But I have always claimed though, that our three main goals are survival-related drives, maintenance/comfort-seeking goals (clean the room, put oil in the car, take a shower, etc.), and entertainment-related drives (what to do with sense of boredom and emptiness). — schopenhauer1

Yep. Instead of talking about life having the purpose of flourishing, you need it to be all about blind and pointless survival. You need it to be the case that once the basics of "existence maintenance" are achieved, everything else can be viewed as a meaningless filling in of the time.

So you wire in your conclusions from the start.

The alternative picture is that humans - once they have sorted the more basic needs outlined by Maslow's hierarchy - then will continue on to self-actualise. That is, they will reflect the natural logic of their evolved situation and seek to flourish even further by being personally creative in some socially valued fashion.

Turning to "entertainment" to fill a psychic void is obviously the wrong thing to do - the unnatural thing.

Yes, we do have the problem that the modern consumer society has encouraged that kind of "fulfilment". But then we can't critique modern society if we simply believe it is essentially right about the human condition.

There is no potential to live up to. It is just repetitious survival and finding hope in entertainments of sorts. — schopenhauer1

You still have the problem that you are employing a value-laden argument to argue against value laden arguments.

If I am saying life has the point of living up to your potential - because that feels fulfilling and worthwhile - then you are saying no, that's some kind of delusion. It is just forced and repetitious survival, a vain invention of a reason to hope. So you are arguing against a positive assessment with a negative assessment.

If you were truly arguing for an essential meaninglessness to life and however we might choose to live it, then you ought to be simply neutral. However I viewed life - optimist or pessimist - shouldn't make a difference. Nature would be as indifferent to the anti-natalist as it is to everything else (in your view).

I mean aren't you striving your utmost in a repetitious and time-filling fashion to fulfil your potential as a Pessimist here? Isn't that the purpose giving meaning and direction to your life?

You kill your own argument by showing how much you care about it. It matters that you are right. If you convince others, you will have achieved something useful with your efforts. You will have proved yourself the best Pessimist you could have been.

A true Nihilist wouldn't even bother to post. :)

Stepping back to consider the actual existential situation we find ourselves in, the answer from positive psychology would be that we are indeed alienated by the "scientific" realisation that we are "cosmically insignificant". And this goes along with its polar opposite "realisation" - that in the end, only "we" can count.

What our modern expanded philosophical view of ourselves does is force us to a strongly dichotomous metaphysics where reality becomes something essenatially empty, pointless and meaningless, which then throws all the responsibility for being fulfilled and meaningful back on this "us" - this Romantic notion of the human self as a witnessing soul that stands dualistically separated from the actual world it is forced to inhabit.

But this is a faulty metaphysics. Actual science tells us that we are the products of biological and social complexity. We are parts of a whole. We are individuated selves - but individuated due to a larger evolving context. And that is an intrinsic source of any felt meaningfulness, any assessment either positive or negative.

So if we are parts of a whole - naturally embodied in a lived human context - then that is what we rationally ought to focus on if we want a co-ordinate frame with which to plot our own individual path in life.

It is crazy, irrational, to act like a dualist and try to make sense of our existence as if we are some brief guttering flame of consciousness that is illuminating a cosmically vast and empty void. That is a metaphysical framing that seems scientifically justified - given astronomy and Newton - and yet is also a huge exaggeration of our actual position.

Our actual position is better understood from natural philosophy/systems science which focuses on the way everything is an embodied part of a "living" whole. This would then say we are each a product of our biology and culture. We are not solitary sparks as dualism would have it. Therefore we should expect to find our life purpose in that actual evolutionary history, in all its fantastic complexity and essential openness.

We just aren't designed to feel personally connected to the Cosmos. Even religion - in offering an image of a connection to a larger whole - generally paints a picture of that in social terms. Everyone gathered together in a state of love in the garden of the Big Daddy in the Sky.

So an honest metaphysics would be honest to the right scientific picture of existence. And that is what positive psychology in particular would attempt. We are born to find meaning in our biological and social context. And while that is a fairly specific kind of constraint, it is also not a closed and deterministic one. Part of the realism is that the finding of meaning is an open and creative exercise - a continuing journey of adaptation.

What I am arguing is that you reject the actual complexity and naturalism of life because you accept this simplistic metaphysics of a lonely soul in an empty void. That was the shocking existential picture that Enlightenment science appeared to reveal, so setting off the opposite reaction of a Romanticist revulsion.

But that scientific reductionism and romantic existentialism are only two sides of the same coin - the two views of the one faulty metaphysics.

We know enough now about actual complexity, actual systems metaphysics, to see this framing of the situation as very flawed. And thus any philosophy that tries to found itself on it will be too.

But I never claimed this was an ideal state either (that of knowing that it's not a metaphysical fact that we have to live up to some ideal state). — schopenhauer1

It has to be one or the other.

Either you are saying something righter than us, therefore we all need to take notice of you. Or you are saying you are just another dude making a random noise and so we don't need to take any notice.

Your anti-natalist lament has this self under-mining logic. It's been pointed out before.

If we all speak different languages, then that logically implies that there is a global language that comes before words, ie: we don't think in words.

Mr Chomsky's answer was "Introspection reveals to me that i think in words."

Babies obviously have thoughts, not in any language until they are trained. — Gary McKinnon

I would reply the big mistake is asking what we think in. The real issue is what constrains our thoughts to be about some thing in some particular way. And words, with their grammatical structure, are an immensely powerful means of constraining thoughts in a particular fashion.

So animals and babies "have thoughts". The brain itself is set up to work in anticipatory fashion. It must have some kind of image of what is just about to happen next in the world - what it would want to happen even - so as then to make sense of what does actually happen that is a surprise, or fail to meet some intention we had.

