Evolutionary models, when addressed on their own right, hold that all life is equally evolved. — javra

It is as much ideology to proclaim evolutionary equality or multiplicity as it is to assert winners and losers. There is so far only one species that could anthropomorphise an entire planet. We and our domestic animals, our selectively bred crops, dominate the biomass of the Earth. We are more evolved in having broken through to a higher grade of sociocultural evolution.

It might not make us fitter in the long run if we can't find the sustainable balance within that. But biology can see grades of evolution and doesn't have to answer to what are essentially political projections coming from left and right.

Life exists to accelerate entropification. It creates dissipative pathways to cool the universe faster.

Of course it's contribution in cosmological terms is infinitesimal. But green forest does a better job than bare rock at turning hot sun rays into cooler infrared radiation. The energy goes back into space at a much lower spectral temperature that would otherwise have been the case.

As to the Matrix, it's a film. Does simulated rain make you really wet? Would a simulated factory make real robots?

Also you personify Nature i — MikeL

Because I don't have a problem crediting nature with purpose, even if it is not much of a purpose in being the general tendency to entropify.

So ordinary language gives us two choices - either to chose mentalistic or physicalist terminology. Dualism is baked into our linguistic culture. Biology would offer more accurate jargon, but that might go down so well.

What do you mean by "means" in the above statement "it doesn't have the means to make itself"? A robot assembly factory is able to slap together pieces to make another robot. Do you mean resources? — MikeL

Someone would have to have built the factory, supplied it with power, stepped in to fix the software glitch that halted production, etc. And then the factory is building robots, not building factories.

So natural things are autopoietic or self-making. They develop rather than get built.

Could AI also be a generator of ideas or desires? — MikeL

Ask Siri.

Yawn.

So the difference between process and substance is just too complicated for you to follow? You have to keep talking past it?

Let's count the number of traits of the mind that this statement attributes to a soup of chemicals: — Rich

Where was "the mind" said or implied?

I have no problem at all if you understood me as talking about mindfulness as the concrete action of modelling the world in biological fashion.

And where was "a soup of chemicals" said or implied? Clearly I was emphasising the structure not the matter.

So you are just making the newbie error of reifying a process as a thing. You want to criticise me for believing in my fundmental stuff rather than your fundamental stuff. And yet my actual argument is against that kind of naive metaphysics entirely.

It’s easy to then declare myself a panpsychist of sorts, but the truth is that my current gut feelings (which can always be wrong) find a sharp division between inanimate identities and animate ones; logically, I’ve no idea how panspsychism would work. This is what I’m diggin’ in the dirt for. What attribute would an inanimate identity hold that, though not itself being the awareness of life, could be logically presented not as a divide but as a continuum. — javra

Panpsychists do often just say that it is the special structure of nervous systems and brains - whatever that is - that explains why you get the step up.

So there are two explanations - both of which ape what physicalism itself would suggest.

The first is the idea that if you concentrate things in some fashion, you get a spontaneous phase transition. Condense vapour and you get liquid water. The physical situation (which is completely unmysterious) can be offered as a metaphor to suggest a rarified "mental stuff" might do the same, suddenly changing state at a certain threshold to coalesce as a located first-person point of view.

The other then is that the information processing structure of organisms is what does the trick - just as it does for information processing physicalists. So now the panpsychism piggybacks on the informational explanation rather than the dynamical one.

You can see where this is heading....whatever seems the right answer due to the success of physicalist modelling can be held to be the secret sauce of panpsychic mechanism too.

The mental never in fact explains anything. It just sits there demanding its explanation.

OK, so you hold that consciousness is not substance but rather that some vague matter/info/stuff is — javra

I would start by reminding that I would see consciousness as a process and not any kind of "stuff". You do think of consciousness as a stuff - substantial being - and so you automatically try to understand my position in the same ontic terms. For you, the critical question becomes what sort of substance am I talking about - aha! Information. Or (vague) matter. Or something (some thing).

Still, last I recall, we can both agree that life and non-life are qualitatively different. — javra

Again you just translated the discussion into substance terminology. Where I would say we might agree on a difference in process, you say we might agree about a difference in quality - a particular property of a substance.

To my mind, the physical plane is the closest communal proximity that all co-existent agents hold to the grand finale. It deterministically (again, derived teleologically) constrains our various freewill intentions to a set of possibilities that we all abide by (e.g., nature says: thou shalt not act out one’s fantasies of flying off of tall cliffs/buildings through the flapping of hands lest one fall and loose one’s identity to this world … kind of thing). — javra

It is plausible that when all possible wishes are taken into account, a generalised shared world emerges as the baseline to that. That is also the logic of the "sum over histories" approach in quantum mechanics. The Universe can be understood as emerging from an ensemble of possibilities where the vast mass of those possibilities will self-cancel away, leaving behind only the commonalities that are uncancellable.

So if we average all "desires" or "acts" in a world where the possibility of turning right is matched by the possibility of turning left, then the shared outcome is a world where what is left uncancellable is the symmetry of being poised between two options.

The story works for either a mentalistic or physicalist metaphysics.

