How is that not a dualism? You cannot get out of it be referring back to the constituents and ignoring that its emerged ( — schopenhauer1

We could be here forever and you won't get the first bit of it. In my metaphysics, the constituents emerge too. The global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom.

This is holism here. There is no point you trying to understand that reductionistically.

The fact that there is a feels-like-something along with the modelling. — schopenhauer1

Have a go at supporting the counter-factual - that there is the kind of modelling relation the human brain has with its environment and that that feels like ... nothing?

When is that the case?

If you are dead or in a coma, for example, there is no modelling relation. But when you are in a lived and active engagement with the world, what supports your claimed counter-factual here?

Not seeing it. (Hey, another counter-factual!)

But that's the point! It exists qua its own phenomena. There is no counterfactual as there is just feeling-like-something, the territory that you keep missing for the map. — schopenhauer1

It's like you have zero comprehension skills. Don't just claim counterfactuals are irrelevant to facticity. Demonstrate how that is an epistemically credible stance to be taking.

You have a rather important dichotomy to existence: that of conflict v. harmony. Some of us emotive people can interpret the same as hate v. love. Some of other folks can interpret it as states of chaos v. states of order. It doesn’t much matter how the processes are interpreted here; nor at what levels of existence they're addressed; the two processes of becoming remain the same. — javra

Yep. Anaximander confused the heck out of folk as the only recorded scrap of his actual words talked about cosmic justice vs injustice. Heraclitus likewise talked about this unity of opposites - flux and logos.

So that is what I cash out when talking about constraints vs freedoms. A system is the necessity of both in balance.

When it comes to the science of social relations - sociology - we see the same story playing out at a higher level. What is fundamental to a natural notion of a social system is that it is the successful balancing of two necessary oppositions - co-operation and competition.

The main difference here then is you want to add some further twist - another metaphysical dimension to your analysis. And that is based on the opposition of good and bad, or some such deontic distinction.

So my position would be deontically neutral. Neither competition nor co-operation would be inherently either good or bad. It is their balancing act that counts. And even that resulting outcome is not inherently good or bad in a Platonic "the Good" way.

As a natural philosopher, nature just is what it is and doesn't have to answer to transcendent values. Existence has no further moral dimension (although culturally we are free to construct a morality that pragmatically works for us in terms of achieving an optimal balance of competition and co-operation).

But I get it that for you existence does probably just have this inherent value. It is fundamental and so top of your concerns in any discussion we might have.

So I can recognise the legitimacy of adding further dimensions to our metaphysics that go beyond the simple-minded reductionism we all complain about. I've just argued again for the vague~crisp distinction of anyone taking a developmental position on ontology. And so your choice to defend a deotological axis of description - if that is what you are doing - is both a valid epistemic move in my view, yet one that I of course contest vigorously on ontological grounds.

Harmony can occur in the absence of all conflict. This is not a “crispness” that requires both dyads to be. In the latter form, the given of harmony / love / order can exist just fine in the complete absence its opposite – to not even address any relation in -between. — javra

Ah. There you see where now I would disagree even epistemically. Nothing can be spoken of intelligibly except counterfactually. Harmony makes no sense as language, as proposition, unless not-harmony refers to something more solid than just "whatever not might mean".

That was the problem of the Platonic good - especially right through all Christian theology. Evil has to exist to make sense of goodness. And yet the existence of evil, or worse yet, its deliberate creation, does not compute. How could a God of perfect love and harmony allow the stain of Satan to come into being?

Theology tries to say the paradox of that formulation is somehow resolved in Hegelian fashion by making the re-establishment of perfection at the end of Earthly time somehow a fact that reinforces the concreteness of God's purity.

It doesn't fly logically. But that is what happens when theology becomes the sound of one hand clapping - the notion that only one half of a dichotomy is "true", the other necessarily "false".

So I would say you are fooling yourself in not actually even granting yourself a deontic dimension anchored securely at either end by the complementary notions of good and bad, harmony and strife, order and disorder, heaven and hell.

Metaphysics works because it got the hang of proper dialectical argument. Theology retreats from that at its peril. Or rather, retreating form the fray is the only way theology, tied up in its paradoxical knots, can survive.

