ou have two distinct forms of information in your description. You have information within the dissipative structures and you have information within the semiotics. There's a big gap between these two, because in "semiotics" information is a property of matter, and in your "dissipative structures" information is supposed to be prior to matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

To ungarble this, the story is that there is indeed the two things of semiotic information and dissipative degrees of freedom in my approach (which is also the mainstream information theoretic view, so not some personal theory).

The semiotic information acts causally as the constraints on substantial being. In Hylomorphic terms, it represents the top-down formal and final causes.

Then the physical degrees of freedom are the bottom-up material and efficient causes.

Substantial being emerges as the third thing of their interaction. As hylomorphism argued long ago.

So while I appreciate your attempt at parody, it failed by not understanding what it hoped to mock.

Meanwhile back in the real world, physicists make it clear that they are making an analogy. A hologram is some real physical pattern. The holographic principle is about the theories you could write that can measure observable events described in information theoretic terms.

So the Universe may be LIKE a hologram. No one is saying the Universe IS a hologram. (Outside of the usual misleading reader-grabbing headlines.)

In the everyday world, a hologram is a special kind of photograph that generates a full three-dimensional image when it is illuminated in the right manner. All the information describing the 3-D scene is encoded into the pattern of light and dark areas on the two-dimensional piece of film, ready to be regenerated. The holographic principle contends that an analogue of this visual magic applies to the full physical description of any system occupying a 3-D region: it proposes that another physical theory defined only on the 2-D boundary of the region completely describes the 3-D physics.

http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

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

Endogenous retrovirus sequences are the product of reverse transcription of retrovirus genomes into the genomes of germ cells. Mutation within these retro-transcribed sequences can inactivate the viral genome.[31]

Over 8% of the human genome is made up of (mostly decayed) endogenous retrovirus sequences, as part of the over 42% fraction that is recognizably derived of retrotransposons, while another 3% can be identified to be the remains of DNA transposons. Much of the remaining half of the genome that is currently without an explained origin is expected to have found its origin in transposable elements that were active so long ago (> 200 million years) that random mutations have rendered them unrecognizable.[32] Genome size variation in at least two kinds of plants is mostly the result of retrotransposon sequences.[33][34]

You cannot get experience from fiat. Emergence of physical phenomena from physical phenomena is part of the easy problems. Emergence of mental phenomena from physical phenomena is different based on the fact that mental phenomena is actually needed to observe the rest of phenomena. — schopenhauer1

So you avoid my question as usual.

Are you saying information is "just physical phenomena"? How does that work in your ontology?

Again then, why shouldn't a modelling relation with reality not feel like something? Information or matter alone doesn't have reason to be feeling like something. But to form a lived model of the world - one where informational possibility and material circumstance are in close and pragmatic interaction - just does seem as though it should feel like something.

Can you tell me why it wouldn't?

Yep. I can see how easy it is to confuse the holographic principle with literal holograms.

OK. How does energy come to rest to yield "solid matter"? What is your theory which isn't another "just so" story?

The same applies to dissipative structure. That is magic too.

The trouble with you anti-materialists is that you don't even appreciate the self-organising wonder of nature's materials. How does energy ever find the substantial stability of "coming to rest" in some form?

I can't believe you guys take the passivity of matter so much for granted. You just want to rob material nature of all its beautiful and profound mystery. It's just dirt and gunk to you lot.

Where are you in this? Are you passionate about local communities? Or are you more of a Zizek? The world exist, messy as hell, as an opportunity to theorize about it? — n0 0ne

Well I have certainly lived a life of wealth and selfish privilege. I have been doing my own thing from an early age. :)

So yes, I don't get my hands dirty much in actual community practice. Partly because the theoretical value of that is a recently recognised thing, but mostly because I'm too lazy to spend evenings on committees or weekends on working bees.

Yet then I am recognised and even earn a living from offering what enough people find to be useful analysis. And selfishly that feels like a reasonable contribution.

So the honest answer would be that I started out in cynical mode and turned that into a paying gig. And I'm still a disengaged cynic at heart. Or at least by long habit. But that is also a good basis for understanding the world as it is and as it could or should be.

The resultant red shift intensity would be relative to the speeds of objects. It could be that they are both red shifted equally, one is blue one is red, or one is more red shifted than the other, surely. — MikeL

Nope. Your scenario would predict inhomogenities in red-shifting that we just can't see. If it is our relative motion that causes the effect, then we couldn't be moving towards some things without moving away from other things. There would be no way to conceal that fact.

The red shifting is just too precise and well behaved in every direction for our motion to be the cause.

You could imagine an inverse physics where instead of spatial expansion causing this even outward flow the story is that every point of space is contracting inwards. So the universe is a constant size in the global sense, but every point within it is shrinking smaller. That is kind of your contracting galaxies story.

But that would predict the sun and the milky way stars all receding from us too. Every point in space would have to be contracting inwards .... at lightspeed .... to invert the same physical picture.

As I said, actual galactic structure couldn't still exist. It would have all shrunk out of our sight. Even the good old sun would be a light-day "more distant" from us each morning when we wake up. Not to mention that we would have to junk quantum mechanics and its claims that physical action is tied to some actual minimum Planckian scale.

So your conjecture predicts observables we don't observe. And in the case of the sun rising tomorrow, the degree of error in the prediction is not small. It is astronomical. :)

And I'm saying that what you don't accept is the epistemology that is necessary to even underpin any ontic commitment either way. SX was correct about your stubbornness on that score.

I have zero expectations of making any real difference here. That's way I might at least one day be pleasantly surprised. So carry on....

I keep dealing with the same points over and over. To be immeasurable is to be epistemically vague or an idea that is "not even wrong".

You are convinced of the veracity of the whole story, while others in this discussion are not. Again, I could buy into the idea of an expanding universe. What I do not buy in are the current cosmological theories. — Hachem

I was explaining why cosmologists, as a pragmatic community of inquiry, would proclaim themselves convinced.

You are free to dissent. But your dissent only counts as reasonable if you can show you understand what is being said, and why, then make some other case in that light.

Otherwise its all fake news and alternative facts, as they say.

Do you see where I'm going with this? He can justify a selfish "Romanticism." He can embrace something akin to stoicism, skepticism, hedonism --attempt an individual solution. He can view his actions in the world as a stupidity to be endured. He can climb the career ladder by playing along with structures he doesn't believe in. He can pay his bills, hide in his little house, and pursue his idiosyncratic notion of happiness. Perhaps for you this is the opposite of Romanticism, since it is cynical. But abandoning the folly of the world aligns with the Christian component in Romanticism. — n0 0ne

I agree with you there. We do wind up having to make personal meaning of our own existence. But then the general political issue becomes how much of a burden that is for "ordinary folk".

This is the real question we would be asking of neoliberalism (if we can just set aside for the moment that larger question of whether it should be allowed to rape the Earth the way it is doing).

We all want to live lives that are meaningful. And our social system should deliver us that. Neoliberalism's promise on that score is we are given an unlimited possibility of the self-actualisation of our choice. It sounds just like the Romantic dream of being allowed to express our own personal potential to its fullest extreme.

But just as obviously, that neoliberal promise is pretty hollow and burdensome in practice. Who really needs its version of self-actualisation which is mostly about extreme consumption or extreme capital accumulation (power now being monetised via the new economics)?

So then the question becomes what should the average person do to construct personal meaning within a world that basically looks to be going mad (or as I put it, developing its own supra-human identity)?

