a final equilbrium stability which is the triadic thing of a hierarchy.

But why so many metaphysical oppositions to describe the one nature? It is because you are trying to fold all the rich variety of an emergent cosmos back into the barest metaphysical scheme. It is not about which single dichotomy covers every angle that has emerged. It is about how every possible angle will emerge once you have the singular mechanism which generates that kind of variety.

Is chance real?" We can posit it, or not, but it will always be in the model either way. And this would be Peirce's pragmatism, yes? — Srap Tasmaner

Well reductionism wants to reduce all forms of chance to some kind of hidden determinism. Nothing could be actually just spontaneous.

So that is the bold move. To actually accept absolute chance as being as real as determinism (or absolute constraint). But then, it is only accepting either being absolute in terms of being the bounding limits of the actual.

So it is a more subtle, or sly, story. Chance and necessity are only absolute and actually existent in terms of each other. They are as real as each other. Which on some views - with them being flattened limits - makes them not really real at all. They are just co-dependently real. One exists to the degree the other is lacking. And neither can be completely lacking for either to actually exist.

Oddly, this matching up makes me even more uncomfortable than the Big Theories do on their own. If the big theories already seem to hang in the air (the way a brick doesn't) on the buoyancy of their own internal coherence, this version seems more like jumping and forgetting to hit the ground. — Srap Tasmaner

Surely it is the opposite. A dichotomy is the organisation that could bootstrap itself as it depends only on that which it bootstraps. Continuity exists only as an exclusion of the discrete. And vice versa. So each is what makes the other. They have a formally inverse or reciprocal relationship.

The internal coherence of a dichotomy is complete. By definition, a dichotomy is that which is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. It only needs itself to make sense.

But since we're talking metaphysics, do you have any qualms about the word "fact" here? What kind of fact? Are we forced to call such accumulation itself either accidental or necessary? — Srap Tasmaner

The fact is a fact about the metaphysical process. It is its distinctive structural feature. Out of individual accidents, collective order arises.

So the story is of this duality. The accumulation is not a case of either accidental or necessary. As said, it is about both. Both the chance and the necessity, the accidents and the habits, the tychism and the synechism. Each are fundamental in being the limits that sandwich the actuality of being.

So history, the passage of time, fuses together the material and the formal causes to produce the hylomorphic whole, the thing in itself. You have a past of congealed accidents that are steadily expressing the necessity of some global structure or order. And then the world as actual substantial reality - the richly varied thing - is the bit in the middle, the present moment in which much is constrained and yet much is still open and free.

That makes nice sense. Yesterday's chance is today's necessity. I understood your project to be pushing back or outward to ever greater generality, to the "purely" necessary. I guess if that's only an ideal, you'll be mapping the ossified accidental just like the rest of us. I suppose that's the sense of mapping "from the inside", as you put it. — Srap Tasmaner

The "map" is of the very fact that accidents accumulate to form the regularity of habits. That is the Peircean ontological story of the Cosmos.

And then the Platonic part of that is that there are structural attractors. Given the accumulation of accidents, certain flow patterns must be expressed. The latent structure will be what emerges by the end.

This was highly speculative metaphysics in Peirce's day. It is now routine scientific modelling - dissipative structure theory, hierarchy theory, chaos theory, constructal theory, self-organising criticality, far from equilibrium thermodynamics. There are a ton of labels for the current mathematical variants of the basic metaphysical model.

Your response helps. I still don't quite get the big picture, but I'm good for now. — Srap Tasmaner

Great. I appreciate that.

So do maps need to map the essential or the incidental? What do you think abstraction is apart from the shedding of the inessential particulars to arrive at the structural generalities?

My thought here was that the usefulness of a map is showing you what roads happen actually to exist connecting features you're interested in that also happen to exist, and it shows where the features and roads actually happen to be. You could abstract away location, distance, and so on, and just show the connections -- but this town and that city and the road that connects them are still matters of accidental history. — Srap Tasmaner

So the maps have to have enough essential information. And - for the sake of optimality - they would thus leave out all information that is inessential? Do you agree here or not?