The mind is thus generally constrained by its long-term experience of the world and its short-term expectations concerning the world. Those focus its thoughts to be about certain things in terms of anticipations and plans.

Words - and the structure of ideas they encode - then add to what is already going on at that biological level. We don't think in words. But we certainly talk to ourselves to constrain our own expectations and behaviour just as we talk to others to do the same to them and their states of mind.

So language gives humans a unique ability to self-constrain their states of mind. Words limit our thought in a very particular and socially constructed fashion. They shouldn't be understood merely as symbol strings carrying some already present cargo of meaning.

You don't need an already present mentalese which forms the thought and then gets translated into overt speech. Instead, speaking is the skilled action of forming up a thought with grammatical clarity by applying a structure of limits on all the things that could possibly be going on in another mind ... or our own.

If I say "cat", you should not be thinking of horses, cake, Russia or a Sherman tank. You should be now limited in your conceptions to cat-like experiences and expectations. If I say "that black cat that's always crapping in your vegetable patch", then your state of mind should be that much more constrained in what it is thinking.

All that "thought" was always there in your head - potentially. But words and sentences build little fences that enclose states of active interpretation. It narrows what you are likely to be actually thinking to the point that it becomes highly predictable to me. We can be of like mind and communicate.

So yeah. Words don't carry the actual meanings themselves. They are a tool to regulate meanings - a way to restrict the natural roaming freedom of another's wandering mind. And once humans started regulating each others thoughts through language, it was a short step to turning the trick on themselves and regulating their own thinking in just as strict a fashion.

The PL is Electro-Magnetic Energy, the NL is Neural Activity in the Visual areas, and the CL is the thing that we actually perceive. — SteveKlinko

This sums up a representational position on consciousness. There is a world, there is the data processing, and then third, mysteriously, there is a self that witnesses the resulting neural output.

So it is setting the problem up as an issue of translation - a transformation of inputs into outputs. First there is the physical output, then the neural output and then the conscious output ... which is somehow an experiential output. It has this new and substantial property of "being aware".

Nothing is being explained by this line of thought. We know that neural processing must have something critical to do with qualitative experience. But we don't answer any important question by positing it as an "inter" stage as that just shovels the essential mystery down the line to a new blackbox that somehow contains a self that does the witnessing of the neural output.

The better approach is to understand the neural processing in terms of a model of reality - a model of reality that dynamically incorporates a "selfish" point of view of the world.

So it is no surprise that a model of reality - one that is starting from a "selfish" point of view - should feel like something. If there is all this information being constructed into a living relation between a "self" and a "world", then why wouldn't it feel like something?

I would stick to understanding how brains model their worlds. And then turning the table on Hard Problem questions by asking is it really conceivable that a model with its own personalised point of view wouldn't feel like it was just such a personalised view?

If the neuroscience is viewed in the right light - as embodied reality modelling, with a "self" as an essential part of that construction of a reality - then the zombie argument loses its metaphysical force.

We can see why any amount of "information processing" wouldn't "light up" with the further substantial property of "consciousness". If the problem is framed as one based on representationalism, then the witnesser of the representation is forever left out of the conversation and zombies are made conceivable.

But if we understand how the brain is representing the observer as much as the observables, then the question becomes how could a sense of being conscious get left out of such a dynamic and highly personalised process of reality modelling? How could it be lacking when it would be the starting point of the "representing"?

‘Dimension’ in the sense of ‘an aspect or mode of existence or lived reality’. — Wayfarer

It literally means to measure. So I am pointing out the irony of you using such a scientistic term to lend prestige to your argument against Scientism.

It sounds precise, doesn’t it. So I’m asking, what is precise about your use of it?

I'm simply agreeing with Janus - that art has more than simply or only a social dimension, even though it does have a social dimension. — Wayfarer

Dimensions are things that imply measurements. Do you mean to make that kind of scientistic claim here?

Great if you do, but you then need to spell out the kind of measurements we could make to cash out whatever conception the dimension entails.

So what is the nature of this further dimension such that we can quantify it in the name of philosophic intelligibility?

So within that ‘enchanted garden’, art evokes the archetypes and mythological re-enactments of the great themes and tragedies of culture. — Wayfarer

So was the pre-modern mind actually an enchanted garden or is that the Rousseauian myth of the noble savage?

Do these archetypes actually reside in the collective Jungian unconscious or does structuralist anthropology explain why certain themes repeat as the rational expression of being social creatures creating social organisation?

In a nutshell, is the foundation of our philosophising the coherence of the Enlightenment or the incoherence of Romanticism?

As for the notion of ‘collective construction’ - it’s certainly true that most of us inhabit a kind of ‘consensus realiity’ which is precisely that. But what that doesn’t accomodate is ‘the boundless’ - the unconditioned, the immeasurable. That is outside of the ‘constructed’ worldview (symbolised in Oriental culture as renunciation, ‘the forest’.) Probably rather too ‘religious’ for your liking but ought to be said, nonetheless. — Wayfarer

OK. But then I approach the "other" of the boundless from a rationalist's point of view. As a systems scientist and natural philosopher, I would talk about it as the Apeiron of Anaximander, the Firstness of Peirce.

Maths and science would be the suitable path, not art or mediation.

Maybe speech acts come in different varieties. Some necessarily volitional and some not. — frank

We can start by replacing the dualist conscious~unconscious distinction with the neurobiological distinction of attention~habit. Volition then speaks to attentional processing, where the prefrontal in particular is engaged in a half second’s worth of evolving a state. This is then opposed to the automatic which is the emitting of a habitual response via the mid-brain basal ganglia in about a fifth of a second.

In other words, there is a clear and well mapped pair of brain paths - one that is volitional in having the time and plasticity to form a novel response, the other that is automatic in being the fast and unthinking release of actions we are already prepared to perform with practised skill.