Thing is, there’s a bridge that I have a hard time traversing. I’m very set on affirming that life and non-life are substantially different, with the difference being that of awareness. What I’m considering, though, is the possibility of there being an underlying factor to both non-life and life—one that would yet be present in the final end—which when held in large enough degrees forms the gestalt of a first-person point of view as can be defined by perception and perceiver (no homunculus). — javra

This indeed seems a critical problem for your approach. You are wanting to assert that awareness is basic, and yet it only emerges eventually.

So one solution to that is panpsychism - saying that awareness was always there, just dilute and not properly organised to be a structured state of experience, a point of view.

The other would be to turn causality on its head and make finality retrospective. In Hegelian fashion, the world is called into being by the desire that is its own end.

Panpsychism is in fact pretty reductionist - back to primal stuff with primal properties. And the idea of retrocausality is something even physics is having to contemplate, as in Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. Experiments like the quantum eraser show how the future can act backwards to affect events in the past - or at least something that "causality violating" must be the case.

So for both the mentalistic and physicalist ontologies, the alternatives boil down in similar fashion.

Here, there’s yet a duality, as you might call it, between the ontically real “agency” and the information that, despite its causal influence upon agency, is nevertheless an illusion which vanishes in the final end. Though this is from my interpretation, I believe you’ll find it parallels your own: in the Heat Death you uphold, information as we know it, together with all natural laws as we know them, all causal processes as we know them, etc., vanish, leaving instead … well, that’s your territory. — javra

The way you describe it sounds too much like the Cheshire Cat's grin. Once more, you are reifying the process of acting agentially - behaving like a self in form a point of view - as then this thing of "agency". Your claim becomes that an abstraction is left as all that exists. Knock down Oxford University and its essence still persists, hanging over the cleared ground as a real substantial being.

The Heat Death is a more subtle concept because it is in fact a process that never stops, yet becomes eternally unchanging. Differencing still goes on, but it ceases to make a difference. You are left with the same process producing now only the simplest possible outcome.

[For those who deny that bacteria hold any awareness and some minimal degree of freewill, the transition nevertheless happened somewhere along the way toward being human; I pick at this level for my own reasons … As for myself, I’ll not here again debate where the transition first occurred, nor on whether reality is all determinist v. indeterminist. Again, the intended theme here is how one can logically go from inanimate matter to conscious agency.] — javra

This is the advantage of a semiotic approach to physicalism. We can now define the bridge as the epistemic cut between - as Pattee puts it - rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics.

So as soon as proper internalised semiosis occurs - as soon as there is a modelling relation - there is life and mind in some formally-defined degree.

For a bacteria, this sign-processing may be terribly simple. The mechanics of what is going on is completely transparent. A bacterium with a flagellum - a wiggling tail - connected to a chemo-receptor, can swim along a gradient of food scent.

So long as the receptor is signalling "yes", the molecular motors spin the tail, a collection of strands, one way. The bacterium is driven in a straight line towards its heart's desire. Then if the receptor's switch is then flipped the other way - no chemicals binding it, causing the receptor's molecular structure to change shape due to a simple alteration in the balance of its mechanical forces - then that in turns signals the flagellum to rotate in the other direction. The bundle of strands untangle and no longer push the bacterium in a direction. It now tumbles about randomly - until it again happens to pick up a scent.

The point is that if we actually look at the ground level of life, there is just no mystery. You get intelligent behaviour due to semiotics. A mechanical chain of events connects information to action as a hardwired interpretive habit.

This epistemic cut is a small trick. But having got established, it can be scaled to be as large as you like. The modelling relation has no limit on its complexity. Physicalism just doesn't have a problem explaining intelligent behaviour. There is no explanatory gap when it comes to semiosis as a model-producing process. The gap arises only once folk start treating the process as something further - an ontological thing, or substantial state.

Again, the intended theme here is how one can logically go from inanimate matter to conscious agency. — javra

One can't because the dualism is baked in by the chosen terminology. It becomes a word game, not a reasonable inquiry.

There doesn't seem to be a strict cut-off being what is natural and what is artificial. — darthbarracuda

The simple difference would be that the artificial doesn't have the means to make itself.

Nature makes itself whether that be at the level of rivers carving out their channels or bodies turning food into flesh. The artificial only happens as the result of someone having the idea and the desire to manufacture the material form.

under a Survival of the Fittest model I would be looking for where is the selection pressure to do so was when delicious leaves and grass were already in abundance. The ancestor possums weren't attacking each other so there was no need to seek out new niches to live in. — MikeL

If a leaf eating possum suddenly appears, that creates a selective advantage for trees to have poisonous leaves. Then eucalypts having evolved toxins, that creates a niche for specialist eucalypts eaters like koalas.

For every move, there is a countermove. And eventually things settle into some mutual balance that is tolerable for both.

Adaptation into niches without a primary environmental driver to do so seems like a superfluous action. Do you agree with the idea that a creative evolution model and not survival of the fittest model fits best here? — MikeL

But there is an environmental "driver" if there are resources sitting around needing consuming. So adaptive radiation is no big deal. Life would fill every available crevice even if that search is purely random.