Stoicism and cynicism seem like a response. But I would say that is retreating inwards and living in sufferance.

It does have some advantages so is not completely wrong. But there is the alternative of reaching out consciously to reforge local community. That is a positive response which would then collectively start to become an actual counterpolitical movement to roll back neoliberalism.

And indeed re-localisation has been a major theme among political activist for a decade now. If the problem is that globalisation has resulted in a life denominated in US dollars, then you can grab back power by creating local community time-banks and local community currencies.

The theory is just obvious. And you will find people trying to do that in every smart town or city now. But of course it does seem like a token scale effort for the most part. Neoliberalism still holds sway over the majority of lives. It is the way ordinary folk think. They have internalised the oppressor if you like (although, as I say, neoliberal theory itself is more neutral, less black and white, than its practice). So the current counter-politics is trialling change in small fashion. But it is also pretty vocal and clear about its approach.

And in fact - manifesting as the social enterprise approach beloved of Millenials - it is itself quite neoliberal in philosophy. So the economic model isn't really so much the problem. It is the lack of a place for social values and green values within a "market" approach to living life that creates a systemic ill.

This is why the kinds of authors cited in the OP make me despair. It's retreaded Marxism. And Marxism was retreaded Romanticism. We already know that model of socio-politics to be a dismal failure, consigned to the dustbin of history.

The way forward is to use neoliberalism against itself by building back in the local social and green values that the globalised version has managed to strip out. There is an actual pragmatic philosophical discussion going on out there in the real world, within every town and city with any intellectual capital, that goes right over the OP's head.

Of course then I have to go back to the larger fossil fuels story. We are still screwed unless a localised neoliberalism can connect us financially to a post-fossil fuel productive economy.

Again, that is why the OP prompts hair-pulling. We really don't need Marxist theorists fighting the same old class wars when they are dealing with things - like debt and entropy - about which they are philosophically clueless. They only muddy the water with their meandering musings at a time when utter clarity of thought is what's required.

So our entire assumption about the universe expanding is based on one interpretation of a bit of red in a telescope when there seems to be other interpretations for that bit of red? — MikeL

As T Clark points out back at the start, if the red shift was just us moving towards some mythical centre, then we would also be approaching other galaxies, creating a blue shift. And even if they were moving faster ahead of us for some reason, the resulting red shift would not be as red as galaxies in the opposite direction.

Then if it was instead just our galaxy collapsing inwards, we would have collapsed long before now. And also all the other galaxies would look redshifted equally regardless of their distance. They would all appear to have the same velocity, not a velocity that appears to accelerate until it eventually goes super-luminal (faster that lightspeed) and so get swallowed up by a cosmic event horizon.

So there are a whole bunch of astronomical observations which are simplified best by believing that what we see is an expanding/cooling universe. And science says the best theory is the one that accounts for the most variety with the least explanatory effort. We have no good reason to doubt the expanding/cooling universe hypothesis.

There is not just one observation that demands the theory. The theory is the only one that makes sense of everything we so far observe.

Remember Olber's paradox. If the universe is infinite and wasn't expanding we would be blinded at night by the blaze of every star in the cosmos. Thank goodness for event horizons that means we only see a finite number of those stars and so can sleep in the dark.

Yes, it is nice to reimagine every physical claim from its other angle, tell the same story in reverse. That is what physics gives you - reversible stories that thus connect starting conditions to final conditions in a predictable way. But if you actually try to understand the physics backwards, then you will become prone to all kinds of metaphysical error.

So red-shifting was the big clue that forced the reach for a good explanation. But there were already other reasons, like Olber's paradox.

General relativity also created an issue of how the Universe could be stable, given that it either had to be gravitationally collapsing, or for some reason expanding. We could guess it wasn't collapsing because otherwise our odds of being here to witness its existence would be infinitesimal (given infinite time, at any particular moment, collapse would have already occured with matching probability). So that only left expansion as the reasonable guess.

And now - surprise - Einstein was righter than he knew on that score. We have discovered a further observation, what has been dubbed dark energy or the cosmological constant, which tells us metric expansion is wired into the fabric of being. Expansion forever is a hardwired-looking fact now.

So as I say, physics ain't dumb. The expanding Big Bang universe was predicted by theory as much as it was necessitated by multiple lines of observation. Once Einstein cracked GR, expansion had to be the case somehow.

The 'epistemic cut' implies a dualism between matter and symbol and so implies a duality. — Wayfarer

It implies a formally exact complementarity, which is a very different (triadic) thing.

The reason matter~symbol works, and mind~body doesn't, is that we have fundamental physical theories of the relation between physical degrees of freedom and epistemic degrees of uncertainty. I just explained that above - the equivalence of Shannon information and Gibbs/Boltzman free energy.

So it is a dichotomy that works. We know how to measure it as a physical reality. We can convert it to bit, and back again. This has become an insight of fantastic power.

And as I've mentioned with considerable enthusiasm, biophysics has now discovered in the past 10 years how this works for life and mind. There is an obvious reason now why - at the quasi-classical transition zone of the nanoscale - bio-semiosis and neuro-semiosis could take off. Again a unit of biological information and a unit of biological work (the two sides of Pattee's epistemic cut!) are zeroed at that scale for reasons that are just physically transparent (once you understand the physics).

This is huge. As big as DNA. Science has come through for us once again.

You choose the Apeiron as the deeper/est reality: “boundless/formless fluctuation”. I so far further interpret you as expressing that one day all shall be Apeiron once again, aka end in a Heat Death. Correct me if needed. — javra

No. The Heat Death for me would have to be an eternally determinate state. It would have a fixed spatiotemporal structure and a minimal presence of energetic action. So unlike Anaximander, there is no dissolution back into the Apeiron.

The Apeiron is generative potential and the Heat Death is a self organised or emergent finality, an enduring habit. So here I am switching to a Peircean view.

The final telos (for there are innumerable more proximate teloi) is for me one of perfect symmetry. — javra

In my scheme, the Heat Death is a perfectly crisp or definite state of symmetry, while the Big Bang arises from a perfectly vague state, or a symmetry of utter indefiniteness. So the change is a transition effected from the vaguest existence to the most definite existence. It is a change from a state of unlimited disequilibrium to one of universally stable structural equilibrium.

The telos is then not a glorious higher purpose but simply this tendency which is pointed in the direction of the Apeiron becoming maximally its own "other".

Time, space and energy differences (definite actions) all must co-arise as part of this trip towards "absolute other". Anaximander still had to take time, space and energy for granted at the start of things. That is why his Apeiron still sounds pretty materialistic or substantial.

While it is true that for me this final telos is also, in part, that of absolute metaphysical objectivity (impartiality, hence fairness, hence justice) of which we are all (freewill-endowed) subjects to, absolute coherency/harmony/lack-of-conflict/peace/love (which brings about coherency, harmony, lack-of-conflict, etc.), absolute beauty/sublimity (which, complex as this topic in itself is, in part draws us to the unknown), and absolute selflessness of being, it is also true that—while inductively knowing, or at least believing, it to so be—I for logical reasons also know/uphold that what “it” in fact is is impossible to conceptualize, accurately represent, etc. (for technical metaphysical purposes, by anything that is endowed with selfhood; hence, by any psyche: be it ant, human, or (hypothetically) deity). — javra

Once you start to talk about human notions of telos - The Good - then for me, that only arises along the path from the Big Bang to the Heat Death.