That is the general neurobiological model - one in which epiphenomenalism can’t even be a thing.

And then speech acts are just acts like any other. They are a blend of the attentional and the habitual.

For the sake of efficiency, we will want to act as much as possible out of skilled habit. But volition is always there as whatever level of attention we must still devote to connecting some specific speech act to its more general communicative intent.

So yes, epiphenomenalism is self-contradictory if you hold it as true that it feels like we are in some kind of control of our ability to assert meanings.

But bring in the neurobiology and what is revealed is our faulty notion of this homuncular “we” that is suppose to author (or not) every individual speech act. That is a false binary. The truth is that “we” are both our in the moment conceptions and our generic bedrock of well learnt habits.

You could say we are both our conscious and unconscious selves, but working in functional unison and not at dysfunctional odds - which is the Freudian romantic version of the neurobiological story.

I was pointing out the differences between the arts and the sciences in terms of the ability to achieve, or at least approach, universal consensus. Nothing you have said touches on that point in any way signifiant enough to refute it, as far as I can tell. — Janus

I’m surprised that you would even target universal consensus so strongly here. In another era, there might simply be a notion of good taste or artistic perfection towards which all creative endeavour would want to aim. This led to the familiar art teachings about proportion and symmetry, the Greek ideal of beauty, etc.

But today - art still being the social technology for inventing the self - the whole point that art would want to teach is the modern cultural ideal. Which is that we are all actually individual and so will show that in our aesthetic responses. The new ideal is the destruction of the old, rather Platonic, notion of a universal consensus. Art has to be challenging, weird, transgressive.

So Romanticism treats selfhood as an inward act of discovery. Artistic practice has evolved as an expression of that metaphysics.

Speaking for the scientistic Enlightenment, I would point out the psychological facts. This self of which Romanticism speaks is a social construction, a linguistic structure. It is not some foundational essence - a soul or spirit - but the very thing that the cultural activity of art is there to manufacture.

So science here explains art in terms of the facts of the world. It provides the larger view of what is really going on.

Alternatively, if there were a soul for creative training to discover, then science would give the evidence for that theory of the wider reality. Science wouldn’t rule the possibility out. But it would be - philosophically - the way we would decide the question as best we can.

Art consists in saying something in a suggestive or evocative way, or in a metaphorical or allegorical way, rather than in a logically rigorous way, about the human situation, about the aspects of being that we care about. — Janus

Yes. So there is here the possibility of another way of doing philosophy - one that claims an evidential basis in the subjective, as opposed to the objective.

It is a familiar argument. Perhaps it is right that there are truths that are best accessed by evocative language rather that direct language. Perhaps there are things we think and feel that are so vague or ephemeral that they break apart if we try to grasp them in a firm and frontal assault.

Yet still, what works will reveal itself to us. We can allow this as an alternative, or even complementary, approach to philosophy, and then judge the results. Science - as epistemic method - doesn’t rule this out. Science here only represents the pragmatic maxim that the approach have some generally agreed social utility as the evidence it is a worthwhile thing to believe.

But if you accept that essentially scientistic view - that a general consensus on pragmatic utility is the epistemic foundation - then that would seem to be at odds with your other desire to treat the subjective as spiritually real rather than collectively constructed.

Again, in appealing to any notion of a universal consensus, you are setting your own argument against itself in contradicting fashion. Evidence that is private is evidence that is not corrobable. And so in that direction you can only wind up with a philosophical method that is solipsistic and completely personal. It’s evidential basis is simply revelation backed by faith.

So yes, philosophy could well entertain two complementary approaches to truth - the objective and the subjective, the real and the ideal, the factual and the poetic. It is a simple fact of metaphysical logic itself that two paths must exist for there to be any path at all. So the fact that philosophy is home to its own counter-impulses is not a surprise but a necessity.

And we can even say both flourish in their different spheres. Science is the branch of philosophy that went off and perfected a method of inquiry into the metaphysically foundational. Art is the branch of philosophy that went off and perfected its own inquiry into the subjective and aesthetic.

Yet science is then the larger exercise - if we agree that it has dispelled a theistic worldview and replaced that with a naturalistic one.

I can see that is still a big “if” for some. But that is what all this comes down to.

And I would note that a defence of an evocative and poetic approach to evidence gathering and consensus corroboration building looks quite carefully a socially constructed position.

In the good old days, God and his supernatural world, just simply existed in a direct graspable way for folk. You could paint God’s picture on a church ceiling. And now to argue we must use the most evanenscent and allusive methods to grasp that same truth seems pretty telling.

The evidence has evaporated before our eyes - our scientistic eyes. At some point you really need to consider the alternative that when it comes to a subjective essence, there was never anything really there beyond a utilitarian social construction.

Like any diverse activity, as Wittgenstein pointed out, it cannot be precisely defined in some essentialist manner. — Janus

Yes, it all comes back to constraints-based thinking. ;)

No inter-subjective corroboration, as opposed to mere agreement, is possible here just as it is not possible with religious and mystical experience, and, really, even philosophy. Corroboration would consist in universal agreement; the inability of any suitably good-willed and unbiased observer to disagree once they have been presented with, and understood, the evidence. This exists, if it exist anywhere in the the human enquiry, only in science, and more so in some categories of science than in others, it seems. — Janus

Again, pragmatism already says this.

So the only place where we can differ is that you want to treat the private ineffable experience of the individual as some kind of reliable interior evidence - for a communally-defined externalist methodology.

Which would be Romanticism in a nutshell. It's art if I think it is art ... even if the whole notion of "art" is a form of life, a language game.

No. Communities seek to impose increasingly restrictive standards to socially-construct a hierarchy of "artistic impulse". You know you have really made it when they hang it on a gallery wall as if it were a sacred cultural relic. So some committee of the great and the good gets to choose whose vision is communally celebrated.