Then Bergson was indeed right about the hole in early evolutionary theory - the fact that selection can only remove variety - but hardly correct about the answer for where that genetic variety might come from.

Of course Bergson was years before the machinery of DNA was discovered. We now know how the genetic deck gets shuffled.

Creative evolution seems a better model. — MikeL

To biologists?

First, I wasn't endorsing Lamarckian evolution.

Then on marsupials, you would get divergent evolution to fill all niches because of a lack of constraint. And convergent evolution due to constraints emerging. There are wolf-like and flying-squirrel like marsupials as ecosystems would be organised with similar niches to fill.

By environment, I meant everything that might impinge as information. So that would include competition and predation from other species.

It's the idea behind punctuated evolution. Whole ecosystems can maintain a collective stable balance for some time. Then there is a collective jump to another balance as the result of some perturbation.

I’ve instead reduced metaphysics to a) a multiplicity of awareness-endowed agents (i.e., first person points of view), b — javra

The infodynamic closest equivalent might be agreeing that every material event or degree of freedom is like an informational point of view.

If something happens, then that fixes a departure point for what may follow. In that sense, material reality is a pattern woven from the establishment of multiple points of view. If an atom decays, the event creates fresh information, an update on the physical context within which all possible points of view are determined.

But this is a metaphorical rather than literal description. The having of a point of view is not about awareness as such (awareness not being a substantial thing). It is just speaking to the particularity of being a dissipative event located at instant of spacetime.

How do you propose that identity is established if not via awareness which, as awareness, identifies itself as same/identical to itself and different/non-identical to other? Now, if there’s agreement that this identity is established via awareness, then how is the primacy of awareness (an identity known experientially) abandoned for the sake of primacy of matter (an identity known theoretically)? I anticipate that this will reduce to what is the true metaphysical nature of identity. — javra

I agreed that in evolutionary theory, the global constraint of natural selection preserves identity. So the environment of a species acts to stabilise its identity. If the environment doesn't change, then neither will the species. The causality is contextual. The environment acts as information that regulates species identity. And it can do so because there is the genetic memory to capture that as actual information. The genes can remember the identity that the environment demands. In effect, the genes can take the environment's point of view of what some individual of the species ought to be.

Dissipative structure theory is about how identity persists due to environmental negentropy. A tornado is kept alive by the thermal gradient off which it feeds. Then life has the extra trick of being able to form a model of how it ought to look from a natural selection point of view. It has a self-identity now as it can milk dissipative gradients "at will" due to its control over its own negentropic structure.

I can paraphrase this from a different point of view: the ultimate end is the actualization of absolute order wherein a) all conflict vanishes and b) all imperfectly integral identities become an objectively perfect identity/unity. — javra

That's a good translation.

Physical entropy--to distinguish it from IT notions--is merely the process of taking paths of least resistance toward the grand finale of this absolute order--thereby being determinstically driven teleologically toward the final end of absolute order. Negentropy, were it to approach this grand final (which is itself metaphysically determinate as end) via its top-down causal abilities, would via its own freewill become more determined/determinate in its actions toward the requirements of actualizing this ultimate end - thereby itself becoming ever-more entropic (following paths of least resistance toward absolute coherence/unity/accord/etc. given contextual constraints). — javra

You are now talking about entropification at a more subtle level. But my view then is the dissipative structure one where entropy and negentropy go hand in hand. So rather than the usual simple-minded story - "thermodynamics = disordering" - I am talking about the self-organisation of the structure which creates those paths of least resistance.

So yes, there is an entropy gradient everything slithers down. But only because of the negentropic construction of that gradient.

The Big Bang couldn't have gone anywhere unless it had crystallised a three dimensional spatiality - a directional volume within which to cool/expand. The Universe had to build its own internal heat sink to dump all its hot energy somewhere.

As far as teleology goes, it is hardly the grand kind of purpose that folk traditionally want to credit existence with. Folk want something ringing and exalted to give meaning to the cosmos.

But so what? Maybe organising a Heat Death seems merely a "tendency" within the pansemiotic telic hierarchy of {tendency {function {purpose}}}. But it is what it is.

To me, purpose/telos is intrinsic/immanent to awareness. — javra

But bio-semiosis agrees that purpose is internal and agential and first person when it comes to organisms. They have the right modelling machinery - ways to code and remember.

And then with physio-semiosis, this is what is missing. There is nothing inside a tornado with which it regulates its being, maintains its identity. All that information is contextual - part of the structure of the world in terms of the weather patterns which swept the tornado into local being.

So the semiotic approach can track telos or top-down finality across that epistemic cut separating life and mind from brute dynamics. It explains both an underlying continuity and the sharp disconnect.

The changes that 'transcendental theism' are concerned with, are first-person. — Wayfarer

The question of how to be a better self is an important one. But my argument - as you know - is that the self is a bio- and socio-semiotic construction. So the answers would have to be naturalistic ones, not transcendental.