It turns out that the Big Bang couldn't achieve its end directly. Instead of expanding/cooling as a simple bath of light - pure radiation - it had its own secondary story of a Higgs field symmetry breaking which switched on gravity for particles that could feel the field through their mass. A lot of crud condensed out of the radiation to become heavy matter that lagged behind events. A gravitational symmetry was broken and you had a secondary action of massive particle falling together as clouds, stars and blackholes.

This was a major negentropic event - a backwards eddy against the general entropic flow. All the stars and black holes will eventually re-radiate that lagging mass back to radiation. But in the meantime, the stage is set for further levels of material complexity feeding off this gradient. ie: material structures like us.

So in my scheme, humanity is part of an interesting detour taken by a relatively small part of the original formless radiation bath. You could say that the great condensation of gravitating, sub-lightspeed, matter was a cosmic negentropic accident. And that then set the scene for complex material structure - like stars and humans - with the negentropic purpose of re-entropifying that matter, returning it to the general cosmic flow, as quickly as possible.

So my view is formed by looking at what we actually now know about the story of the Universe (and of course there is more to learn).

I can see how you may then apply the same metaphysical logic as me to the world as it seems from a very human-centric point of view. It does make dialectical sense that if our existence seems defined by its extreme self-centredness (not meant in any pejorative way), then the "other" of that - the obvious destination in terms of a radical change - would be a state of selfless being.

The particularity of selfhood is an extreme case of broken symmetry. That is the same story in my scheme too. There is nothing more negentropically a sore thumb sticking out in the Universe than a human self. And so the "other" of that would be to dissolve selfhood back to where it came from (back to entropy for me), or alternatively (for you) dissolve it forward to a state of pure selflessness.

So in terms of our differences, we likely agree on a dialectical understanding of cosmic history, but I would see humanity (and all its values or meaning making) as at best the culmination of a side detour to the big trip, while for you, it is the starting point for that big trip. Make sense?

I don’t place this state at the metaphysical beginning, in part, because it is of no personal concern to do so. — javra

I think this is where it gets tricky for you. If selfless being is truly the cosmic goal, then some kind of maximal or ultimate state of selfish being had to be its origin. We are talking about the journey that becomes possible because there is space between two complementary metaphysical limits on being.

So you would have to say more about this origin - this state of absolute selfish being - to justify the dialectical logic of your argument. (Just as you rightly push me to answer "well what is vagueness, what was there just before the Big Bang?".)

Including those of: is information equivalent to energy? — javra

My semiotic approach is based on these being equivalent at a foundational scale. If each is a complementary mode of action, then there is a starting scale at which each is the same size as the other.

I guess this is a dual aspect theory of matter (as opposed to a dual aspect monism of mind). :)

We know that at the Planck scale, information and material degrees of freedom become the same thing. Our measurements in term of Shannon entropy, or epistemic message uncertainty, equates to our measurements in terms of Gibbs free energy or countable physical degrees of freedom.

This is a profound fact that has given rise to the notions of event horizons, holographic principles, black hole radiation, and all the other good stuff of recent cosmology.

So modern physicalist theory already has a new foundation based on a measured equivalence between two complementary notions of entropy (and negentropy). It makes "no difference" whether it is regarded in terms of epistemic uncertainty or ontic degrees of freedom. The one maths encompasses both points of view. So we are in fact measuring the "subjectivity" of the Universe as much as its "objectivity" now. Physics has been turned upside down because it is a legitimate question: what does the Universe know about what is going on?

Quantum mechanics will hopefully be rewritten by this quantum information approach. We can make sense of quantum uncertainty as being due to the semantic impossibility of the Universe asking two opposite kinds of question of the same spatiotemporal locale. It can't enquire after variables like location and momentum simultaneously as each query requires its own separate and mutually incompatible point of view.

Back to the basic concept, though: The maths to me—again, in a simplified sense—emerge from this perfect symmetry as telos, which is itself a non-maths reality — javra

I'm puzzled here because your scheme would have to resolve the Platonic issue of how mathematical form might be itself related to the greater thing of The Good. If we are talking about beauty, love and truth as the ultimate telos, pure selfless being, then there is a gap to fill in when linking The Good back to mathematical forms.

In my own physicalist take, the summum bonum is a dissipative thing - the ultimate constraint which is to take the shortest path possible. The maths of metaphysical strength interest is the maths of symmetry breaking and dissipative structure. And that maths is an expression of the Least Action principle which is so central to physical theory.

So I accept the intuitive correctness of Platonism - some ultimate principle of "goodness" which then results in the more specific mathematical forms - but I can give a physicalist reading of that in dissipative structure terms which map to what modern science is discovering.

I don't see how you can do the same. Your version of The Good - if it is selfless being - has no necessary connection to the kind of maths (the 0 and 1 that is the omega and alpha of algebra) which you think is fundamental.

(And I don't mean to diss algebra as - another important fact since Descartes - algebra and geometry themselves turn out to be complementary modes of reality description. Any understanding derived from the one can be translated into the other.)

So anyway, to the degree that you are making a Platonic argument here, you would need to be able to flesh out how your summum bonum principle entails anything mathematical in terms of "pure structure". I'm sensing you appreciate the difficulty of making that connection and that is why you want to move on and treat The Good as essentially non-mathematical after all. And that then begs the question of why you want to claim any connection in the first place.

A systems thinker of course has to be able to wrap formal and final cause together in some satisfactory fashion. Platonism had some suggestions, but in the end, mostly paints over that crack in its logic.

Again, the best answer I can give is that sensory noise would be what it is like to be modelling the world in that vague and undifferentiated fashion.

Why shouldn't richly structured modelling feel like something (and largely unstructured activity with no self concept feel like pretty much nothing to no-one)?

I don't recall you ever said why.

But properly speaking, the life of discipleship is living in that light, whilst still in ordinary existence. Of course, there is also a sense in which this is a hopeless quest, an utterly quixotic undertaking. But one has to persist, regardless. — Wayfarer

This sounds good, but what does it say that it is founded on logical paradoxes?

We have to live as if the passing life were the eternal one. It is a hopeless quest, yet we must persist.

Maybe paradox is a necessary characteristic here that you can explain? To my mind, these kinds of contradictions - if actually compelling - contain within them their own resolutions. They speak to the third thing of some balance.

It could be that we are inevitably seekers after meaning. And even though that is ultimately quixotic, that is still who we are and thus what we must do.

It isn't a crazy way to be until we stop to think about it - as that negentropic bent in us is evolved. But once we stop to think about it, it becomes crazy as we are now aware we could be doing "other".

I think this is the existential truth you are expressing. If we are always looking, then there must be something to find. Otherwise why the heck are we always looking? And can we actually continue the habit of looking knowing there is nothing to find? Can the habit itself fill a void despite its ultimate futility?

What you cannot do is get something from nothing like so much fiat — schopenhauer1

The logic of it is that it would be more like getting something from an undifferentiated state of everythingness. Vagueness is not nothingness but unrestricted potential. The newborn's problem would be a state of experiencing that is too much going on to the slightest stimulation.

So if you want to imagine a vague state of sensation, it is like a blooming, buzzing, confusion. Maybe like getting tumbled in a heavy surf, but without yet any sense of self as well as just sensory noise.

The digestive bacteria that cockroaches rely on do live inside cockroach cells. And they show the same big loss of genes as the result of that lifestyle.

Newborn human babies have wired and functioning brainstems and so the level of sensory and orienting processing that goes with that. But it is surprising how lacking in neural differentiation they still are at the cortical level.