It's just like science in other words. Though science pretends to be much more democratic in its admission criteria - and indeed, it often is.

You say - "Corroboration would consist in universal agreement; the inability of any suitably good-willed and unbiased observer to disagree once they have been presented with, and understood, the evidence."

You must know that the art world doesn't operate with this kind of open-minded good will and lack of bias. And the art world justifies that by saying it is all subjective in the end anyway.

It is only science which openly sets this kind of standard of public acceptability. Well, and courts of law and other rational institutions that expect the evidence to tell its own story.

And as I say, in practice, the first thing fine art faculties want to teach its young and impressionable students is that it is social game. You need to network to get ahead. You need to focus on what's the new innovation and then market the hell out of yourself if you hope to earn a living out of it.

So the human artistic impulse is a bad example for your case.

I agree we certainly do feel something when we approach a great work of art with a correctly cultivated mindset. It is not as if we can get eliminativist about that aesthetic response.

But feeling an aesthetic delight at clever solutions to difficult problems is something all our creative endeavours share in common. It is as true of science and maths. And neurobiologically, it makes evolutionary sense that we are atuned to recognising ideas that strike upon the optimal path - the solutions that reduce the most information in accordance to that dearest principle of science, the least action principle.

It is only the target of the art that has changed. The "problem to be solved with optimal efficiency" used to be the manufacture of religious awe and the communication of moral precepts on behalf of the institutional church. Then it became kings, queens and the power hierarchy that needed to be communicated the same way. Then the right national "form of life" - the quintessential Englishman, or whatever.

Eventually it has become the manufacture of social disorientation and dissent. We have reasons collectively to want to shake things up.

The game goes on in the same way, even as its targets change to best suit the problems of the times.

The Romantic view of course is that art is instead an excavation of what is deepest and most precious in the individual human soul. But regard that as just a self-serving cover story of the modern institutional elite, the guard-dogs of the galleries and salons.

So in addition to being vacuous, closed-minded, toxic, cancerous, disingenuous, infantile, barren, and ignorant, and I'm now also a troll? — Pseudonym

You missed out callous and brazen. Those especially amused me. I could only read that bit in the tone of a communist Chinese denunciation of the Western bourgeoisie. The hyperbole dial cranked up to 11. :)

This is where we disagree; I think philosophy is as much an art as it is a science. — Janus

Define art.

There is a reason why modern fine art departments sell their courses as applied critical thinking these days. Just like philosophy departments. Indeed the humanities sell themselves as crucial to the modern economy - another STEM subject in effect as tech goes social.

I think you are trying to preserve some fusty Oxbridge culture wars distinctions here.

Art is a social technology. It always has been since the first beads and cave paintings.

By not declaring every problem amenable to a scientific solution; by recognising what is and isn't a scientific problem. — Wayfarer

That is a fair point. But it is a general one. Religions might treat prayer or mediation as the universal solvent of problems as well.

Maybe some things, even many things, are merely accidents with no especial causal mechanism.

But then isn’t that what the scientific method already presumes? The null hypothesis is what is provisionally held. It is up to the weight of the evidence to falsify it.

So by training, scientists ought to limit the scope of what demands explaining. They can shrug their shoulders at even quite “miraculous” coincidences.

And as always in the modern view, Darwin trumps Plato, right? So ultimately it comes down to what survives, or what propagates; that's the only kind of 'meaning' that has currency in today's world. — Wayfarer

You are the one who needs Scientism to justify your anti-Scientism.

My position is different. Holism doesn’t have to reject reductionism. It just has to show how material and effective cause are a small part of the bigger causal picture.

Science relies on there being an 'epistemic gap' between knower and known. And ultimately we're not apart from reality. So all knowledge is forever conditional, it can't be any other way. So 'cracking holism' requires breaking out of the dualistic mindset that underlies science. — Wayfarer

Hence semiosis - as a science. Hence dualism giving away to the trichotomy of the generalised modelling relation.

So yes, cracking holism is all about getting past dualism.

Which is of course true in the context of science; but more or less irrelevant when it comes to philosophy, except in those restricted areas where there are problems caused by philosophers hanging on to the Newtonian worldview, or other reductionist paradigms. — Janus

So how are you defining philosophy here?

To me, the disicipline of philosophy exists to teach a particular method of critical thought. It is about the habits of clear reasoning which lead to positions definite enough to be believed or doubted on the basis of some suitable form of evidence.

What you are talking about are then particular philosophies, Within that umbrella definition of critical thought, all manner of theories, and all manner of evidence, might be advanced.

Essentially philosophy is scientific. As a discipline, it simply allows a far wider range of paradigms in terms of their ontic commitments and hence what could,work as suitable evidence.

Theism is acceptable, phenomenology is acceptable, PoMo is acceptable. They each have their own way of arguing and their own matching notions of evidence. To be part of the stable of philosophies, they only have to pass some minimal critical thinking standards.

Science is then that part of philosophy which has become dominant as its particular kind of rigour has proven its value socially. And I agree that also - as reductionism - has often proven itself anti-social.

The question then is what follows? How do we fix science as a discipline so it is more completely pro-social?

But it is silly to say that even reductionist science is a restricted part of philosophy. It clearly dominates in terms of results to the extent it is its own thing these days. It is no longer merely one of the many philosophies residing within the philosophy department.

Presuming it means something like the excessive use of science, how are we determining excessive? How does Scientism differ from either Physicalism or Positivism such that it deserves it's own name? — Pseudonym

My own definition of what characterises Scientism is that it is a dependence on Newtonian metaphysics. We can recognise it as that metaphysical package that revolves around the notions of reductionism, atomism, materialism, mechanicalism, computationalism, localism, nominalism, monadism and determinism.