Of course, that evolutionary view of religion means that one would understand in an anthropological fashion why a good religion would capture a lot of social commonsense. So one would endorse religious moral wisdom without then having to believe in the ontic claims that are meant to give transcendental authority to that wisdom.

You for instance focus on vagueness as an ultimate beginning; I instead will affirm that the ultimate beginning is unknowable by us *. — javra

Again, if one seeks division, one can always find it. But I'm seeking the third path that lies between the very familiar cultural positions of materialism and theism.

So vagueness is just a word to talk about unknowable beginnings in a rational - that is, retroductive - fashion. If two complementary things came out of creation - like mind and matter, or information and dynamics, or constraints and degrees of freedom - then logically the ultimate beginning is where these two things fold back into each other as a naked unformed potential.

I like "vagueness" as that comes from Peirce's attempts to get to the root of logic, or reasoning, itself. If you want to come at metaphysics from a psychological or idealistic direction, then vagueness seems a very natural category as it speaks to states of experience before it speaks to states of being.

And vagueness is about information and uncertainty. Your point is that the beginning is unknowable. Calling it a vagueness is agreeing that it is a state of maximal uncertainty. Then putting on a physics hat, we can understand that in materialistic terms as a state of maximum quantum indeterminism. And when that in turn is understood in terms of the spatiotemporal general relativity, we can cash out a description of a vague beginning as a maximally fluctuating geometry - a "realm" with the most extreme imaginable curvature.

So that is what I am seeking. A jargon that actually does translate smoothly from one metaphysical point of view to its "other". Whether we describe creation psychologically or physically, it really means the same thing.

You view the ultimate end as a materialist form of nothingness (to not confuse it with Eastern notions of emptiness, for example); — javra

Well, sort of. The Heat Death is the finality of natural habit becoming eternally fixed. The laws of nature are finally fully expressed.

So not exactly a case of nothingness. A state of regulated lawfulness has become definite and classical, having started out vague and quantum.

I instead will affirm that the ultimate end—though its occurrence is contingent on the choices of all co-existing agents—is one of awareness unshackled from the limitations/constraints of space and time (even that which pertain to mind and its thoughts), and, hence, from the boundaries of selfhood (and otherness) … — javra

Pansemiosis would be saying a similar thing, but in terms of infodynamics - consciousness not being accepted as "a thing".

So yes, in the current era, there is complex semiosis. You have life and mind on Earth doing its best to break down accidental blockages in the greater entropy flow. But in the end, dissipation will become as simple and universal as possible. All particular points of view will disappear. As cosmology describes it, there will be nothing but the cosmic event horizons and the quantum sizzle of black-body photons they radiate.

So in a sense, "consciousness" - as another word for the process of semiosis - developed and grew complex in the current era. It was located at least on one planet as a human mindfulness. And this is truly exceptional as an event. These human creatures could have the self-reflective capacity to develop a form of semiosis - abstract scientific modelling using mathematical language - that looked to speak to the existence of the Universe itself. That's stunning, no doubt.

But in the long-run, the Universe will head for ultimate semiotic simplicity again. The work will be done. It can rest, forever coasting into the future as the ultimate peacefulness of a Heat Death.

(Yep, some rhetorical flourishes of my own here. :) )

By saying “yup” in you previous post to me, I take it you agree that evolution can be partially simplified into a universal common denominator of “preservation of identity”. How do you propose that identity is established if not via awareness which, as awareness, identifies itself as same/identical to itself and different/non-identical to other? — javra

Well the difference here is now that you are arguing for the bounding constraints to be caused transcendentally from without, whereas I say they arise emergently and immanently from within.

So it is in fact an evolutionary position. What works is what survives. There might have been an infinite variety of possible states of constraint. But one of them would have been the best - the best at doing the job of constraining the identity of the world in a way that caused the world to keep reconstituting itself. And so that particular way of organising things would have won through by definition. History is the story told by the winning side.

Again this is a fundamental physicalist concept. Quantum theory understands collapse as the sum over all quantum histories. And as a theory, this path integral approach has been demonstrated to more decimal places than any other physical theory - as with the calculation of the magnetic moment of an electron.

https://phys.org/news/2012-09-electron-magnetic-moment-precisely.html

So quantum theory is far weirder than any theistic metaphysics in most people's eyes. Yet there is nothing hand-waving about it. It produces the most precise predictions humans can manage. And the metaphysics it employs is about how things begin in a state of vague everythingness (or anythingness) and then that is collapsed by a principle of selection to find a stable identity. Every electron has a little more magnetic pull than it should, according to classical conception, because every electron feels the same "ghostly" contribution of all the other "kinds of interaction" it could have been.

When transcendental theism comes up with facts about the detailed state of the Universe that are as remarkable, profound and challenging, then maybe metaphysics would take more notice of its attempted ontic contributions.

Of course quantum theory is said to struggle to account for the observer half of its formal equations. So that seems to give wiggle room for "consciousness as a transcendental thing". But in fact "observation" is being reduced to thermal decoherence. The informational structure of the Universe in general is doing the (pansemiotic) observing. The path integral or sum over histories story is being generalised so that it applies to the persisting Universe as a whole, not just to the persistent identity of its fundamental particles.