It is part of the human evolutionary story. They have to come out with brains half grown to fit through the limits created by a bipedal pelvis. At birth, they are still sprouting new cortical cells at the rate of a million each minute.

On the other hand, I held my baby daughters minutes after they were delivered. There was no doubt they had sensations. What I would question is your assumption that they had an "inner" quality, or that they were in any way distinct.

You see it is you that is wedded to a Cartesian theatre. You can't conceive of mind except that it is already like that. A space with a self watching a parade of definite sensations. But a baby has only the vaguest notion of a self separate from a world. It doesnt even have hands it controls.

So yes, the traditional Jamesian blooming, buzzing, confusion is as apt a characterisation as any.

A replicating lifeform inside another lifeform will kill it, cold. — MikeL

Well it was nice knowing you then. Goodbye to you and the 100 trillion bacteria living mostly symbiotically in your gut. And the vast variety of retroviruses hijacking a ride on your DNA.

That was a very smart decision. When did it come to this decision? Before or after it killed the host? — MikeL

Did you miss the key point? The host was a handy supply of its food. While it was a handy source of energy for its host. So the situation was SYMBIOTIC. :)

They went together so exactly that they created a whole new evolutionary era. All their fellow microbes were left in the dust. In 4 billion years, the other guys have shown no essential structural change.

But with their new super-powerful respiratory mechanism, the symbiont duo could swell to become single cells 15,000 times larger. And then become the vastly radiating variety of body forms that is multicellular life.

I'm not sure what your definition of a successful marriage is. But that must be a once in a planetary lifetime lucky break.

Could they? How did they come to that arrangement? Enterprise bargaining? The blind mitochondria said to the blind cell, "I don't know what the hell you are or where the hell I am but here comes some genes. Catch." — MikeL

This is a bit of smart alec reply given the realities of bacterial and archaeon sex. Look up how it works some time. Life at the microbial level is a genetic free for all. Cells are always throwing gene kits in each other's direction.

An individual E.coli only has room for 4000 genes. But it floats in a gene pool - a metagenome - of 18,000 genes that it can pick up as it needs as food sources change and a different kind of digestion might be needed, or whatever the environmental challenge happens to be.

You seem to be trying to extrapolate backwards from the highly regulated world of multicellular organisms to the open air orgy that is the microbial world. Fortunately evolution itself was going in the other direction.

...this crossing relieves us of the last bastion we had of excluding ourselves from the immediacy of risk that has always marked the 'cultural' realm. — StreetlightX

Sorry but I'm still not seeing any clear issue of concern. Let's look at the examples you offer:

This is what's at stake in the medicalization of life. And once this happens, the categories that once used to exempt the body from it's circuits now begin to capture it: beyond the much mentioned 'commodification' of the body (in terms of say, stem cells, DNA sequences, and other, now 'patentable' biological 'innovations'), you also get - as again charted by Cooper - the militarization of biology, where the body itself becomes a site of security concern - — StreetlightX

So I take it the argument is the body used to be your own property - some kind of refuge. But now that aspects of human biology are now ownable as intellectual property somehow that becomes a new source of unease for ordinary individuals?

I'm not getting the ring of truth.

If you could claim patents on my genetics and go clone a whole bunch of me's, making profits and not needing my permission, then maybe I would freak out. Or maybe I might be so narcissistic as to think great, those guys will be good company.

But anyway, the point is that biotech can't do that. In the real world of today, it is commodifying stuff I would regard as generic and not personal. It wouldn't feel like an existential threat unless I start to feel left out in some fashion. Like maybe when I can't afford the vast benefits of stem cell injections into my brain that are making everyone else so much smarter (like next step Gattaca).

But knowing biology is being exploited commercially on a generic way does't sound like something that would make folk feel insecure within their own bodies. I don't see a connection.

Increasingly, then, any counterpolitics of health, ecology, and life will need to engage with the pervasive reach of the war on terror; to contest, in other words, the growing collusion between neoliberalism's politics of life and the imposition of a permanent state of warfare." — StreetlightX

OK, to take this quote, the suggestion here is that there is a health-affirming politics that is in a tussle with some neoliberal need for permanent destabilisation of the otherwise self-actualising individual. Pretty classic Romantic guff I would reply. Already we are expected to side with the good guys who stand for true individualism vs the always oppressive constraints of society,

Yes, the war on drugs and the war on terror are familiar scare tactics. Orwell predicted them. But they seem more inspired by the personal political insecurities of presidents - the need to bind a nation like the US by presenting a "visible enemy", a collective existential threat. Why would we think they advance the agenda of neoliberalism? At best, they a justification to mask a grab for control over resources. So an economic (and existential) agenda perhaps. But not one that is actually neoliberal in philosophy, more old fashioned colonialism.

Again, I see some extreme language but little to justify that rhetoric. And no link back from any general eco-fuzzy counterpolitics vs Kleinian shock doctrine arm-wrestle to your thesis about a resulting personal sense of biological precariousness.

In Marxist parlance, capital has set it's sights not only on the means of production, but on the means of (biological) reproduction as well. — StreetlightX

What does this mean? If capital is doing anything, isn't it just suppressing reproduction - as no one can afford time off for having kids? Reproduction seems only something capital hasn't thought through very well. So what do you have in mind here?

(cf. the work of Ivan Ascher on the 'portfolio society' which we now inhabit). — StreetlightX

Yep. It is true that quite a few countries are run by former financial market whizzes now, and literally economies are being run along portfolio investment lines. Derivatives are used to create nation-level liquidity. The theory is then that money will flow freely into the best national investment opportunities. A nation can then choose its own appetite for risk. Does it want to run a conservative or an aggressive fund.

So that is an important new development arising out of neoliberal thinking - the financialisation of national balance sheets.

But it seems way distance from any biopolitics or bodily precariousness. You haven't actually drawn a connection I can see.

I'm not getting any reason to see some link between the logic of neoliberalism and a new bodily sense of individual precariousness. And it is not because I don't want to see.

I agree that neoliberalism is about turning everything that composes life into a tradable commodity. That sounds a good idea, but then always results in an opaque and weakly regulated system that is easy to game. So that is a huge source of psychic instability. It erodes personal or community level control. The economy becomes as impersonal and capricious as the weather. We become helpless in its tides.

But where is the overt risk of your biology being monetised by impersonal forces? So far, there is not a single example of what this might mean in a way that is a notable fact.

What fascinates me about the mitochondria I referenced earlier is that the battle occurred in the pitch dark. The chemically formed cell doesn't possess the sentience to know that there is a physical body inside it. The story is that a foreign cell (a mitochondria) invades a eurkaryote. Chemicals go crazy. In the end, rather than killing the mitochondria, the very exact part required for reproduction of the mitochondria is deleted from the mitochondria and appears in the nuclear DNA of the cell. WTF
--Chemistry would have an awfully hard time explaining that based on reactions. — MikeL

This is nothing like the story. The clue is in the word "symbiosis". The deal was mutually beneficial. It worked because the waste product of one was the fuel of the other. Together, both multiplied fruitfully because a division of labour made multicellular life possible.

The mitochondrion (or ancestral bacterium) lost the need for a lot of its genes as it was now safely tucked inside the host archaeon. It only retained the genes most critical for regulating its highly volatile respiratory activity. So the proteins needed to maintain control were kept close at hand. Then the other less time-critical genes could migrate be part of the DNA in the central nucleus.