(I don't mean all theology. A lot of it has flirted with proper systems thinking. The re-discovery of Peirce was certainly led by religious scholars.)

"you label me, I label you" — javra

I suggested you focus for a change on why ein sof or dependent co-arising might be something shared here. But it is your choice to see only divisions.

our answer of "vague~crisp" does not answer the question that you replied to … unless it is to explicitly say that the metaphysical beginning is unknowable. — javra

Mmm. Still not getting it even when it is said explicitly?

It is epistemically fundamental - I take it as true - that questions no longer have answers once they become totalising and lack counterfactuality.

But then you are seeking some ontic certainty despite that explicit epistemic caveat.

So I say no go. That is simply brute fact argument. You are presuming a truth that has no means of test. You have gone beyond epistemically reasonable metaphysics. Sorry to have to be the one to break this bad news.

Then returning to what I'm saying, I'm saying - epistemically - we are safe in talking about the emergence of existence right after the earliest moment that its symmetry in fact just broke.

So vague~crisp does that. We are dealing already with a developmental process busy growing. We are in the game now in a measurable fashion.

This won't satisfy ontic absolutists. They will cling on to their ability to appear like sceptics, opposing any explanation even though they are now - at this level of rarified questioning - operating without the oxygen of proper counterfactuals.

You can't stop folk talking even when what they say is just nonsense. But you can show that it is nonsense when they can't pose their scepticism, their endless questioning, in grounded counter-factual terms.

How did Life come from no-life? — Rich

It was a quantum mind field projection bit of trickery by the big daddy hologram up in the sky. Or something like that. Can't actually remember straight.

But I saw the YouTube clip on it by some guy who builds banking software. And he wasn't even wearing a tin-foil hat. He had to be legit.

The point is WHAT is experience? — schopenhauer1

No, the point is WHAT IS IT NOT? If you can't provide the suitable counterfactual, you ain't got nothing, buster.

Funny, I had Helen Keller in mind. — javra

You know Helen Keller wasn't born that way? And she always had the senses of touch, taste and smell.

Is vagueness an uncaused presence of "lack of crispness"? — javra

Sigh. I said totalising questions have no resources by which they can be answered. So eventually we arrive at brute fact. "There is existence," is all we can say. Proper counterfactual questions no longer exist.

So that is the negative conclusion. I'm sure you will pounce on it gleefully as an admission that thus nothing has been said at all here. Any argument I made lacks its factual - or rather, counterfactual basis - and so must be "inadequate" to the question you still insist on asking. The question that has no answer as it ain't actually a question.

Sigh. The way you folk keep circling back to that burning need for efficient cause absolutism. If there is an effect, there just has to be a reason. As soon as any terminating concept is named - like vagueness - off you must go again.

So stop and think. We can't totalise. But we can safely dichotomise. We can work our way towards the most fundamental of metaphysical-strength counterfactuals.

I've explained how some traditional "dichotomies" like mind~matter don't work. They are merely broken dualisms rather than formally mutual divisions - definitions that meet the requirement of being "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive".

Mind and matter just speak to different and unrelated varieties of substance - real stuff and soul stuff. Plato and Aristotle already took metaphysics down below the level of "substance", revealing it to be the emergent hylomorphic product of formal and material causality.

And Peirce of course heralded the modern re-conception in terms of information and dynamics. The symbol~matter dichotomy. This works as the source of the mutual exclusiveness is there in plain sight. Material dynamics is all about dimensionality. Signs then exist at the limit of dimensionality, They are what is left once physics has been removed from the equation as much as possible. They are what must arise as a new concrete possibility once dimensionality has been constrained as a possibility - shrunk to a zero dimensional point.

It would be worth re-reading my lengthy post on the biophysical basis of biosemiosis. The physical zeroing of dynamics - the convergence of many varieties of energetic process at the quasi-classical nanoscale - is another spectacular proof of this fundamental insight.

But anyway, the point about the vague~crisp is that it arises as the limit of our metaphysical inquiries into the question of "why existence?".

