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.

Compared to say the 50s, where we were in charge, in tight control of our resources, there is a lot more entropy in the system now. — MikeL

The 1950s were rich for the US because oil could be extracted and delivered with an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of 100 to 1. The fuel creating the economy was basically free. Nowadays the ratio is down to 10 to 1. So no boom for average America.

So yes. Owning the resources is key. But there was more entropy going spare back then - as can be told by the gas guzzler 1950s cars.

There is more to modern economics than just having cheap fossil fuel to burn. But also, the correlations with GDP say it is the dominant factor. Hence fracking and its short lived sugar rush that let the US stagger on without real reform post GFC.

Academic education is all about regurgitating for A's. — Rich

Sure, at school, there often is too much stress on regurgitation at the expense of teaching critical thinking.

But the question here, on a philosophy forum, is are you able to demonstrate a capacity for critical thinking?

You have your own faith to peddle. Morphogenetic fields, holographic quantum mind projection and other routine New Age babble.

What people are pointing out to you is the big difference between critical faith and uncritical faith. If you accept no method of fixing belief, then you didn't even learn that lesson at school.

What I object to is faith being shoved down people's throats. — Rich

I think you mean education.

I even objected to it in school despite the threat of not getting As. — Rich

Yep. You meant education.

For some more details on the unsoundness of your argument — fdrake

But Rich rejects logic. Rich rejects evidence. Rich rejects inductive method. Rich rejects the burden of proof. You got it, he rejects it.

I didn't view the youtube clip, but having skimmed it, I think Jacque Fresco is either misusing the term, or I'm mishearing it.

A Gaussian curve is just the bell curve of a normal probability distribution. So like the variation in people's height or IQ, you have an average and then a scattering around that average.

A powerlaw probability distribution is different in having no actual average and therefore undamped variation over every scale. That is what human wealth now looks like.

We used to be clustered around an average - back when we were all hunter/gatherers. Then we were still all fairly average when 80 per cent were peasant farmers. Now you can be anything from the $2 a day income that is about half the world to the Bill Gates earning more than a small nation.

Fresco was describing something else really. The potential for job automation rising exponentially, the number of human workers being held constant, and because of that, individual purchasing power falling to zero.

So I would forget his use of the term Gaussian. He is really talking about the same things as me. The flipside of powerlaw or scalefree economics is that just as there is no top on how wealthy an individual can grow to be, so there is the reverse consequence that the number of those on "below average" incomes increases without sensible limit. You get exactly what we see - a world of mcjobs and zero hour contracts.

Another way of talking about this powerlaw thing is "fat tail" distributions. The fat tail says you get a lot more people stuck at the bottom of the scale as the price of letting the top end soar without limit. Think of novelists or musicians. One or two make it in ridiculous fashion. The vast majority will make less than bugger all.

It's not really important to the political discussion except we should not be surprised by the fact that extreme inequality is what the unfettered free market will produce. The expectation that the distribution of wealth ought to somehow arrive at some Bell curve normal level of inequality is naive. The system is set up already to produce the most extreme possible variety of inequality - one that doesn't even have an average somewhere safely in the middle for the majority.

So actually, it is relevant to the political discussion as the unfettered free market philosophy was always going to screw the majority.

The automation of jobs debate is then a new angle here. There is no reason why we can't both automate life and then manage to spread the wealth of that through society in deliberate fashion.

But I say that more in hope than expectation. Governments have become scelerotic and weak. No one dares any radical moves as the world economy feels too precariously balanced to truly question anything.

But I guess the former outweighs the latter, right? — Wayfarer

Jeez, I gave Tour points for being upfront and honest about his metaphysical prejudices. I then pointed out the obvious flaw in his reasoning. Thousands of workable lipid options make abiogenesis more comprehensible, not less.

Deal with my actual answers, don't just divert.

And yes, any number of research patents and papers in his field of synthetic chemistry don't outweigh faulty arguments motivated by a metaphysical prejudice.

It's not lumpen materialism, but it's still materialism, insofar as the overall principle is physical, namely, entropification, which just happens to throw up apparently meaningful things, like people, in the process. — Wayfarer

It's stronger than "just happens". I said - as a metaphysical opposite or complementary thing - it would count as "meant to happen". It is another necessary fact. We can only know entropy to be a metaphysical thing because there is its metaphysical "other" from which it can measure its own existence.

Of course, if we are just speaking from a human point of view, I can agree that you are objectively right if you want to argue our entropic contribution to the Cosmos is infinitesimal, while our negentropic significance seems way out of scale.