Thus all can be explained by constraints of metabolic efficiency and genetic evolvability. The relationship was mutual. The genes landed up in the best places. And you will be home to about a quadrillion mitochondria. Things did not pan out so bad for them.

I think you are talking about yourself and not "the physicist." — T Clark

In fact Einstein, Poincare, and others have described as best they can the way they thought problems through. The literature on mental imagery and creative thought is something I've studied. So I'm not pulling it completely out my arse here. :)

You can also see all this in the advance of mathematics itself. The story has been about all the concrete stuff you can throw out to get to the next level of abstraction. You get from geometry to topology by throwing out all "actual distances" and just imagining "naked spatial connections". Then higher topology is where you get to as you throw out every concrete notion of a space you can manage.

The question I place – to myself if not others – is whether or not these mathematics (and in theoretical maths, many disperse systems can be fathomed) are themselves constrained by something that is absolute objectivity (for lack of better terms) or, alternatively, themselves encompass the very notions we hold of absolute objectivity? — javra

Symmetry maths is absolute in its invariance under transformation. So it is a dynamical and emergent "absolute objectivity". And there is likely the key difference.

It is normal to think of the absolute as the fixed and unchanging. But this flips it the other way. The absolute is that which change cannot change. All change is absorbed into what emerges as the limit on change itself.

Stated differently, are the maths themselves representations of something deeper that is – only allegorically stated - immovable or are the maths that go beyond the mind’s eye reality itself? — javra

It's trickier than that. If the mathematical object is an image of a limit, then it is the only thing which can't in fact really exist. A limit is the line that bounds the reality. It stands as the place where reality is aiming for and can never actually reach.

We are used to this in the maths of infinities, or concepts like instantaneous velocity, or the paradoxes of Zeno.

So it is pretty Platonic. A circle is the image of perfection. Rotational invariance pictured in the limit. And nothing real could be so perfect. However it is also free to try to approach that unbroken symmetry as closely as it can.

So yes, in the mathematical imagination, we do just take the limit and see an object emerge from the cloud of all its possible "imperfections". We can recognise the symmetrical figure towards which everything else now stands as a "striving tendency".

And I agree, mathematicians mostly don't take a more dynamical view. Unless they are working in higher topology and imagining how spaces or manifolds emerge from the naked possibilities of actions - the kind of stuff they are talking about with bundles or sheaves.

But in mathematical physics, emergent limits are the go. A successful theory of quantum gravity has to be like that. Classicality is what survives because all the quantum weirdness has averaged itself away somehow.

Hence, for example, is that which is referred to by 0 and 1 – however codified by us - the reality itself, or are these referents universally applicable representations that both stem from a deeper reality which is impossible to represent? (most definitely not via relations) — javra

Again, they would be real limits. And so unreal in being what material being can't reach. But also they would be considered causal, and so real in that sense, if your notion of causality itself is reframed in terms of constraints (or interpretive habits, as Peirce would put it).

So zero and one are names for particular limitations. One is perfectly individuated being. Zero is perfect absence. A constraints-based metaphysics says you can both approach either of these limits with arbitrary precision, and also you can never reach them. A residual uncertainty or spontaneity is simply what constraints-based thinking takes for granted.

So you can reify zero and one, treat then as actualities rather than regulating limits. But I am speaking for the metaphysics which flips that on its head. Now zero-ness and one-ness are wherever we arrive once we start to judge that any difference (or uncertainty) makes no actual difference.

I agree this seems an uncomfortable position to take perhaps. You want something definite at the heart of the matter. And Platonism seems to give you that - the perfect triangle that absolutely exists. Something is wrong if that perfect triangle is simply the emergent image of a host of imperfect triangles - triangles that just look close enough not so that their imperfections subjectively cease to matter.

The Platonic triangle promises you reality because its perfection is seen as the cause of all the actual material world's imperfect attempts. And then my talk of emergence says it is just an a-causal ghost ... like consciousness, the epiphenomenal smoke above the factory. What a disappointment. We were nearly there.

But as I say, a constraints-based metaphysics like Peircean semotics let's you have your cake and eat it. The ghost is causal. Because it real does have consequences.

This can't really be seen when talking about triangles - the creatures of plane geometry. But in nature we are talking about actually emergent situations. And so we are talking about universal objects such as vortexes, fractals and other natural geometries. Self-organising structure. Real symmetries and real symmetry breakings.

So yes, another level of distinction making here. The forms of classical geometry are how we imagine symmetry and symmetry-breaking in a frozen world of linear geometry. They are a good starting point, but they arise in a realm that is devoid of all dynamism. The paper is flat. There is no temporal or energetic dimension, no interaction, being represented.

But modern symmetry maths is so powerful at representing physical reality because its throws away everything but pure permutation. It is all action and no backdrop. Then out of that you get the structure that survives every attempt at self-erasure. The hard limit on unlimited change.

But if not, on a metaphysical level of contemplation, are the foundations of mathematics (regardless of how universal and elusive to the mind’s eye) the foundational reality to you? Or do they, in a sense, emanate as very abstract, manifested representation of a deeper reality that cannot be itself represented? — javra

My honest answer is that the form of existence looks like it can be completely explained by mathematical concepts. Plato was right in that sense. Reality might not be composed of tetrahedrons and other Platonic solids, but there just are structural necessities that we are picturing when talking about symmetries - the hard limits on unlimited change.

So complete success possible on that score. There can only be leptons and quarks because they are the simplest of all possible ways to break the symmetry of unbounded possibility.

But then, on the other hand, that leaves a fundamental mystery. Formal cause we can tick off. Material cause becomes the unexplained. We know there is actually a world that expresses these irreducible forms, but still there is also this fundamental notion of "action". We end up having to take that bit for granted in some fashion.

So there is a deeper reality it would seem - the vagueness that is the boundless Apeiron. A sea of pure formless fluctuation.

Of course I also am happy to have a go at explaining that too. There are ways to reduce that mystery as well. But my point is that the formal side of the equation looks very hopeful - in a way that it didn't need to. Symmetry principles may yield our physicalist "theory of everything".

But I am admitting (or it is what I always say) that the corollary is that this metaphysics depends on the matching notion of "unlimited action". And the existence of that would be a final "why anything?" kind of mystery.

However, also note how the metaphysical question itself has been transformed from the usual "why not nothing rather than something?" to now "why not everything if anything?". And we at least have the answer to that fundamental question. A state of everythingness already mostly cancels itself out to nothing. Unbound action or change must result in the structural invariance which is the indifference of a symmetry.

And that is the bottom-line of the last 500 years of highly successful physical and cosmological theory. Discover nature's hidden symmetries and you have something objectively fixed against which to then measure the way everywhere we can see has been left symmetry-broken in some fashion that is a difference that makes a difference.

But notice I didn't disagree with you regarding the idea of learning making the distinction occur. — schopenhauer1

And notice I was disagreeing with you that general qualia precede particular qualia. What precedes is vague qualia. It is differencing rather than difference that gets things started.

This may seem a technical distinction, but it is basic to Peircean logic and semiotics.

In other words SOME event of internal aspect is occurring to the newborn, even if not the one we are familiar with as discriminatory perception. There is some internal aspect of what it is like to be a newborn. Your major problem is replacing the HARD PROBLEM with EASY PROBLEMS and then constantly dodging the real question when it goes back to it. The result is that now we have semi-absurd answers like newborns do not have inner sensations. — schopenhauer1

Again, you are stuck with only two possible categories - the general and the particular.