So it is not the "scientific method" which is being excessively applied. There are good epistemic reasons to think that rational inquiry - that combination of theory and measurement - is the only proper way to arrive at a more objective view. And that objectivity has been the whole point of philosophy in the modern western tradition.

It is instead a particular brand of metaphysics which is being excessively (or not) being applied.

The Newtonian paradigm justified - at the level of universal observation and mathematical-strength theory - a particular view of Nature. Extrapolated, it says that all there is are atoms blindly following deterministic paths that make all higher organisation or complexity essentially meaningless and epiphenomenal. This is what people object to. The ruling out of everything potentially more interesting than a web of impressed forces acting on dumb masses.

In Aristotelian terms, the Newtonian paradigm allows you to treat Nature as purely the sum of its material and efficient causes. Its formal and final causes just don't have any real ontological standing. Purpose and meaning become a grand illusion of some kind or other. They are now merely subjective.

And that paradigm of Nature obviously has a whole lot of direct philosophical consequences. It says something basic about politics, ethics and aesthetics. It decides what counts as a legitimate question in these areas.

So the modal scope of this reductionist view is completely sweeping. Which is what gets folk squealing.

Obviously I view Newtonian reductionism to be a useful (indeed, super-useful) way of thinking, but also - metaphysically - incomplete. A holistic or systems view of Nature takes the expanded view that brings top-down formal and final cause back into the picture as also elements of scientific inquiry. And of course, science itself is increasingly understanding Nature in this fashion.

So once science cracks holism, then it is game over. :)

Of course, philosophy being a social activity, people can define it as they like. They can talk about other ways of "knowing" - like feeling, or poetry, or revelation.

And that is fine. In an open competition of ideas, all the different ways of thought will play themselves out in good old evolutionary fashion.

My only personal concern is that Newtonian reductionism can be quite a damaging paradigm in long-run social terms. And to counter-act that, it needs a strong and well-grounded response - the kind of response that only a scientific holism could deliver.

Waffling on about feelings, poetry and revealed truth - the ongoing Romantic response to the Enlightenment - ain't going to cut it. The only answer to half-done science is to come back and finish the job.

Poor SX. Always peevish to discover he has been re-inventing the wheel.

I don't see a whole lot of conflict between your (1) and (3) (leaving God out of the picture.) — Wayfarer

Funny. I see them as diametrically opposite. One is about immanence and causal emergence, the other is about transcendence and causal mystery.

Global regularities that 'emerge' could easily be simply another way of saying 'laws of nature'. — Wayfarer

Well they are opposing metaphysics that target the same observables. They are related in that each has to explain the same recalcitrant realities. And perhaps both also share the anti-nominalistic view about the "hard reality" of these causal entities.

The jargon used ought to reflect these distinctions in my view. But in a general way, we are all talking about what folk mean by the Cosmos appearing to have mathematical-strength regularities.

I mean even "emergence" means very different things to the reductionist/nominalist and the holist/realist here. There is a bit of a verbal minefield to pick through. So I'm not wanting to get too hung up calling laws "laws". That's only the start of the disagreements. :)

And my view is that whilst the laws or principles of nature that science discovers provide explanations across whole swathes of the phenomenal domain, science doesn't necessarily explain those principles. I suppose I have an instrumentalist or pragmatic view - that science is useful and powerful, but it's not inherently meaningful in an existential sense. — Wayfarer

But that is just you expressing your political agenda here.

I'm not say that I don't have an agenda. I speak for natural philosophy. However I think I can point to the way science has actually unfolded as the best support for my metaphysics. A process or systems view has worked.

And my emergent constraints approach has the advantage that there is no causal mystery. It appeals to collective or statistical behaviour. And our mathematical models of those explain why the patterns have no choice but to arise.

For interest....

Today, we use the Lagrangian method to describe all of physics, not just mechanics. All fundamental laws of physics can be expressed in terms of a least action principle. This is true for electromagnetism, special and general relativity, particle physics, and even more speculative pursuits that go beyond known laws of physics such as string theory.

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/db275/concepts/LeastAction.pdf

Sorry, there is a misunderstanding here. I agree that "law" is a rather odd term to use. It does have misleading connotations. The reason that nature is "law-abiding" is because it is physically constrained by its own developmental history. So it is "constitutional" in that structural sense.

The ontological issue I am then highlighting is that our efforts to define the laws/principles of nature are targeting something real, even if that reality is emergent. There are forms of organisation that are mathematically inevitable - even from locally random action - and so the Laws of Nature can't be treated as some kind of socially constructed bricolage.

(And the same argument could apply to actual human constitutional laws - are they just a bunch of arbitrary social conventions or do they ultimately target something that is fundamental by way of "natural justice" and "human rights"?)

Anyway, that leaves three views in play concerning the Laws of Nature.

1) The laws are some kind of mysterious thing - the handiwork of God perhaps - that were written into the Creation of the Universe and determine the course of all physical action in some transcendent fashion.

2) The laws are descriptions we freely invent that somehow both account for events in ways that are remarkably effective and yet also somehow have no particular claim to being "the truth" of reality. They never become more than social constructions.

3) The laws are historically emerging constraints on free action in the Cosmos. They are the global regularities that emerge to regulate the dynamics of events. Information accumulates to create general contexts that give every action a common direction. And while the development of these regularities might be "random" on the individual scale, statistically they must evolve towards equilibrium balances. So "laws" - expressing the symmetries broken, and the symmetries arrived at - exist as mathematical-strength inevitabilities of that very process of evolving. There is nothing contingent about the ultimate outcomes of collective random action. Everything gets channelled into the common probabilistic "flow" which we describe as "lawful".