The amount of actual entropy produced by human civilisation hardly registers in the big picture. Who cares if some random planet has a sudden temperature rise of 3 or 4 degrees?

And when it comes to negentropy, we might well be the most complex, intelligent, and creative beings ever to exist in the Universe - or at least until we went 'poof' after the short, bright flare of an anthropocene.

So yes, I am certainly a physicalist - a naturalist seeking immanent explanation with no spooky substances of any kind. And that rules out traditional notions of material substances as well as immaterial ones, as you know.

But it doesn't matter how often I remind you of such subtleties, you will still want to lump me as "other" - the necessary move to make some variety of idealism come out as right for you.

Again, I am neither idealist nor realist, materialist nor dualist.

One has the choice. Either remain trapped eternally in the standard "philosophical" culture wars - the WWE of reductionists and theists thumping chests and banging heads - or find the very small door marked exit. Walk through and discover the third option that is naturalism, organicism, systems science.

Essentially a situation where we can produce things at nearly 0 cost, and yet no one hase enough money to make the wealthy significantly wealthier. — XanderTheGrey

The statistics in operation is powerlaw, not gaussian. The current economic system is predicated on free growth with no mean restricted wealth. That is why extreme inequality - the continual move away from gaussianity - is a natural consequence. The middle class, the middle ground, has already been hollowed out by neoliberalism and globalisation.

But here is the wrinkle.

As you point out, the rise of the minimum waged and sweat shop production means that the wheels should be falling off this "economic miracle". Consumer spending ought to be evaporating, collapsing the system.

But the wealthy financialised the world economy. It gave the 99 per cent an endless line of cheap debt. That allowed the transfer of even more real world assets to the rich in exchange for wages that go now to covering interest payments.

So the poor don't just not own much right now, they are left owing more than they could ever earn in any future. While for the rich, it works the other way around.

It's actually a lot more complicated than rocket science. Rockets are simple. — Wayfarer

Yep. That was the joke.

I googled James Tour, he denies being creationist, — Wayfarer

I googled him too. His line is that he is a messianic jew who thinks it is important to read the Bible every morning and meditate on its meaning. He doesn't hear God literally speaking to him, but he is very aware of His presence.

So at least he is honest about the axe he is grinding. He has strong motivation to read the state of the science a particular way.

But I think the question still remains. The cardinal point of any living structure is that I manifests purpose, right from the very first. There has to be that purposive action for anything to be regarded as an organism, as distinct from a mineral. That intentional ability - not conscious intention, but the ability to adapt in pursuit of the goal of survival - that is unique to living forms, is it not? And that is what seems a cardinal difference from anything in the inorganic domain. — Wayfarer

Isn't that what I'm arguing? It all starts when the ontically distinct thing of information enters the world. Or rather, semiosis and "sign processing". A molecule becomes a message when it material aspects are no longer what is causal. Instead it is the function that is being executed in the name of some higher organismic purpose which is the thing.

A cell pore is just a protein switch. You can explain how it opens and shuts due to the critical instability of its mechanical arrangement of electrostatic bonds. It just wobbles back and forth for "no good reason at all" so far as any materialist can see. Indeed, a materialist would chuck such a flaky bit of machinery in the bin as being fundamentally useless.

But for a living system, that complex molecule exists to perform a function. It is informational in the sense that it performs a crisp logical operation. Shut or open. Them's your sharp choices. And so now the further thing of "choice" is an ontological reality of the world.

So the material world is already busy entropifying. It already has that global thermodynamic goal. That is how the Cosmos exists and persists. It keeps running down the hill by expanding and cooling.

Then the biological world seems to change the game by suddenly expressing a negentropic desire. It wants to live and survive. It gets this idea in its head of being an organism.

However while that is true from a particular point of view - the usual one that evolutionary theory use to tell its story from - it misses the larger point of view which is the grand thermodynamic one.

Now it can be seen that life and mind simply accelerate entropification locally. For some reason, entropification has got held up. Negentropy has arisen by accident in the form of the barriers preventing quick entropification. And so life and mind can get going as more purposeful and designed structure that knows how to fulfil the Second Law's desires.

So life's desire to exist and persist is a sub-goal - a negentropic one that subserves the global entropic one. The fact that it is the very opposite seeming kind of goal is exactly what you would expect if it is to be the complementary or mutual direction of action.