We can't answer the question in some monistic fashion - A caused B, and that's that. It is already accepted that existence itself is a brute fact because it is a totalising question bereft of counterfactuals (well, no one has imagined a good one so far).

But as a positive metaphysical achievement, we can say that we pushed the limits as far as was possible. And my argument - the one I say many ancient wisdoms share, even if in groping, informal fashion - is that the vague~crisp defines that epistemic limit best.

However if you can argue against that, go for it.

Your posts are dissolving into incoherence. Relax and take a moment to read what I've actually written.

Even think why it is so important to you that I remain "other" to the ancient wisdoms you quite like. Why do you treat that as the ultimate disaster here? Why don't you look for the possibility of a friendly connection in that fact? What could you have been missing in our discussion so far?

Think of the four Aristotalian causes, together with all other possibilities of causation that have accumulated in our history (such as that of co-arising, etc.) and logically justify the causal principle by which the firstness came to be. It could be an uncaused given (another possibility of causation). Whatever you choose, how do you justify it was ontically so. — javra

So you are asking what causes vagueness? Apart from a lack of crispness?

What bit of my account of counterfactuality and the legitimacy of causal questions did you fail to get?

And yet these mystics you gleefully put down in their place, with nothing more than their states of (non-measurable) awareness, came to the same conclusions you did via "scientific rationalism". How? — javra

It is hard to reply if you insist on being ridiculous. Anyone who ever came up with a powerful metaphysical view was reasoning from experience of the world.

Do you think it would be possible to have clever thoughts about existence if you are blind, deaf and dumb?

Have I not explained this often enough. The first thing is to stop talking about it as a nothingness. An apeiron is an everythingness in being a pure potential without limitation.

So if you want a mental image, it is a chaotic sea of fluctuations. A maximally confused host of actions in "every direction", and thus expressing "no direction in particular".

Constraints then emerge to regulate this chaos, give it form, bring it into a state of relative peace and order - an equilibrium that persists.

So start by switching out the image of a nothingness and bringing in an image of a seething directionlesss everythingness. Then start to subtract the concreteness that that imagery appears to demand.

I agree it ain't easy. But that is also how you get your head around mathematical conceptions of symmetry, or physical conceptions of quantum path integrals. With practice, you start to get the required level of abstract intuition.

But also, at the end of the day, any kind of "picture in the head" is not the point. The scientific method accepts that the final judge of all conceptions is not "how convincing it feels to my imaginative powers" but "is this idea publicly useful as a system of theory and testing?" - a modelling relation or interpretive habit.

Secondly, you hold a long history of degrading them mystics / spiritualists while you then go ahead and use their own notions to support your views. — javra

Yes it must be baffling. I acknowledge all the efforts in the same obvious direction and yet also criticise those efforts to the degree they remain mystic and unformalised.

I'm also a constant critic of Peirce, don'tcha know? The ability to be self-critical like this - to highlight flaws so as to keep improving on the understanding - is such a rare thing. Outside of a scientific training.

Lots of words to say: to my best current reasoning, nobody can know if existence ever had a beginning. — javra

Nobody knows as usual. This Mr Nobody sure seems one heck of a smart guy.

It is always just so easy taking the sceptic's position isn't it. "I don't believe you yet. Tell me again. Nope, still not believing you." Etc, ad infinitum.

Anyway, the Peircean answer - like other ancient wisdoms - is that if there was a beginning, it would also have to be the opposite of a determinate event, the product of an efficient cause. It would have to instead be a beginning that was some form of ultimate vagueness or state of indetermination.

Rather like a quantum Big Bang indeed. Why did the atom decay right at that moment? We now have physical models that say efficient cause evaporates when you get down to the fundamental level of material events. We have to start thinking less conventionally, more holistically, about causality.

So now there is a happy coincidence between the physics and the metaphysics. And why - actually understanding the metaphysics - would we not see it is more than just some coincidence?

My references to other cognitive modes are invariably met with vitriol — Wayfarer

So justify those cognitive modes in reference to my explanation of my cognitive mode.