I should be addressing these points to the OP of course. So SX correctly quoted this...

In practice engineers handle irreversible processes with old fashioned phenomenological laws describing the flow (or flux) of the quantity under study. Most of these laws have been known for quite a long time. For example there is Fick's law... Equally simple laws describe other processes: Fourier's law for heat flow, Newton's law for sheering force (momentum flux) and Ohm's law for electric current....

The trouble is that each equation is a ceteris paribus law. It describes the flux only so long as just one kind of cause is operating. [Vector addition] if it works, buys facticity, but it is of little benefit to (law) realists who believe that the phenomena of nature flow from a small number of abstract, fundamental laws. — StreetlightX

But then science moved on to think in terms of more global symmetry principles. Instead of leaving things where they might well seem some bricolage of local heuristics speaking to no universal hand, science rewrote Newtonian mechanics in terms of Lagrangians and Hamiltonians. Symmetry, and symmetry-breaking, became the general story holding all "laws" together in a constitutional framework.

The terminology did switch from laws to principles - in particular, when it comes to dynamics, the principle of least action. An evolutionary ontology became wired in because the most general constraint is that everything should happen by using the shortest path available. Essentially nature is free to take any path to an outcome. And then, because all those paths are in competition, the optimum path is the one that - on the probabilistic whole - is going to be the one that emerges from the fray.

So while to all outward appearances, science seemed to talk of externally-imposed and hence mysteriously transcendent laws, all the actual practice of formulating laws had switched to one based on notions of emergent, historically-conditioned, constraints.

Hence my complaint about the political tenor of the OP. It is easy to attack "the laws of nature" when they are presented in a strawman fashion. The "Newtonian" idea of "laws" falls apart fast under any examination. But that doesn't then make this social constructionist/bricolage rhetoric of Cartwright - or those employing her here - any more correct.

The truth of things is more interesting. Global regularities are emergent, but mathematically-inevitable, constraints on action. The Universe has a complex constitution due to a series of symmetry-breakings that have left it increasingly more organised in a hierarchical fashion. And this is a structure of "law" that science can target in legitimate fashion. In the end, there could be only the one answer in terms of "what exists".

And for philosophy generally, this is important. As said, it ought to impact on even our human debates about politics and morality. For instance, the arguments of evolutionary psychology couldn't simply be dismissed out of hand.

If you don't want to mention the word "law" for some reason - and remember it's not me that defends the term - then what exactly would you like to call this kind of universal if-then statement?

Scientists would elevate it to a principle of nature rather than merely a law of nature I guess. :razz:

There are no special constitutional Laws of Nature, or perhaps, the things we call Laws of Nature can only be so by analogy to constitutional law. — Akanthinos

The deepest physical laws look to capture mathematical symmetries. This is in fact a theorem - Noether's theorem.

All the conservation laws that have allowed us to describe the Cosmos as a closed and coherent system - a Universe - derive directly from symmetry principles. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy. Space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum. Rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum.

So this puts paid to the social constructionist angle that our laws of nature are some kind of pluralist bricolage.

In the end, Nature seems to have had no choice about the fact that - if it is to exist - it must be shaped by these mathematical-strength "laws".

Of course, the interesting thing is that the closure that is necessary for there to be a generalised state of Being is now likely to be emergent rather than fundamental. On the microscale, quantum mechanics shows that things aren't exactly closed and conserved – at least not in unambiguous fashion.

So yeah, symmetry is the ideal limit state description. A story of effective laws. Yet still, as a finality, those symmetries are the inescapable destination of any evolution of a state of Being.

The idea that the laws of nature are some kind of psychological convenience has to deal with the hard facts here.

I was thinking about this too, and especially the curious idea - let me know if you agree - that even positive injunctions in the law are, in a way, simply double negatives. — StreetlightX

Constraints are apophatic in this fashion. Only that which could be predicted can also be forbidden. So possibilities could be ruled out as picked-out individual cases, yet nature can continue to be fundamentally surprising or probabilistic.

I'm tempted to try to start a reading group for this paper discussing Rosen: — fdrake

Howard Pattee did this nice critique of how Rosen turned overly Platonic and mathematical in his last work...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5891221_Laws_Constraints_and_the_Modeling_Relation_-_History_and_Interpretations

Due to the fact that modelling relations are bidirectional by construction, they admit a precise categorical formulation in terms of the category-theoretic syntactic language of adjoint functors, representing the inverse processes of information encoding/decoding via adjunctions.

The interesting question here might be whether it matters that the measurement process is itself informal - something quite apart from the formal model of causal entailment that is the law-expressing theory.

So as a necessity of the modelling relation, the act of measurement (the encoding/decoding) is some kind of purpose-laden and pragmatic exercise in constraining the physics of the system in question so that it yields some number or value or sign. It is a fundamentally free action - a choice the modeller can make - in contrast to the modeller's representation of the world with a theory that is then utterly constrained, lawful, algorithmic and deterministic.

So on the one hand, category theory might allow a representation of this relation - the way the modeller does pragmatically map algorithmic descriptions to a non-algorithmic reality. But then the connection between the map and the territory depends on this fundamentally informal and unconstrained business of measurement.

In practice, habits of measurement are in fact constrained by the fact that they must work to achieve some goal or finality that the modelling relation represents. Measurement may have complete freedom, in contrast to the model's complete formality, yet the further thing of a purpose is used to prune the excessive degrees of freedom.

However that is then an unmodelled real-world physical issue that an overly mathematical or formal approach to the story fundamentally fails to pick up. Any use of category theory couldn't actually deliver the kind of purely mathematical relational biology that was Rosen's ultimate goal.

Again it is the usual central issue of ontology. We struggle to find a story that deals with the observers along with the observables.