The Peircean or systems approach is about having three categories, with vagueness or firstness as the undifferentiated from which generality vs particularity arises.

So all this talk of goal post shifting is simply that you don't understand that I am speaking from a different view of metaphysics. It is why you keep searching everything I say to find evidence of the dualistic sin of representationalism or Cartesianism.

If I am trying to bypass something, it is that underpowered system of metaphysics. ;)

...this is all an example of where you draw your lines, of the division you see between the naturalist, which to all intents is 'things which science can explain', and then all the boo-word metaphysics that you think belongs to anyone who questions naturalism. — Wayfarer

And no matter how many times I say the opposite, you will trot this nonsense out.

There are three camps here. The reductionist, the idealist and the naturalist - natural philosophy being the systems approach that both accepts the reality of all four Aristotelean causes, and sees them as part of the one world.

So reductionism rejects the reality of formal and final cause.

Idealism - if it follows its own logic - rejects material and efficient cause. Or it is forced to dualise them.

Naturalism accepts all four causes and sees them as complementary aspects of the same reality. Semiosis is then the metaphysics that cements the deal by explaining the "how".

Being a natural philosopher, I of course don't in fact accept a hard boundary between metaphysics and science. They are different levels of the same discipline. The theory and the applied.

But never mind, go back to accusing me of Scientism. That way you can be in the right by standing on the other side of the dualistic divide.

Empiricism these days addresses only the materialist notions of that which can be perceived through the physiological senses + logic/maths — javra

But is it still materialism when the "belief" is epistemically grounded in the logic/maths? And the physiological senses are relegated to the job of simply reading a number off a dial?

To be a materialist is to believe in the reality of substances. Stuff that exists in some brute fashion and has inherent properties. Dualists are just believers in two kinds of material - a matter stuff and a soul stuff. Panpsychists believe in the one kind of material, but with two kinds of inherent properties.

Science - especially where it is clear about its epistemology - just says it is all models. We construct qualitative concepts that we then seem to be able to quantify in some useful way.

So if physicists mention entropy, or information, or energy, or quanta, or particles, what is really going on inside their heads?

The lay-person thinks of it as being a claim about "the existence of real substantial being". But really, the words become just placeholders to talk about some observable invariance of nature.

"What is energy? It's this quality the Universe seems to have. Something is conserved as something also changes. I can see a metaphysical contrast between what seems invariant - fixed and solid - in a situation and what is merely contingent, the bit to which we would instead attach some particular number to quantify its degree."

That is all in the end a physicist can say about the Universe. One can see what is generally symmetrical or invariant about experienced reality in relation to what is then the contingency of its possible symmetry breakings - the range of particular ways the invariance can be particularised.

If a physicist is really pushed (and I am talking about the metaphysically informed ones, of whom there are plenty) then the question of "what is real?" does become pretty Platonic. A particle is a point. Unless we consider it as a string, or a loop, or a knot - each of those conceptions speaking to some different set of symmetries or invariances that seem to explain the symmetry breakings we actually then measure.

So any usual notion of "material" goes right out the window. The image left in the physicist's mind is of a pure mathematical object. And then even the object gets chucked out as what the mind's eye "sees" is really all the possible rotations and translations that are the set of possible actions such an object would have. The mind's eye is left only with the ghostly kinesthetic play of pure relata.

This is why you need a mathematically trained brain to understand metaphysics from a truly scientific point of view. Materiality has been left far behind to be replaced by mathematico-logical conceptions. Nothing is left of the Cheshire Cat except its grin. Or in this case, a sense of some structure of invariance which can also only be broken with certain moves. You can bend and fold and twist. Those relations then tell of the heart of existence - the reason why it exhibits "materiality" in some well-behaved and measurable way.

Either get with the program - or you're a shaman! — Wayfarer

Shamanism is an example of getting with the program. That was the point.

You are standing up for uncritical belief. And when that doesn't give answers, you say the "humility" of not even trying should be good enough.

The only way to avoid this miracle, is to make mind fundamental and irreducible. — Rich

Love the confused thought process. Materialists can't explain mind and idealists can't explain matter. You substance dualists really deserve each other. Go at it, boys!

But Peirce's philosophy was an idealist philosophy - if you google the term 'objective idealism', Peirce comes up as the #1 hit. So when I raise that, oh well, that's the aspect of Charlie that's a bit of an embarassment - Uncle Charlie's been raiding the Christmas plonk again. We can do with all his methodology, the hard-nosed pragmaticist, but the starry-eyed idealist Charlie - let's not mention that. — Wayfarer

These are your wishful binaries that must be projected on to Peirce. I get it. We must divide ourselves into opposing camps. We must be team materialism or team idealism. Peirce becomes one more team mate to squabble over.

At a rhetorical level, perfectly entertaining. Just don't mistake it for proper philosophical discussion.

If all you have is a hammer..... — Wayfarer

But you are speaking for those who don't even have a hammer....only an axe to grind.

Which might even - shock, horror - amount to an admission that there is something we don't know. — Wayfarer

That misses the point. You don't even have a hypothesis. You just have a belief that you claim as knowledge. Yet it is a belief that falls into the class of ideas that are "not even wrong" as there is no method to fix that belief in a formalised fashion. The belief is merely a habit - an accident of social circumstance.

If you are brought up in Yoruba or Salt Lake City, it is pretty predictable how you will think existence works. That doesn't seem a very secure way of fixing your beliefs, does it.

...suggest simply a sense of humility. — Wayfarer

In the end, fuck humility. Or rather I like a method that builds humility in formally in agreeing it is "only testable models". Then it become possible to say my model fucks your model. Check the numbers.

You just said, up-thread, that humans are capable of 'devising their own meanings'. But the 'meaning' you see in 'pan-semiosis' doesn't really express any meaning, other than the running-down of entropy; 'negentropy' is a kind of sleight-of-hand of dumb stuff, appearing to be smart, so it can get to non-being that much faster. — Wayfarer

I get it. You still need me to be the "other" of Scientism so your New Age mysticism can seem the good guy here by comparison. It's just rhetoric not argument. But rhetoric is fun too.

And where the hidden dualism lies- the Cartesian theater you wish to avoid. — schopenhauer1

Do I really have to walk you through the reasons why semiosis or a modelling relation is not representationalism all over again?

You constantly change the goal post. — schopenhauer1

Nope. Still in the same place. It's just you tumbling randomly in space that makes it look like they dance about.

My guess is you are in the camp that thinks a newborn has no internal sensation (inner experience) because they have not learned distinction (between sensory nuances like "green" and "blue") etc. — schopenhauer1

In fact what makes me think that is a lack of cortical connections in the newborn brain. The wiring hasn't even grown.

It takes time for the newborn brain to form its discriminatory circuits. We can tell that from EEG recordings. Early on, a stimulus creates generalised firing. The brain reacts much the same to any environmental source of energy. Then the firing of individual cells starts to correlate with an ability to make perceptual discriminations. The brain does get specific and consciousness thus becomes a high contrast qualitative state. We can definitely be seeing red as we are not seeing green, etc.

So having a religious view amounts to a prejudice, but having an aversion to religious philosophy does not. — Wayfarer

Yep. There is a world of difference between a prejudice and a hypothesis. One accepts measurement, the other strives to avoid it.

Life has to be understood as 'self-generating', for ideological reasons, not for empirical reasons. — Wayfarer

Nope. Metaphysical reasoning leads us to crisp either/or hypotheses. Then those alternatives can be weighed.