I've highlighted the centrality of counterfactuality to metaphysical-strength reasoning. How are you going to reason employing a mode that rejects counterfactuality? That rejects measurable facts in other words. How are you escaping falling into the class of metaphysical explanations that is formally "not even wrong"?

You are welcome to challenge me with your alternatives. But you have to do more than name them here. You have to argue for them ... well, counterfactually. :)

And you get snarky when you think you're being accused of scientism, when surely that's the gospel you're preaching, bro. — Wayfarer

Sure its annoying that you can't be consistent. But since you are really just accusing me of being relentlessly reasonable, I can't complain.

I'll just remind - and you have to be reminded as frequently as a goldfish circling its bowl - that my "scientism" is systems science and not good old fashion reductionism. I am an organicist, not a mechanicist. I am about full four causes explanation, not just bottom-up atomistic construction .... etc, etc.

I'd define snark as an effort to be unpleasant in a way that rides rough-shod over the facts of the matter. Whether you are extremely forgetful, never really understood, or merely desperate to regain the ideological upper hand, I can't tell, and don't really care.

But the fact remains that I am not applying the same metaphysics as your totems of Scientism like Dawkins and Dennett and Krauss. So your snarky comments just undermine any credibility you might have hoped you have established here.

Obviously a variety of interpretations are possible, however note that many current adaptions of Peirce assume the 'hard-headed scientific Peirce' but eschew the 'idealistic and metaphysical Peirce'. — Wayfarer

Darwin believed in God. So did Newton and Einstein. Thus it makes no difference if Peirce believed in God.

That is the splendour of the scientific method. Eventually any superfluous mental scaffolding falls away to leave the naked physicalist reasoning. Talk about stuff that can't be measured - stuff that is not being talked about counter-factually - dies its death. It becomes classed as the "not even wrong".

The purity of scientific reasoning is the most marvellous realisation one can have. All the nonsense of life just falls away. One can penetrate to the core of the mystery that is existence. An idea as powerful as semiosis is giddy with beauty.

Grubby religious beliefs are to Peircean metaphysics as porn is to real sex. ;)

When you ask "what is" you can only answer in terms of other things. — Agustino

That's right. The Hard Problem has bite because in the end, causal explanations (about anything) rely on counterfactuals. You can believe the answer is A because you believe the answer isn't not-A.

And so when you make the question about the cause of some totality - like "the Cosmos", or "the Mind" - then there just is no not-A permitted by the question. Or rather you get the ridiculous answer that the only alternative is "not". Existence arose out of nothing. Mind arose out of nothing.

Talk about qualia has the same formula. Why is green green? Why is the scent of a rose like the scent of a rose? The question form itself fails the counterfactuality test. There just is no comparison possible as green is always green. And it still would be as far as I'm concerned even if it were to switch to bleen. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction)

Aristotle made the same point. Talk of causality is always a question about a reason for a change. Without counterfactuality, the game doesn't even get off the ground. The question you are asking is not really a question if you the questioner fail to provide a reasonable counterfactual basis for it.

The burden is on Schop to show why he is asking a good question ... if he now again denies that the question was answered.

Then to repeat what I've said about a Peirce-style organicism a million times, it does provide you with a critical extra counterfactual resource when asking questions - another dimension to standard metaphysics. It may not eliminate the problem here, but it is a further way to minimise it, to shrink it as small as we know how.

That extra resource is the (still pretty Aristotelean) notion of vagueness. So Peirce stood for a developmental metaphysics in which all things originate in a state of ultimate vagueness (or Firstness). Then by a mutual or orthogonal act of separation - a dichotomisation, a symmetry-breaking - you get a fundamental opposition arising. And from that dyadicy of a bare relation - a now crisp distinction that gives you your requisite either/or - you can develop further to the third thing of an interaction that hierarchically goes to equilibrium over all possible scales of being. The vague (as a formless chaos) becomes the crisp (a structured and law-like state of affairs in which change becomes minimal).

So this is a tale of how emergence and process can lead to the kind of deadened world we observe - a Cosmos nearly at its Heat Death doing nothing but entropifying. And thus - counterfactually - life and mind can be understood as "other" to that. We are distinguishable from our context by our negentropic qualities.