If accidental negentropy has arisen in the Cosmos - like the way fossilised plankton got trapped as petroleum in ancient sedimentary rock - then what could be more fitting than purposeful negentropy arising as the matching response. Entropification which got locally deaccelerated can be locally reaccelerated again.

Indeed, just as we humans are doing for those languishing fossil fuel stores in our valiant bid to waste them all to heat in great big planetary-scale burst.

Of course you will protest again that life on earth can't be so pointless and futile as all that. You feel that being human must have some special significance.

But my argument allows humans to invent their own meanings if they like - so long as they are intelligent enough to understand the constraints that have formed their nature so far.

Thermodynamics only sets the ground conditions. Within that space, we can freely choose what to do. Literally nothing is stopping us.

We do have a choice over climate change and ecocide for example. But also, that choice seems quite polarised in our debates about the issue.

Either we can be hair-shirt greens and say we have to cut down to 100 million people living off permaculture in harmony with whatever scraps of traditional ecosystems remain. Or instead, we can trust to the exponential wonder of technology, the glory of the Singularity, to make a safe transition to our next evolutionary step.

I've always been a greeny, but it is honestly a tough call. Life delights in presenting us with polarised dilemmas - the 50/50 choices that maximise the information content of existence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, etc.

A bit of a diversion in the argument it might seem. Yet really, I'm still talking about the same metaphysical issue. Everything turns out to be dialectically poised in existence for good reason.

So if you are puzzled that the Universe seems to be torn between two purposes - entropy and negentropy - well really they are only the complementary aspects of the one (pansemiotic) process needed to bring existence into existence itself.

I stress semiosis here because the basic idea was recognised by idealists like Schelling and Hegel - as their complementary intellectual response to the Newtonian-inspired Enlightenment realists. But Naturphilosphie and the like didn't get down to the basic infodynamic mechanism like Peirce managed to do.

So this whole thread and the many others like it want to force a hard binary choice. Either brute materialism is right or religious-style idealism is right. By now it should be obvious that - socially - each needs the other as its "other". Our culture is divided sharply because the dichotomisation of our metaphysical choices is the mechanism that drives metaphysical advance (or intellectual negentropy) itself.

But in the end, the bigger story is how the two extremes thus created can find their resolution, their synthesis. That is where naturalism or systems thinking comes up through the middle.

Although no-one ever notices because you still have two cultures at war producing their vast clouds of hot air, or waste heat. Entropification always wins.

I'll repost a longer explanation I gave elsewhere that explains the basic point Hoffman makes in Life's Ratchet. It details the instability or dynamism on which life is founded.

Biophysics finds a new substance

This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.

The key finding: In brief, as outlined in this paper http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf , and in this book http://lifesratchet.com/ the nanoscale turns out to be a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.

So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.

This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transition from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. At the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.

The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.

So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.

So the big finding is the way that contrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.

The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.

In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.

A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where it needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.

It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.

A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.

This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.

The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.

But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.

It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.

So contra conventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.

As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.

And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.

Not that this resolves what life shares in common with non-life that is a continuum.... — javra

Where's the difficulty? The molecular dynamics of non-life is ruled by the laws of thermodynamics. There are a lot of reactions that are energetically favoured but mostly don't happen as they have to get over some entropic hump. Then life has the information that can construct the machinery - like a helpful enzyme - that gets them over the hump.

So it is all the same chemistry. All that changes is information enters the picture to change the observed frequency of some particular enthalpic reaction.

Here is an open letter from an organic chemist to his colleagues about the unlikelihood of replicating cellular mechanisms forming spontaneously. — Wayfarer

The guy is a creationist. So he would say that. No doubt he is well-intentioned but his reasoning is pretty faulty.

For instance, he says it is a problem that there are thousands of possible lipids that self-assemble into vesicles. It is a general property of these asymmetric molecules with hydrophobic and hydrophilic opposite ends. So which one got life going exactly? It's a great big research mystery as there are just so many for nature to choose from.

It's comical really. In contradiction of what you write, exhibit A is that nature seems so over-exuberant when it comes to spontaneous membrane forming that it makes it hard for any scientist to decide which are the 999 out of a thousand lipids that can't claim to have got life started.

Tour pulls the usual creationist trick. Imagine the world as the sterile laboratory of the synthetic chemist where everything has been pulled apart and kept well away from anything that might let it react or develop a structure.

I think it was like a first day trick in my organic chemistry class that the lecturer got out the pure metalic sodium stored in oil to stop it spontaneously combusting in the atmosphere, scrapped off a slice so we could all watch it burst into flame.