So either existence is self-generating, or ... the other thing.

And actually, the other thing doesn't even make rational sense. Talk of divine causes or transcendent being collapses in the usual familiar fashion. It becomes in the end just another way of saying "I don't know what makes existence self-generating, so there must be something more".

So we would pursue a story of self-generation and see how far it gets us. As science has demonstrated, that is a huge way indeed.

Maybe your creating God had some choices about the strength of a handful of natural constants. You often trumpet that as the best evidence of "the crisis" of modern physics.

But a God free only to change a few physical parameters - pick one universe out of a multiverse of other options he didn't invent - is not much of a creator really.

It seems that there is a strong cultural predisposition to the notion that life must be essentially fortuitous, and the universe essentially meaningless, as a presupposition of science. — Wayfarer

But that is hardly my position is it? I argue that entropy and negentropy are two sides of the one coin. The essence of pansemiosis would be seeing that the Heat Death of the Universe is just as much a state of exceptional order as disorder.

There is nothing spiritual about this view to be sure. But dualism is precisely what is being rejected here. Again, the two-ness of matter and symbol is a mutually formative deal. It is the third thing of their interaction which is the process making a world.

In essence, the default variable is swapped: one is not a healthy person who is currently not-sick: one is a always-potentially-sick person, who, at this point time, happens to be healthy (were it not for the continual self-intervention into the state of one's salubrity). One is essentially ones' biological risk profile. — StreetlightX

I'm not buying this as a central issue. Our biological risk profile feels very secondary to our true modern concern, which is for "the self" - the Romantic agent expressing every variety of power.

So sure, our bodies are part of that. Beauty and muscles and vigour are all potencies that concern us. And the modern world does promise us their availability in abundance or surplus. For a while - ever since Victorian notions of physical culture and self-improvement - the way to achieve that kind of perfection as a physical agent was to really work at it. A lot of sweat produced the results. Now the promise is that money can buy you the steroids, the plastic surgery, the personal trainer to provide the motivation. Or actually, have enough money - be a billionaire - and everyone will treat you as the most georgeous stud.

But again, this is one facet of the larger concern. It is worth exploring as a theme, however it is not central.

Think again about Romanticism as the response to the Enlightenment. Newtonian mechanics, and then Darwinism, painted a new vision of the human condition. We were reduced to meat machines. That was an actual biologicalisation of humanity - a change wrought by new science.

Humans really are more than biology in being fundamentally socio-linguistic beings. We do represent something new on Earth in being formed by a further grade of semiosis, a further step in the evolutionary story. After genes and neurons came the new code of words. And so H Sapiens became the symbolic species, regulated by a new realm of conceptual abstractions.

We are cultural beings - as well as biological ones. And then along comes the Enlightenment that both recognised this clearly - the moral philosophy of Hobbes, Locke and others got the fact of the social contract - and yet also, the more telling lesson of science seemed to be how much we were actually just "smart apes", and "meat machines", driven by the "survival of the fittest".

So the Enlightenment saw us as socialised animals - and a lot of good moral, political and economic theory flowed from understanding that individual human agency is essentially a culturally forged phenomenon. But then the emphasis fell more on the scientific shock of discovering we were really "just animals" at base.

Romanticism was the confused reaction to that shock. But at the core of Romanticism was the dualistic repost that human agency was sacrosanct. It stemmed not from biology, or even sociology - all that mundane materialistic machinery - but from another dimension to existence, the mind, the spirit, the will, the Platonic Good. The true answers lay within the self - its feelings, its values, its striving.

So when it comes to any modern obsession with "biological risk profiles", it is dream bodies we are talking about, not real ones. Our actual physical health is quantifiably better. At least for the baby boom generation - not so much for the junk food and couch potato generation perhaps. But modern life - driven by Romanticism and its dreams of unbound selfhood, limitless personal agency - does ask us to judge our bodies by the impossible standards of new cultural mythologies.

Shit. Just watch a youtube clip of dudes doing parkour and feel your self-esteem plumet. What they can do is physically inhuman. And you can't unsee it. It is always going to be a benchmark lurking in the back of your thoughts. Multiply that by n other examples of bodily prowess or agency and it is easy to see why you wind up in a state of generalised disatisfaction.

The variety of the modern world - its surplus of personal opportunities - means that in fact everyone can be good at something. We can all train and excel in some way. Yet if everyone is indeed doing that, then we also wind up enveloped by the knowledge of all the million other skills we never personally mastered. We end up both with high self esteem with what we have achieved - perhaps a six-pack or being great at salsa - and low self esteem because the number of things we didn't and never will achieve is inevitably far greater.

And neoliberalism basically does the same thing in terms of one's credit risk profile. — StreetlightX

Again, I would now go back to the bigger picture of nature at the thermodynamic level. The real story of humanity - post the Industrial Revolution - is how we in fact evolved yet a further semiotic step. We invented mathematical language. Ordinary language was about cultural organisation, social interaction. Then it actually became talk about abstraction. This enabled agency - formal and final cause - at a pure technological level.

It seemed that by discovering nature's laws, that put us humans in control of nature. But nature got the last laugh there. It led to the forming of a new system of control that was supra-human. We did become enslaved to a new thermodynamic imperative. Neoliberalism, globalisation and financialisation are just now the symptoms of our having uncovered the possibilities of technology, and those possibilities then flowering as a new level of semiosis/dissipative structure. A new planetary super-organism.

The key is entropy. Until the industrial age, humanity lived of the daily solar flux. We survived on what sunshine had to give. Well, that was also an already mechanised and industrialised existence of a kind. Agriculture had already been through its technological revolution. But it's precarioiusness was tied very tightly to the environment. The rains, the pests, the soil fertility. And then the accompanying social perils of raiding tribes, feuding neighbours, tyrant kings.

But with the Industrial Revolution, humanity plugged itself into the new energy dense fossil fuels that could be dug out of the ground. That completely changed the course of history. Entropically, we were no longer constrained by the daily solar flux. We became politically and economically enslaved to the new globalised mission of "drill, baby, drill".

The financialisation of the world economy was just part of removing the final social barriers to our alignment to that thermodynamic imperative. As you say, derivatives seemed a rational mechanism for producing safe liquidity. They allowed the risks of capital investment to be socialised - spread over the whole of society ... the society which was then meant to benefit.

So what went wrong? Mostly that folk just haven't realised that we are not in control of our own desires. Romanticism misled us about the true nature of being human. We bought into the mythology of being self-actualising agents rather than culturally-evolved creatures. And so because we fundamentally have rejected "society" as the source of our being, we completely fail to recognise the super-societal emergence of a new world order - the one founded on the wants of fossil fuel ... its very natural desire to be combusted as fast as humanly possible.

Our era is the great conflagration. And we are looking the other way. We think it needs to be all about the dawn of H.Romanticus. We are looking forward to achieving the ultimate self-actualised agency where we can all be the best we can be. It is all self, self, self. And mostly that is great fun.

And philosophy is not immune to this distracting vision. Just like science, or politics, or economics, it has become thoroughly aligned with the secret entropic project of fossil fuel. In talking about the need for romantic re-enchantment - the human project where everyone achieves full agency - it is just playing into the great conflagration. Modern society, as a dissipative structure, depends on that "self-making" mythology as the way to ensure it does it best to remove each and every obstacle standing in the way of accelerating "production".