Semiotics is then a further part of this developmental story in both being the triadic logic of the metaphysics - the vague to crisp tale of developmental organisation just described - and also the particular story of the mechanism, the modelling relation, which accounts counterfactually for life and mind.

So to deal with both of philosophy's hardest problems - what is existence?, what is mind? - Peircean semiotics calls on the further metaphysical resources of the vague~crisp to get us further down the road towards an intelligible reply. Vague vs crisp is another source of counterfactuality to motivate the framing of the questions.

And vagueness is in fact defined logically as a perfect lack of counterfactuality. Peirce said vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. Crispness is thus the opposite - where the counterfactuality has developed to a point we might consider it absolute.

This is all very neat. Logic - the way we can ask definite questions - has just been extended in formal fashion so that it can safely talk about the indefinite. We can begin our metaphysical conversation even before counterfactuality arises - as the emergence of counterfactuality is what semiosis fundamentally explains.

This is not so new. Anaximander did it at the dawn of metaphysics with his much misunderstood tale of existence's emergence by symmetry-breaking from the Apeiron.

Indeed, something similar is the basis of most ancient wisdoms. You have the Judaic Ein Sof, the Taoist Dao, the Buddhist dependent co-arising, etc.

And of course - if you can get past the Scholastic misrepresentations - Aristotle was striving towards the same with his Hylomorphism. His "prime matter" was a logical attempt to vague-ify the basis of being.

So when it comes to asking the most interesting open questions - why mind? why existence? - the search is for some position of counterfactuality that can make those questions seem more sensible. And a Peircean developmental logic, one that is rooted in a notion of vagueness, a complete lack of counterfactuality, is the bold new metaphysical approach that deals directly with this very issue of counterfactuality.

That is why he summed up existence as "the universal growth of reasonableness". Such a statement sounds very mystical and is open to obvious misinterpretation. But that is why you actually have to study and learn the new logical notion that lies behind it.

Intelligibility is what emerges. Therefore it would be incoherent to claim that what it emerges from is the intelligible as well.

I can agree with you all day that modelling relations have feel like something aspects to it. — schopenhauer1

Finally. That being so, case closed.

These are very important thoughts you are sharing.

You've covered them by placing the cart before the horse: better spelled out, maths before awareness ... — javra

Again, you aren't really listening. Peirce begins with an examination of human reason - epistemology. And then pansemiosis argues ontology - existence itself - also shares the same self-organising logic.

Further - all thought/all reality being irreducibly complex - making your argument in terms of "cart before horse", or "chicken before egg", simply betrays a Procrustean need to make all argument conform to the mode of reductionist analysis rather than holistic understanding.

You want a sequential story of cause and effect. But this is explicitly a triadic developmental story. I know you will be starting to understand when you yourself think "cart before horse" is a nonsensical kind of issue to be complaining about.

Rich, you are proof the Cosmos loves hot air.

This is the part that I initially hoped you held a cogent grasp of when I started this tread. — javra

Did you really ever follow what I said then. You keep coming up with questions I've already covered.

Pansemiosis is about the fundamentally of thermodynamic purpose. And biosemiosis is entrained to that cosmic goal. It is required (if it is possible for it to be) by the need to break down blockages to entropy's great flow.

So I hope you now suddenly remember another part of the argument which I've so frequently presented. Maybe even an apology will be forthcoming, seeing you have chosen to join the insulters? :)

I've explained why all through the thread. There is a difference between biosemiosis and pansemiosis.

Biosemiosis is an actual modelling relation. The information, the constraints, are internalised to construct a point of view.

Pansemiosis is then more general. The information, the constraints, are environmental. The point of view in operation is external and so highly generic - just the state of the cosmos at some point along its historical development.

This bloody huge difference is why I wouldn't say leptons have feelings. There is no reason to think they form a point of view or have any autonomy. They are the products of a generic cosmic sign relation, not the authors of particular located points of view.

You'll have to try harder to make it worth continuing the conversation.

Start by answering honestly why a modelling relation with the world wouldn't feel like something. On what basis can you simply presume that?