So this is reductionist science at work - nature disassembled in a fashion so humans can put it back together by careful construction.

But that isn't nature. As I described with alkaline vents, you have a real world where entropic gradients are already set up and ready to go. You have a working contrast between hot akaline water one side, cool acidic water the other side. A source and a sink of hydrogen ions.

For a lab chemist, this is a nightmare. His laboratory is already on fire! :)

But for nature, this is an unstable reaction with an inherent dissipative direction that just needs some controlling information to keep it burning. So any first small steps that add stability to the events taking place in the vent will be selected for. And then the next steps is for enough stabilisation to be added for little cells of this metabolic activity to break off and survive as islands of "vent gradient" in the open ocean itself.

It's not rocket science.

How then does the unity of the living ameba as identity emerge from the structures of its non-life components? — javra

The simple answer is the semiotic one. When we talk about that x factor, we are talking about the information that regulates the molecular dynamics and so represents the higher purpose, design and intentionality that gives an organism a recognisable global identity.

An organism is a memory for a structure with a direction. The chemistry of life has the special quality that it is constantly on the verge of falling apart. It only hangs together when energy flows through it in the right direction.

This is one of the little surprises of nature that lay folk find it hard to get their head around. The ordinary expectation - the one that comes from being machine-makers ourselves - is that the foundations of systems must be solid and fixed. You can't build an engine from parts that are right on the verge of disintegrating the whole time.

But life is the opposite. Key structural components like microtubules have a half-life of about 10 seconds. They fall apart, and then - given the right energetic nudge - reform. Only the core informational machinery itself - DNA - has stability. The rest is selected for its instability - as being fundamentally unstable is the trick that allows for informational control over that stability. Instability opens the door to being regulated - pointed back in the right direction - by the higher purpose of an organism.

So this is the big secret of life. Unstable molecular foundations are required to allow stable informational identity to be the one in control. The less able the parts are to maintain an identity, the more the identity becomes something that must be held as a semiotic habit up at the level on which information is being accumulated.

Mate, you're hilarious. Getting all huffy about molecular machinery when you believe existence is a hologram .

Try to keep up Rich. Infodynamics is information and dynamics. Has been all along. They morphic resonance and project onto the astral plane of holographic chemtrails.

Yea. Go morphic resonance. Go holographic mind projection. Give us the different story.

Peter Hoffman's Life's Ratchet is another good new read if you want to understand how informational mechanism can milk the tremendous free energy available at the molecular scale. Life goes from surprising to inevitable once you realise how strongly it is entropically favoured.

I keep telling you. Holographic quantum interference mind projection. Nuff said.

It might have begun being about substance ontology vs process ontology, but now it seems to be about abiogenesis. I have no idea what you mean to criticise.

Why not just read the book?

What's idealism got to do with biosemiotic mechanism exactly?

...could you outline the abiogenesis arguments — MikeL

Check out Nick Lane's The Vital Question. He makes a good case for alkaline hydrothermal vents.

You start with a chemical situation that has all the right ingredients. A porous vent with a flow of warm akaline water, high in CO2, low in oxygen, running into a mildly acidic ocean. Then ferrous oxide in the spongey rock acts as the catalyst. Dissociated hydrogen reacts with CO2 to produce methane via the redox steps of formate and formaldehyde, presuming the ocean on the other side of the thin vent pores is acidic enough to be the proton donor.

These very special chemical conditions - which would also have been common in the early Hadean era sea - thus creates an organic starter fuel in concentrations millions of times greater than normal. You have a factory of organic chemistry, a natural dissipative or energy releasing gradient with complex molecules as the waste products.

So you are halfway to the basic metabolic set-up of life. And now proper organic machinery that can "eat" methane - turn it into the kind of crud that makes cells - is energetically favoured as it removes methane and lets the vent produce more.

Actual cells only have to internalise this existing chemistry by forming a vesicle - and lipid waste does this spontaneously in water. Then adding a membrane protein that can act as a sodium pump, exporting sodium ions to create a source of protons (hydrogen ions) flooding in the other way.

So the argument is that a naturally occurring feature - an alkaline vent - is already doing basic organic metabolism. Only a few minimal additions are needed to encapsulate it and take it to another level.

Life begins when there is the first semiotic step - a membrane pump protein dedicated to maintaining a metabolism sustaining flow by kicking out enough sodium ions, using the energy being released by the consequent redox reaction.