But as Pattee outlines, the modelling relation itself is very good for making it clear just where "laws" fit into things. They are the way we can see nature as if it were a mechanical reality implementing a formal system of causal entailment. And then the informal measurement side of the business - the encoding/decoding - is where the issue of the observer with a purpose can get buried safely as everything that really needs to be said about a pragmatic semiotic habit.

The laws themselves are absolved of carrying the burden of telling the ontological truth. They become mere algorithms. The non-formalised part of the business is then our capacity not to feed garbage input into them, and also to recognise when the output might be obvious garbage.

This is an interesting insight into a Chinese approach to good citizenship...source: New Zealand Institute.

China is piloting a social credit system ... It is very simple. Everyone gets a social credit score. If you do good things, pro-social things – things that reinforce trust in President Xi’s institutions and encourage a sense of unity – your score goes up. Volunteering for a charity and separating your recycling can enhance your score. So can donating blood. These are all good things that must be rewarded.

If you instead decide to exhibit bad behaviours, your score goes down. Your score can go down for social microaggressions. Things like not turning up to a dinner reservation or leaving false product reviews. Ubiquitous facial recognition camera systems can assign demerit points for jaywalking. Soon they will be able to also assign demerit points for doing unmutual things – things that reduce the sense of unity and trust in institutions – like engaging in civil protest.

The Chinese pilot scheme so far rewards high-scoring citizens with things like shorter wait times in hospital and punishes low-scores with reduced access to public services and travel restrictions.

"PC pluralism" has on it's side Existentialism and, and this may be a bit chauvin, the non-negligible advantage of being the only non-douchebag game in town, so to speak. — Akanthinos

Yeah. Anyone not standing alongside you is a douchebag. Skillfully argued.

The background to this thread was SX promising to show how the enemies of the left misuse the concepts of evolution to serve their political agendas.

Well great. It's very true. But now he is wheeling out Cartwright to give his own politicised reading of the metaphysics. I find that amusing.

What about the view from anywhere? Can't there be propositions that are true regardless of where you stand? — Banno

Should be simple enough to demonstrate. Just give us an example.

Nature is always being hi-jacked to serve the political agenda of folk.

In the good old days, morality was based on what God told you in chiselled stone tablets or magic books. These days, people find support for the fundamental rightness of their socio-political views in what science might tell us about nature.

The right are as bad as the left, as I say. And SX is very good at criticising the right wing agenda as it shows itself in the Darwinian justifications for capitalism and neo-liberalism, or the racism of facism. I'm just pointing out that PoMo has a long social history of batting for the other side.

If the "laws" of nature are merely a social construction, a convenient illusion we project on to a bricolage of individuated histories, then this would give a metaphysical-strength justification for a politics of PC pluralism.

If Nature itself is a loose and collegial network of différance - it rejects hierarchical organisation, power structures, homogeneity, causal determinism, at root - then who are we humans to think otherwise about what is right and proper when it comes to our political relations? Listen to Nature! She has already spoken.

What Smolin argues is that while some represent the laws of physics as "global", they really are not. — Metaphysician Undercover

To study a system we need to define what is contained and what is excluded from it. We treat the system as if it were isolated from the rest of the universe, and this isolation itself is a drastic approximation. We cannot remove a system from the universe, so in any experiment we can only decrease, but never eliminate, the outside influences on our system. — Smolin

So as I have argued, the emergent law approach taken by Peirce would see contextuality as irreducible. Thus it is certainly right to point this out about any claims which might portray micro-physical laws as themselves basic rather than emergent.

The usual view is that physics must find something definite, crisp, determinate, atomistic, once it drills down to the bedrock of existence. This is why the micro-physical laws are taken to describe something substantially real while the macro-physical laws - like the second law of thermodynamics in particular - are dismissed as merely emergent in the sense of being descriptive illusions. A way of summing over the fine detail as a convenience.

But the view Smolin is expressing - which Peirce made much more clearly a 100 years earlier - is that even the micro-physical would be emergent. The micro-physical realm gains its atomism, its definiteness, due to the downwardly-stabilising action of a weight of global constraints. The micro-physical is pure fluctuation, pure quantum possibility, shaped up into actual substantial events that can then go on to weave a classical world unfolding in a global dimension of time.

So yes. The way our fundamental micro-physical laws get formed just paints right over the fact that there has to be some story of development already. Smolin points that out. However that just says it is contextuality or constraints all the way down. Both the local and the global scales of the Cosmos are emergent. That is the whole point - how you can get something out of "nothing". The local and the global stand mutually or synergistically as each other's ground. Each is producing the other - the dialectical other that it itself needs to have there as the causal source of its own definite being.

This is why Peircean metaphysics is triadic. In the beginning is just Firstness or Vagueness. Then this potential splits - the symmetry breaks - in local~global fashion. You get the two varieties of causality emerging - bottom-up construction and top-down constraint. The outcome is a hierarchical situation - a fundamental asymmetry - that then goes to equilibrium over all its spatiotemporal scales of integration.

Check out this paper which looks at how Peirce relates to Smolin...

SPACE, TIME AND NATURAL LAW: A PEIRCEAN LOOK AT SMOLIN’S TEMPORAL NATURALISM
https://proyectoscio.ucv.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/A7-Waal.pdf

...there are no laws in the early universe. It is only in virtue of a high-level restriction of possibility that laws can emerge by enabling certain paths while precluding others. The laws of physics thus develop not unlike the manner in which a stream wears its own bed (CP 5.492);

... in both approaches, the emergence of regularity is associated with a loss of novelty, or spontaneity, in the system. To both this loss of novelty is not complete (there remains room for what Peirce called “absolute chance”),30 rather “at some stage [it] stops being sufficient to destabilize regularity” (Cortês & Smolin, 2015: 19).