No, freedom and constraint only actual exist in relation to something else, a thing which is either free or constrained. — Metaphysician Undercover

So the story is .... triadic?

Degrees of heat or cold only have reality in relation to something which is either hot or cold. — Metaphysician Undercover

Except a backwards triadism that relies on brute fact monism rather than emergence...

Sounds legit.

What's more is that credit seems to have saturated the economy. You can get credit for anything nowadays. — Posty McPostface

Yep. The economy goes sideways as it needs a good dose of inflation to wash away the debt. But it is so in debt that it can't jolt the patient to life by cutting interest rates and giving it more spending cash in its pocket. It all has to go into servicing existing debt as real production shrinks.

Next step, the deflation where the debt burden grows rather than shrinks. Whoops, apocalypse.

That also depends on how informed the rational agent is. I fear, and see, that the population of the US is hopelessly misinformed about current affairs. — Posty McPostface

And not that the population is simply hopelessly irrational these days? ;)

But speaking realistically, there are always going to be artificial constraints - state intervention - in any market system. States can't in practice stand back and let themselves collapse as good market practice demands.

Sure, plenty of people would have loved Greece or Morgan Stanley to take their medicine properly. But in the end, theoretical purity is going to run into self-preservation instinct.

That is the reality the GFC should have rammed home. In the end, at some level, an economic actor becomes too big to fail.

So given that, market intervention should be something that kicks in over all scales in fair fashion. That is what bankruptcy laws were for, for example. Or monopoly laws.

If you are building a car with an accelerator, you also want to remember to build in some brakes. It's just commonsense.

That has nothing whatever to do with Shannon's laws about information transmission. — Wayfarer

Silly me.

The whole point of Shannon's work was about transmitting actual information, something that has meaning. If it was just about transmitting white noise, then what would have been the point of the analysis? — Wayfarer

That comment sums up how little you understand about the subject.

We relate the two to each other through the assumption of present existence, but that they may be related to each other does not make them two faces of the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Constraints remove degrees of freedom. And the degrees of freedom not removed are then those that must be expressable. It's not rocket science.

The invisible hand might not be infallible (climate change and tragedy of the commons) — Posty McPostface

Hence the argument for a carbon tax and a national future fund.

It is just plain obvious that the active subsidising of Big Oil (which includes the massive US military spend) ought to stop. It is a market distortion proper free marketeers would abhor. Then a carbon tax is needed on top of that to pave the way to greener energy. Future generations demand it.

And why not be like Norway and actually ring-fence that income to start to pay back the damage done by galloping financial speculation?

Market principles work just fine so long as the markets are transparent enough to look sufficiently far into the future.

Another flaw in the OP is the complaint that neoliberal liquidity makes the future "a zone of indistinction".

What is actually the problem is the future is being rendered deliberately opaque by privileged interests who want to capitalise tomorrow's profits on their balance sheets today. The elite not only steal the present from the average Joe, they steal the future too.

In principle, a free market takes into account all information or self-interest. And most folk are at least modestly concerned at least a generation or two into the future.

So yes, the future has been made opaque for most people with climate denial and the lobbies against green technology or sustainable economics. But that is a product of having allowed wealth inequality develop to the point billionaires can buy administrations. It is not directly the fault of an economic theory about how best to unblock the barriers to free growth.

(Though the theory is also reckless in not clearly recognising its own downside, its need for strong regulation at government level.)

Being constrained by history, and having anticipation for the future are two completely distinct things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? They are the two faces of the same thing. Surely that is obvious? To be constrained is what results in being left with a more focused point of view.

Yes, but one of the foundations upon which the USA is a vigilant and informed public. That the Republicans keep the population vigilant with invisible enemies from within and outside the borders, then that's a political issue, not an economic one. — Posty McPostface

The US story is about how rage at the consequences of neoliberalism - especially the way liquidity paves the way for globalisation - needs to be re-directed against other targets.

So the middleclass majority, and well-paid blue collar worker, are still befuddled as to why the economic world is running against them when clearly the US is growing ever richer.