So the theist wants to make the ultimate observer the mind of God. But that is just so clearly anthropomorphic as to be a non-starter.

Some theists then try to create a story of immanent divinity. The purpose which drives the development of being is a different kind of "stuff" woven into the fabric of the Universe rather than the big daddy in the sky.

But talking about a spiritual substance as the source of agency is just good old fashioned dualism still. It perpetuates a mystery.

And as I say, the cultural war is between a scientific view which in the end has dematerialised its own materialism, and a theistic view which has produced nothing of note in a metaphysical sense these past 500 years.

Where are any new ideas, let alone the evidence that stands tested to the precision of one part in 1.5 billion?

He was not an atheist. But he also said his theism was unlike that of others.

So you are still trying to play the game of theism wins - or rather, the theism that maximises transcendental causality, the intelligence that stands outside the world it creates.

Peirce was explicit enough that his theism sought to maximise immanent explanation. His God would be the least kind of transcendental being. The "divine" becomes another word for pure creative potential.

And my point is that the same goes for the atheistic materialist - once they are thinking in systems fashion. Material being is inherently spontaneous or indeterministic - as quantum theory avows.

I was just adding something to my last post that covers that.

As I argue, everyone wants to bat for one side or the other - brute materialism or creative intelligence. So everyone reading Peirce will feel compelled to demonstrate that he too is really speaking for one side or the other.

But what if Peirce - as both a scientist and philosopher - was striving to find the middle path that could do justice to both, without collapsing back into either?

To be explicit, I’m using geometric points as representations of aware agents. — javra

Speaking then for a physicalist naturalism, I would make a few points.

A geometric analogy is fine. The very thing of a mark can be understood to bring into sharp contrasting existence the "other" of the general plane whose unmarked symmetry it breaks. There is now a world divided into the locally marked and the globally unmarked.

You are likely familiar also with Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form (or Peirce's existential graphs) where the primal act of symmetry breaking is imagined as the drawing of a circle. That is now not just a geometric move, but a logical move. The point has an interior and space is marked by a boundary. Logic can be built up by crossing and re-crossing that boundary. As a conception of semiotic origination, it has its advantages.

And the Peirce imagined it all in terms of flashes of chance or spontaneity - a conception that is more physicalist as it unites space, time and energy in the notion of a primal action or fluctuation. But also, starting with a chance action is more compatible with a mentalistic ontology. It speaks to a fundamental freedom or creativity. So if Firstness or vagueness is the unformed potential that is lacking in all otherness, the most neutral conception of the first step in creation is a pure undirected action of some kind - not merely a geometric mark but an energetic move.

As Peirce put it:

The existence of things consists in their regular behavior. If an atom had no regular attractions and repulsions, if its mass was at one instant nothing, at another a ton, at another a negative quantity, if its motion instead of being continuous, consisted in a series of leaps from one place to another without passing through any intervening places, and if there were no definite relations between its different positions, velocities and directions of displacement, if it were at one time in one place and at another time in a dozen, such a disjointed plurality of phenomena would not make up any existing thing.

Not only substances, but events, too, are constituted by regularities. The flow of time, for example, in itself is a regularity. The original chaos, therefore, where there was no regularity, was in effect a state of mere indeterminacy, in which nothing existed or really happened.

Our conceptions of the first stages of the development, before time yet existed, must be as vague and figurative as the expressions of the first chapter of Genesis. Out of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something by the principle of firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense after the first, because resulting from it.

Then there would have come other successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency to take them ever strengthening themselves, until the events would have been bound together into something like a continuous flow.

We have no reason to think that even now time is quite perfectly continuous and uniform in its flow. The quasi-flow which would result would, however, differ essentially from time in this respect, that it would not necessarily be in a single stream. Different flashes might start different streams, between which there should be no relations of contemporaneity or succession. So one stream might branch into two, or two might coalesce.

But the further result of habit would inevitably be to separate utterly those that were long separated, and to make those which presented frequent common points coalesce into perfect union. Those that were completely separated would be so many different worlds which would know nothing of one another; so that the effect would be just what we actually observe.

http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/guess/guess.htm

And of course, modern quantum cosmology would say this is the right way to understand cosmic evolutionary beginnings.

The Big Bang started in a particular state - the Planck scale. A state of maximum fluctuation. Being as hot or energy dense as it was possible to be, it was as energetically curved or spatiotemporally disconnected as it was possible to be.

In the very first moment, there was no spacetime backdrop as such as every point of spacetime was so furiously energetic as to warp its own spacetime like an isolated black hole. But the Planck scale was also the "size" where each hot point could first align with its neighbours to start to share relations and so begin to thermalise. Spacetime could start to shed its extreme local curvature and begin to become connected and flattened. Energy could spread and cool. Classicality emerged.

So the modern geometric approach would understand spatiotemporality as the converse of energy density - a fundamental quanta of action. And this would be represented graphically as curvature. A phase transition where a realm of hyperbolic curvature at every point of space became connected and so collectively flattened as all that unaligned action became aligned in a common direction - a cooling/expanding cosmos running down to its "other" of a perfectly flat and absolutely cold Heat Death. And because this flattening, this act of cooling/expansion "takes time", time itself emerged as a thing to mark change.