If you are mapping the geography of a planet's surface, then sure, all sorts of accidents of time will have become today's dominating constraints. A mountain range is - in plate tectonic terms - just an accident. But for an army, a tourist, or some other relevant expression of a human interest, it is an obstacle, a constraint on our free and easy motion. So that doesn't change the principle of what I said.

A map is an umwelt - the world experienced in terms of some set of signs, some collection of affordances. We take note of all that is fixed so as to see the opportunities that are thus, dichotomously, created.

Constraints would only show you what connections could exist, where they could be, etc. We need to know which ones actually obtain. — Srap Tasmaner

They are only constraints if they obtain. If they are accidents, then they are accidents. Like it says on the label.

As individuated events, fluctuations are unpredictable. You can't draw a map of them. Even if you can record a history of them. Or draw a map of a field of probabilities - a map of the constraining context, the obstacle course, that gives a predictable shape to fluctuation now viewed as the generalised thing of a process. A structure in motion.

Granted some features are considered essential to a map, in the sense that they're included when others aren't or needn't be, but it seemed to me those included features are still historical and accidental -- this town might not exist, there might not be a road between these two, etc. — Srap Tasmaner

You are trying too hard to manufacture problems. Sure history is full of accidents. But if these accidents can accumulate, then they become the constraints that act in the present to limit the accidents of the future.

They are no longer accidents once they become part of the constraints that prevail. So you are simply attempting to make an analogy the worst possible by abusing it in the worst way you can imagine.

Yet, we are both doing choosing our habit patterns to look away from the void. — schopenhauer1

Don’t you instead wander the city streets brandishing your placard warning the end is nigh? Repent while you have the chance!

You have to have a reason why you could believe that existence is structurally intolerable when the evidence is that most people find life a mixed bag, but on the whole, worth living. And arguing with unbelievers is how you daily confirm yourself in that faith. It becomes your evidence that ordinary people really do operate under some mass delusion and only you have been gifted with the vision of the truth.

Sorry -- this just seems like the worst analogy for what you're after. — Srap Tasmaner

So not just a weak analogy, or a bad analogy, but the very worst analogy that could be imagined?

Sounds legit. I mean you made such a stellar argument for that conclusion. ;)

In fact I can't think of any kind of map that isn't based on selecting certain accidental states of affairs to mark and the rest to ignore. There's never any essential/accidental distinguishing such as you describe. — Srap Tasmaner

So I said maps would boil down to a picture of the essential constraints and their resulting degrees of freedom. Obstacles and paths.

Can you present a map which doesnt simplify in just that fashion?

Indeed, if the paths are a mechanical level constraint, like a motorway network or an underground line, you don’t even need to show the hills they skirt, the suburbs they must connect.

And what exactly is accidental about a road or rail line? It is essential that you use them if you are using a car or carriage. The only accidents now are you making wrong turns or getting on the tube heading the wrong way.

A bit fractal'ish I suppose, infinite in depth where the map maps itself. — jorndoe

When you say fractal, you could mean holographic or scalefree. So like a hologram, every bit of the reality provides a map of its whole.

And this would be the way I see it. It is what the cosmological principle of fundamental physics presumes. The Universe is homogenous and isotopic. It should look essentially the same, in terms of its basic structuring laws, over all observable scales.

And that would be like a 4D fractal. Zoom in or zoom out and the view remains the same.

So that is what I am describing. It is why from the inside, the complementary limits of the structure and the chance are flattened so that they appear to be at the beginning and end.

Like being inside a fractal, a perfect hierarchy of scales, look down towards the smallest grain and it becomes eventual a continuous blur. Look up towards the largest fractals and eventually they becomes so large that one eventually fills your whole view. The entire world is now inside a single instant of the complete design.

So the larger story is indeed fractal. And our best cosmological theories, or maps, of reality do elevate that fact to the status of a meta-principle. Homogeneity and isotropy are presumed. The laws of physics have to look the same from any possible physical point of view. That’s how the really key maps, like relativity, were derived.

I don’t follow.

Who is arguing that we shouldn’t make rational choices about having kids. Their welfare ought to be our primary moral concern. We might decide the world is not going to be a good place for them as a result.

But that is quite different from a general claim that life on the whole is structurally intolerable.