The war on drugs, the war on weapons of mass destruction, the war on terror - these are all geopolitical moves. Excuses for the assertion of US hegemony and the side-lining of proper international political institutions like the UN. They are the public excuses for private political agendas. They are only economic moves in the sense that it feels good to the US to be in tight control of basic resources like oil.

Yes, they also serve a US desire to impose moral hegemony as well. The American Way still matters at some level of US politics. Institutions like the State Department feel missionary about these things.

But check Trump and you can see how rage is being redirected in a very anti-neoliberal theory fashion. It's plain old gut-reaction xenophobia and other-bashing.

One of the funny things about SX's PoMo Marxism is that he doesn't see how neoliberalism - as theory - advocates open borders and multiculturalism. A free market lets all ideas have a go. A pluralist competition is what is healthy.

Yet Trump harnesses the attack on this social and economic globalism. Build a wall to keep out the Mexican rapists. Every open trade deal ever done was unfair to the US. Get rid of weird folk from our military - or weird and un-american folk in general.

So we have a number of forces in play.

There is "geopolitical chessboards" - maintaining a position of US hegemony. This is about the general benefits of power, not some piffling theoretical debate about particular economic mechanisms. The politicians need to divert the populace to be free to pursue that most critical of national agendas.

Then there is neoliberalism. This is a nice theory of dissipative structure. You maximise system throughput by taking away any barriers to growth. Access to speculative capital being a key one.

In theory, for a while, broken down welfare hicks in US hicksville could be property speculators and mint a fortune. That is what equality of opportunity meant. The convenient lie told the public was that it was perfectly safe even though the US system of market oversight had been systematically deconstructed, and in the case of the credit rating agencies, plain corrupted.

Then the third sweeping force is the usual human reaction of turning inwards when feeling under attack. Rally the village, get out the pitchforks, and apply a little mob justice to anything that smacks of "other".

Here the deception of the people is simply a President agreeing it is the proper thing to do. "You want to burn the world down, sure that's a great idea. Hey maybe I'll join in and do that to North Korea."

Stale PoMo Marxism is just so inadequate as a frame of analysis. Time to speak the truth in plain language. :)

Although the US could sure do with a good dose of Scandinavian social democracy and a radical overhaul of its broken political structures. Unfortunately world governance - the UN - has been so undermined that the US can't just step away from its dreams of empire. Russia and China are just two itching to take its place.

(Well China not so much as its main existential concern is forever going to be preventing the peasants revolting against the centre. It doesn't aspire to a new colonialism, just security and stability within the traditional boundaries of its Imperial Empire.)

Christ almighty. It rewrites the state of the Universe. Another bit of history has accumulated and so points all possibility toward a more constrained future.

Stop thinking about this as humans feeling mentally informed. And don't even start thinking about it computationally as the reading and writing of memory states.

Semiotics is about information as the bleeding differences that make a bleeding difference in the real world, even the lifeless real world. A bit has physicalist meaning as a sign of things to come. :)

No external interpreter is required. Reality arises as interpretance. The historical context points possibility towards its free future. Then history is created by that possibility making up its mind.

Why does an atom decay? Do you think you can answer that in causal terms using regular materialism? Do you think mad woo like Rich's or whoever's idealism can do the job?

And yet you belly-ache like buggery just because I dare to apply Peirce's careful generalisation of a psychologically-derived tale of causality. And point out that it is science as the duality of matter and information is now a formally exact, formally measurable, deal.

Mate, either catch up with the 21st century or leave me alone.

you're evading the point, — Wayfarer

The point is eluding you. That is something different. I've explained myself endlessly. Time for you to do some work in understanding better.

If you keep just asking me "who knows", why should I show respect for your lack of imagination here?

You believe consciousness to be itself a universal property of nature, well fine. Stick to that. Don't for an instant explore the alternative of deflating consciousness by understanding it in terms of a universal semiotic process.

You won't abandon your mentalism. Fine. Science isn't for you. And thus the metaphysics that follows in the wake of scientific advance is also not for you. Again fine. It's your choice.

The door to your cage or conceptions has been opened. But you don't have to walk through it if you prefer the comfort of the familiar.