You can look at Dubai and see amazing skyscrapers erupting out of bare desert. Just add dollars and watch it all grow. But eyes properly atuned can see oil speaking directly about its desires. Dubai represents a safe haven for capital in the world's most precarious setting - the oil rich Middle East. It is the symbol that says everything is just fine. The machine is still running even as all the surrounding nations with their installed dictatorships start to burn their societies to the ground.

So the question is what is really going on and where does it lead?

I say we have to first understand this is all about nature - and the entropic imperative is what is natural. Philosophers especially have the least excuse to be fooled by the thought that neoliberalism/financialisation/etc are unnatural responses. We can't get caught up in the Romantic analysis of the human condition. We have to start with the blunt truth the Enlightenment was right about our biological and social being. From there we can examine our current story with accuracy.

And so what is that story? It is that a super-social level of organism has formed - the one busy burning its way through a finite glut of cheap fuel. The future of this super-organism is either catastrophic collapse or a managed transition to some replacement entropic environment. Maybe our inventiveness can keep the game going by green tech, fusion reactors, solar panels, etc. The physics at least tells us this is a possibility.

But the fact that a cartoon character like Trump now leads the free world (no worse, a reality show character) shows how dismal the prospects of being the ones to effect the change really are.

Trump resonates because he is saying the illusion of control and potency is enough. We can take our hands off the wheel and let events whisk us along while we posture and pout, play our little charades of being in charge of where the entropic imperative of fossil fuel wants to take us.

In both cases what is at stake is a kind of massive intensification of individuation: there's nothing about you, even right down to your biosusbtance itself, that escapes the circuits of potential risk (sickness, debt). The precacity is built-in, as it were, right from the beginning of life itself. And again, this has the profound effect of basically completely altering the temporal order: because risk is the default orientation, the mitigation of risk no longer becomes the management of the possible but the management of the inevitable. — StreetlightX

This is what I object to. It is both right, but also missing the bigger point.

Putting a finger on it, you are speaking to what is right for the individual. It is all about the injustices and foolishness of modern life from the personal viewpoint. And my response is that there really is no such thing as the individual as imagined by Romanticism. We are always going to be formed as conscious agents by the semiotic systems of which we must partake.

Remember how you were taken by the enactive or ecological turn in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It is all about being embodied in a real lived relationship with a world. This is a continuation of the same understanding.

There is no choice but to be entropic beings. That starts with being biological. And socially it continues. We can never transcend that materiality. But what we have lost sight of - through being caught up in the mythology of personal agency - is that there is a debate to be had, a practical one, about what control over Homo entropicus would look like.

What would it be like to be self-aware humanity able to formulate public policy that best befits our actual entropic situation?

Everyone is certainly moaning about the state of things. But few people are really asking the right kind of questions.

What's your take on the boundary breach idea? — MikeL

If you mean breaching a variety of planetary ecosystem boundaries - not just global temperature, but biodiversity - then yes, that is an important point. But then the fact we are remaking nature can be understood two ways. It could be disaster. It could be the dawn of the new nature.

To honestly assess the situation, one would have to accept the possibility that it may all be "all right". It could be for instance that we are merely being sentimental about the virgin forest of the world, the tigers and elephants, all the evidence of the biosphere as it was. It is natural all that is being replaced by this new thing of the anthropocene.

I still vote for disaster - now on the grounds that our lifestyle doesn't look sustainable. And then in a secondary judgement, it doesn't even make us that happy.

However the counter to that is we may still be in the transition phase and we will come out the other side with a green sustainable economy within a now anthropomorphised biosphere.

So the general story is that we are transforming the planetary conditions of life at breakneck speed. This requires us to judge the future outcome and tell whether it is desirable. And the honest answer is that it is really hard to call.

I mean I grew up with the Cold War and the Limits to Growth. I've followed Peak Oil and the Anthropocene very closely. Logic always predicts disaster. And yet here we all still are.

The situation isn't terribly healthy. Zero interest rates, low oil prices and climate denial are all symptoms of free market failure. It feels exactly like the pregnant pause ahead of social collapse.

But I do remember it feeling much the same in the 1970s when the symptoms were rocketing interest rates, galloping inflation, soaring oil prices, the inevitability of WW3. :)

That is why I say step back and consider the larger picture, the thermodynamic view - the hidden hand of nature's imperative to entropify. You can't understand what we are doing unless you can see what is really driving us.

Here is how I summed it up a few years back, noting the numbers that tell the story.

1) It takes 98 tons of ancient planktonic biomass, cooked and stewed for millions of years by geology, to produce a single gallon of the petrol we are going to burn in our car.

2) In a day, we burn the hydrocarbon that it would take the full biological resources of the Earth to produce in a year.

3) It takes about a gallon of petrol to produce a modern cheeseburger. The average Western family now "eats" about 900 gallons a year, along with the 900 they burn in their cars.

4) A population of 7 billion humans now harvests about a quarter of all the terrestrial plant growth to support itself, a third of the earth's ice-free surface having been taken over by agriculture.

5) The planet is now mostly constituted of domesticated anthropomass - people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs. The balance on land has gone from 0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10% at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97% today.

6) The total weight of human flesh is now 10 times that of all wild mammals - that's everything from wombats to wildebeest. Our domestic livestock, our mobile meals, then outweighs that true wildlife by 24:1.

So it seems that our present cultural, political and economic settings are perfectly aligned with the laws of thermodynamics. We exist to entropify. Consciously or not, it is our moral choice. There has never been an organism with anything like our thermodynamic prolifigacy.

Is there evidence we are doing anything else with such single-minded vigour? Surely the numbers speak for themselves.

If the gap between what humans do, and what many moral theorists believe they ought to be doing, were even a modest one, then this level of entropification might be thought an inadvertent mistake, a deviation off the proper course that can be corrected with better moral instruction.

But when the numbers are so wildly off the scale, isn't it time for moral philosophy to face up to life's entropic imperative?

I think we are witnessing the birth of new order, and I think we all know it — MikeL

I would say rather that neoliberalism has been running things for 40 years and we are all waiting to discover exactly what form its collapse takes. But it is proving a remarkably resilient beast. So far it has avoided an actual energy crisis and so revolution in the streets.

I can't say I see anything particularly biologicised or indistinct about the neoliberalised world. The dominant frame of analysis would still be that good old mix of the mechanical and the romantic.

The precariousness in regard to health or the body is tied to the increasingly impossible notions of physical, intellectual, and emotional perfection that folk are taught to aspire to. I only wish that there was more evidence of a biological motif to be seen in the current world system.

I can see people might be worried about disease and ill health. But that seems more due to modern life at least being pretty disease free due to medicine. It is when you have a lot to lose that a sense of precariousness sets in. It is when you expect perfectibility that imperfections get magnified.

So I would diagnose the central ill as the romantic notion of the self-made individual. Community has been eroded so as to make life a solitary contest. We have a politics of de-socialisation rather than any biological existential crisis. It is mental ill health rather than bodily failings that are the generalised issue.

To understand the modern situation, I instead always stress the thermodynamic level of analysis that underlies the biological. And from this point of view, our behaviour then seems perfectly natural and not at all indistinct in its origins.

Politics and economics are self organising dissipative structures. As Adrian Bejan argues with his constructal theory, everything we see is a system predicated on fossil fuels. It is just a great heat producing organism rearranging its parts to maximise its entropy flows.

Us individual humans are caught up in forces beyond our control and simply have to hang on for the ride as best we can. Society is being organised to maximise dissipative activity. Biology and culture are stretched to their limits to allow that to happen. And that pretty well covers everything you mention.