So rather than a geometric point or even a logical cut, modern theory supports a conception of Firstness or Apeiron as a hot fluctuation, the moment spatiotemporal curvature hit a balance between hyperbolic curvature (a point that curves away exponentially from any nascent dimensionality) and then by definition, that flat dimensionality which is the "other" that now exists as the ground from which any such curvature could be said to exist. Already, you get both sides of the deal from the one act, just like breaking the symmetry of a blank piece of paper by marking it anywhere with a black pencil dot.

Abstractly tying this into evolution, I speculate that evolution can be boiled down to “preservation of identity”. — javra

Yep. There is a selection principle at work with a physicalist concept of creation as to persist, the world has to work. The constraints that emerge and come to dominate must be the constraints that can globally stabilise.

[EDIT] In case it wasn't clear, what I like about Peirce's "psychological" habit-taking approach is that it tries to stand half way between the two dualistic extremes of brute matter and creative intelligence.

So the first action is conceived of as a chance fluctuation. Both the materialist and the theist could find common ground in that because there is the irreducible element of creativity and agency in that conception, as well as the dumb energy of an action.

A fluctuation speaks to both order and chaos at the same time in being some definite suggestive move in a direction, but it is an act of no particular meaning or significance until, or unless, it also proves to have a context. It must spark the change which is the development of the coherent backdrop against which its own existence becomes a mark, a difference that makes a difference.

So firstness - conceived of naked fluctuation - is nicely poised between the antagonistic world views that demand we begin either with conscious agency or mindless physics. A fluctuation is the least creative thing as an action. But it is still irreducibly creative in being so purely spontaneous or uncaused. And also a fluctuation is very material in being a primal energetic spatiotemporal event.

I see you realise your error. But even physio-semiosis would combine information and dynamics.

What transcendent thing is semiosis missing, given it covers both information and dynamics?

What are you trying to say?

But what is so objectionable in enjoying dispelling mysteries then? Seeking explanations is not the same thing as "demanding" them. Nor is uncertainty minimisation "dismissing" mystery.

You know that your argument must be in trouble when you have to revert to these kinds of rhetorical flourishes, this use of loaded terms, to do the heavy lifting.

I am defending pragmaticism. You are pretending to attack authoritarianism. Yes, that rhetorical strategy is going to win you points with the uncritical. Who isn't against authority these days. :s But still, it is my Peircean pragmatism that you need to be addressing so far as this actual argument goes.

Yes, but I would say an adequate notion of the father just is a notion of "pure unformed potential" and certainly not any "sky daddy". The latter is a naïve hypostatization. — Janus

Great. And so this fundamental potential has no connotations of inherent mindfulness or consciousness or purpose for you? Or at least - this being my position - it has the least possible so far as that is imaginable?

I mean theism always wants the fundamental to be special in that fashion. So it is surprising to find a theistic framework that truly argues for the least possible divinity in the origination of humanity and the cosmos.

Some of the best things in life: art. music. poetry, religion, ethics and philosophy itself find their roots in mystery. — Janus

This is clearly where our worldviews differ completely. All these things are creative semiotic habits - the new things that language allows us to do in terms of reality modelling.

Sure, fiction can be fun, but there is no essential mystery in how it is created or why - psychologically - it is enjoyable.

And mathematical science is the most purely creative act of imagination. It goes way beyond every other sociocultural effort of telling the truth of things in terms of complete abstractions. In the modern world, all those other activities you mentioned have become a reaction to whatever science happens to be suggesting at some time in its emergent development.

Radical trinity might seem the same thing as pansemiosis from a structural view, but there is a big difference.

As you say, your approach wants to make a virtue of that which can't be immanently explained - the transcendent cause that is the divine form and telos. So the mystery of the triadic relation is maximised. It explains the least in terms of a naturalistic metaphysics predicated on the search for causal self-organisation.

Pansemiosis does the opposite by minimising the transcendental element - the first cause or prime mover. Now that mystical bit is understood in terms of a foundational vagueness, or firstness, or Apeiron. It is pure unformed potential and not a big daddy in the sky.

So that foundational "materiality" is not explained immanently by pansemiosis. It is a given coming from "outside". But it is also the very least imaginable kind of "divine cause" in being literally less than nothing.

So in terms of metaphysical reasoning, it can lay claim to being the best model of triadic systems causation - if you apply the epistemic constraint of demanding a scheme with the least possible transcendent mystery or uncertainty.

But hey, I get it. Most folk are really into mystery. :)

Nature is a pragmatic harmony of information and matter. Technology relies on the forced divorce of the informational and material conditions of being.

The answer is always the same. Machines are our way of imposing our will on nature. And in doing that, we are being formed as "selves" in turn. We become mechanically minded and disconnected as "human beings".

Hence the essential dissatisfaction of modern life where the balance is too one way or the other - where either we feel ourselves as becoming overly machinelike, or instead, that material nature is "getting out of hand". Illness, power outages, and other sources of unwanted unpredictability.