... if there is truly nothing – meaning there are no constraints whatsoever – there is nothing to prevent anything from happening, so that eventually something will happen, which, as there are no constraints, will be a purely random event. In other words, all we are doing is to remove the restriction that came with the concept of nothing as it was conceptualized through the removal of everything, which is that it has to be purely passive –something like an inert, empty space at t0 – unable to generate anything.
Such active, or energetic, interpretation of nothing dovetails nicely with the remarks by Peirce that drew Smolin’s attention, namely that a purely random event is not the kind of thing that needs further explanation to justify belief in its possibility, as any explanation to that effect will give us a narrative
that de facto negates the event’s randomness. It also dovetails with the idea of Smolin and Cortês, discussed earlier, that the events CST speaks of are intrinsically endowed with energy and momentum.

As SX says, Pomo neo-Marxist socialist political correctness.

Both left and right like to make their own readings of naturalism. And nature itself gets obscured in the process.

The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid. — StreetlightX

Ah. It's all mere bricolage. The political agenda shows itself.

My assessment is that the little of apokrisis' posts that I read are on point. The issue is: what is the believer? — frank

You will find that Banno will never answer you on this. He is trying to arrive at naive realism via Witgensteinian quietism. So the pretence is that the question of who has the point of view is essentially idealistic and to be summarily dismissed.

If it is illegitimate to even mention the believer as the issue, then we can all get on talking with naive realism about all the incontrovertible truth we see just looking around with our open eyes in our everyday world.

You are dealing with high level sophistry here. It’s quite entertaining to watch. Just don’t expect a productive engagement.

I’m not sure how you are understanding Smolin. I agree with him about the reality of time. The fundamental laws as they are framed are purely bottom up and deterministic. So that makes our macroscopic reality a kind of epiphenomenal illusion if you simply take those fundamental laws as the complete story.

Whereas I am arguing that the laws represent global constraints. And that now includes the macroscopic correlations that emerge to suppress local degrees of freedom. This is true emergence - where there is also now top-down holism to shape the fine grain of things.

The current laws don’t directly encode that. But you do then have the separate kinds of laws - the various mechanics vs the various thermodynamics - that give you enough of both sides of the story.

So for example, quantum mechanics gets fixed by gluing it to statistical mechanics to give you decoherence theory. More generally, deterministic local physics gets fixed by global information holography. The goal is for a unified physics that puts both aspects of a systems approach together in the same theory - ie: quantum gravity.

So yes, an unconstrained set of micro variables will have nonlinearity. And a purely bottom up mechanics is going to suffer a lack of scaling because of that. We are very used to physicists complaining their theories produce infinities that somehow in reality must get cancelled away. Step back from the microscopic and things explode.

But already physics tames that in various ways by adding in the emergent correlations that would act to suppress the nonlinearIties. The problem is that these constraints are still mostly kluges handcrafted to deal with a particular situation.

On the other hand, we are happy to accept global optimality arguments in science. Biology is comfortable with natural selection as the global invisible hand suppressing nonlinear variety. And condensed matter physics is now mathematically pretty mature.

So I don’t think that my view is radically out of line with Smolin’s. I agree that the fundamental laws alone - the ones that describe the universal microscopic degrees of freedom - can only be half the story. You also need those universally emergent macroscopic constraints that then suppress and shape those freedoms wherever they might occur.

So this is the four causes Aristotelian story. And as has been a point of difference with you in the past, I am saying that finality has to emerge via development. Global constraints are what become fully realised at the end of time. At the beginning of time, they exist only in a potential or latent sense.

This makes belief an odd kind of post-hoc thematisation. — jamalrob

Or it simply lifts things into an importantly different register.

At the animal level, we are embedded and embodied in our habits of understanding. Language turns that into the someone who is believing some state of affairs. It translates the biological situation into one that is displaced from some actual place and time, some unalterable history, into one that now lacks those constraints and so gains new freedoms.

So it in about there being a troubling lack of secure foundations for theories of truth. The whole bleeding point of the language turn - in Homo sapiens history - is to create a foundation for rational thought.

And a big part of that is the social construction of the self as the believer, doubter, or whatever-er.

If we have to build this fiction too, this idealised observer and knower, then that is central to any epistemic discussion.

The sort of uncertainty that is confined to philosophers. — Banno

So when you go to watch the cricket, you complain that all the bloody chaps on the field are not playing rugby?

Really, could this thread have less point?

Doubt is so important to belief that we must manufacture it. :up:

Not quite the beginning, as I understand it - just a moment after. — Wayfarer

It depends what you want to believe about time before it got going. It sounds like you want to start the counting of the Planckian moments from zero rather than one. :)

And the fact that the Universe did then develop in such a way to give rise to stars>matter>life, is the subject of the well-known anthropic cosmological argument. The fact that some physicists promote the idea of a 'multiverse' to avoid that very implication speaks volumes in my opinion. — Wayfarer

You mean that if your metaphysics is of the unconstrained kind that will spawn cosmic infinities, then the anthropic principle is the only constraint you have got left to wield.

The multiverse is not used to evade anthropery. Anthropery is used to make the multiverse feel respectable.

'Completing the metaphysical project' assumes that a biological intelligence, which has evolved as a consequence of adaptive necessity, is able to arrive at some general conception of truth or reason, which may be entirely unconnected with it. I don't see any scientific reason for that assumption. — Wayfarer

Hmm. It's more a conclusion. On the face of it, the thought we can completely understand existence seems implausible. In practice - if you hang out with the science long enough - it instead becomes remarkable how much we can understand in a deep mathematically inevitable way.

That is why I have come to favour talking about animals in terms of expectation and frustration of expectation rather than belief and doubt. — Janus

That makes sense.

And this kind of thread only goes 1000 posts as it is designed not to accept that kind of sense. :)