We want a balance where we are the unpredictable ones and the world functions with machinelike reliability. Or at least we think we do until that gets boring or creates too much responsibility for making up our own individual meanings in life.

Again, top down is real because it really does shape the parts. However the parts are real as well as - in the long run, as an averaged outcome - their collective action must manifest as that constraining whole.

So it is a triadic or hierarchical action. Each is the cause of the emergence of the other.

And you can see that in fundamental physics now. Quantum physics is contextual and thermally decoherent. The whole does on the whole shape events down to wavefunction level. But then spontaneity takes over with the actual collapse of a physical event. History gets written with an irreducible dollop of localised indeterminism. The context itself is being rebuilt as some running story of classical events that have now definitely happened and so act as a constraint on all further quantumness.

The reductionist can now insert himself in the conversation with his presentism and clockwork notions of causality. But the deeper quantum picture is of a world that is self constructing because of a mutuality between its local and global scales. It starts in a strongly quantum state of indeterminacy at the Big Bang and then evolves its way - decohering/dissipating uncertainty - until becoming as classical as possible as the Heat Death.

At the Heat Death, the Universe is left as nothing but a structure of holographic bounds populated by the cold fizzle of the black-body photons they must radiate as event horizons.

So actually, the basic cosmological picture now is quantum thermodynamic. Classicality only "exists" as the limit of that metaphysics. The mutuality between parts and wholes - between holographic or informational event horizons and black body quantum radiation - is explicit in the new formalisms of cosmological explanation.

Plato used reason as the path to a realisation. So he made a logical argument. The world was observed to be changeable matter so - dialectically - that pointed to the complementary thing of the form that could be its timelessly formative constraint. So far, all very naturalistic.

Then he got unnatural in arguing that the realm of form must be the true reality. Having realised something due to an immanent or dialectical argument, he then reified one half of the duality thus revealed and made it the transcendent or the divine.

Or rather that is the telling theists like to remember. Plato tried to do justice to the material pole of being with his late comments about the chora or "receptacle" that could take the imprint of forms. Aristotle also had his go an reuniting the two aspects of being - bottom up and top down causes - in his account of hylomorphic form.

Anyway, there is a metaphysical approach - dialectical reasoning - that has proven itself as a western method. And science has cashed that out in its own largely reductionist way. Science brings the "conviction of pure experiencing" back into it in the form of observations or acts of measurement. A theory is a Platonic assertion of a mathematical form. We then experience directly the truth of that form by conducting an experiment and seeing the expected result.

So that is the essential difference. Scientific reasoning (as defined within Peircean semiotics/modelling relations) is a method that perfectly aligns concepts and impressions. A theory abstracts a Platonic form. Measurements are the way that the validity of the form can be experienced as a fact. If beliefs can become numbers read off a dial, then that is the end game as that is belief fully symbolised by Platonic abstraction.

The kind of religious experiencing you are talking about is relying on the unreliable feeling of "hey, that feels right". Neurocognition can tell you all about the circuits that subserve an "aha!" recognition response - a match/mismatch feeling of salience.

It is a biological kind of world measurement. Psychologically I need to have a judgement that says either "that fits" or "that doesn't fit". We couldn't act in the world without that kind of biological level capacity for "revelation".

But a sense of conviction is quite wrong as a basis of abstract belief. The western method of scientific reasoning is all about rising above our biological embeddeness to find an objectively philosophical point of view. And so that is why we seek to put belief and understanding on a rational footing where our modelling relation with the world becomes one of fully symbolic theory and measurement.

What is the difference between revelation and realisation here? You didn't say.

Another way to see what is going on with reductionism as ontology is how it regards time. It constructs action in a way that conceals issues of development, indeterminism and local emergence.

So time divides into past, present and future. For the holist, the present is the definite boundary between past and future - the point where a history of events forms a fixed global context of constraints. And in doing so, that weight of the past is what shapes a future of definite possibility. It fixes the set of local freedoms which are shortly to be expressed in some particular direction.

So determinism in this view is evolutionary. The reason a billiard ball is so predictable is because, as a mass, all its possibilities have been shaved down to simplest possible symmetries. It has been machined to roll freely in a straight line in simulation of an ideal Newtonian body. It doesn't have bumps on its surface that might knock it off a path or add haphazard friction to its roll. And while in reality no billiard ball could actually be so perfect, we can certainly manufacture balls that are good enough for a context like playing a game or spinning a convincing analogy.

So note the sly trick that Newtonian reductionism is pulling off when it comes to space as a dimensionality too. There is a holistic constraint at play - the global symmetries of translations and rotations which define inertial motion. The symmetries encode a perfect formal limit towards which all roughness and irregularity of material objects can approach ... as it sheds that very particularity in conforming to the ideal.

Anyway, holism takes the developmental view of time where the present is where the global state of constraint - a history - can be said to determine the future to the degree some set of possibilities, some set of directional freedoms, have been made concrete and definite. One could well be attempting to play billiards with some bunch of small rocks. You can imagine how haphazard the resulting game would be. But still, to the extent that the results remain predictable, the history is determining the future.

So the present is the moment which is the line drawn between this idea of global constraint - the shaping hand of the whole - and then the future which consists of the expression of the resulting degrees of freedom ... which can be highly shaped and so approaching the symmetry ideals encoded in our matching notions of material spatiality, or still quite irregular and unshaped and so rather unpredictable and random. It becomes, conversely, impossibly hard to point to something in the past, something in history, which was a particular cause of that random event.

When it comes to models of spontaneous symmetry breaking - symmetry talk again being the deepest level of metaphysics because it goes directly to the issue of global form - the reductionist is forced to admit that "a fluctuation" made the difference. In other words, the pencil balanced perfectly on its point had to fall in some direction as "anything" would have had the same consequence of tipping its balance. No event could be too small to break the symmetry.

The reductionist then takes a very diferent view of time. It is now all about a present moment that ticks along a spatialised notion of temporal flow in a deterministic clockwork of one step following another. The past becomes unreal. The future is still to be realised. The only truly real thing is the present instant.

So reductionism secures absolute determinism by cancelling away any notions of emergence, development, chance or freedom. Both the laws of nature, its fundamental forms, and its initial conditions, its local material state, are imagined as being fixed and unalterable at the beginning of time. Existence begins in counterfactual definiteness and so progression unfolds like logical clockwork.

Reality is a machine that is essentially timeless. There is only a now that is real in being the sum of all that is causal. An ecosystem never had a choice as its fate was dictated by the laws and the momenta of a collection of particles that obtained in the first instant of the Big Bang.

So reductionism is the flattened view of time. It reduces existence to a synchronic theory of presentism or simultaneity where everything is already always fixed and there is no real development or indeterminism. And that is a really useful, really simplifying, way of imagining reality. You don't have to keep wondering about what is the law at the moment, or what are the spontaneitities that might derail our calculations when striking a billiard ball.

But holism is the larger view. And so it sees time in terms of a past that creates a downward acting, degree of freedom shaping, state of global constraint. Then within that is a future of freedoms to be expressed. There remains some element of fundamental chance or spontaneity that may end up making a difference, rewriting what seemed to be inevitable history's "next step".

To holism, quantum indeterminacy is not a surprise. It is a prediction. Uncertainty has to be irreducible, even if the world is a system with the purpose of reducing that uncertainty to a pragmatic minimum.

So you confuse the immanent purpose of naturalism with the transcendence claimed by theism? Finding creative ways to get the issue backwards as usual.

A key part of the holist position is that the top down causality is something real because it shapes the parts.

So where does sand get its shape so that it might compose a beach? How does it get roundish, smoothed and graded by size? What higher constraints lead to the formation of every particle of sand.

Holism stresses the hierarchical fact that parts are made to fit the whole via development, an approach to a common limit. Parts become in fact parts as their initial irregularity or degrees of freedom are regulated so that they become as identical as matters in the construction of the whole.

An army needs to take raw recruits and turn them into soldiers. Young men with irregular natures must be regularised so they can function as parts of a fighting machine. And once a soldier, always a soldier.

It is this fact about holism - the parts themselves get developed by the whole - that make supervenience and determinism bunk in a systems logic context. Or rather, the parts can be deterministic only to the degree the whole has an interest or concern in making them that.

Grains of sand are still irregular rather than exact spheres. They only need to be roughly spherical and reasonably small to meet the Second Law's goal of maximising erosion. To produce perfectly round and perfectly matched grains would require self-defeating care.

Same with soldiers. They only need to approach an acceptable average.

So because the parts must be shaped to fit, perfect determinism is an ideal and in fact there always remains an irreducible uncertainty or indeterminism at the local scale on which any system is being composed.

This has turned out to be true even of fundamental physics of course. The indeterminism of the quantum is irreducible. And that means everything that wants to build itself up from that ground can't be clockwork determinism. It can only be clockwork on average.

But that is part of the argument. If the global telos is to entopify, the complementary local telos is to do work. Order is the way to achieve disordering by breaking down the blockages preventing a free moving dissipative flow.

Just like good requires the other of evil to make sense as a system, so entropy is defined by its other "choice" - negentropy.

It is not a problem if the conscious purpose of humans is negentropy production as that goal also produces more entropy on the global scale. Every organised act must make waste heat.

So at best revelation, and more likely just learning the habit of feeling a conviction?

The question concerned the purpose of nature, of existence in general. Last time I looked, that lay outside any personal concerns I might have.

Well what is the bleeding method then? You've only assured me that there is one.

You keep changing the subject so I'll just repeat the question...

I don't recognise that as 'purpose'
— Wayfarer

What could decide whether the naturalist or the transhumanist is correct here?

But regardless, there are schools, methods, and ways of validating such 'first-person' understanding, that is still scientific in the sense of laying out a way of proceeding and a way of validation as you go along. That is the whole idea of a spiritual discipline. — Wayfarer

That is the question I asked. So more detail please. How does this validation work and how is it demonstrably better when it comes to talking about nature's purpose.