How are you defining habits exactly? Is that an actual theory with some mathematical structure or simply vague hand waving on your part?

(A Peircean definition for example does focus on triadic or hierarchical organisation - the maths of thermodynamic complexity. And it is a physicalist metaphysics in that it extends causation to formal and final cause by embracing the materiality of symbols, or sign relations. So the notion of universal habits means something specific in natural philosophy.)

Although my view is that from the perspective of philosophy, the question ought to be treated hypothetically - i.e. if there is such a form of causation, then it is something not acknowledged by current science. — Wayfarer

But to talk about causes, first you have to be able to demonstrate the reliable existence of an effect (so something more than coincidences, accidents, randomness, etc).

That hasn't been the case in parapsychology labs (or at least, only believing researchers are able to report significant results). And in the real world, casinos can set the odds on their slot machines with decimal precision.

Though I guess morphic resonance is the kind of non-theory that could explain the non-existence of negative casino profits. The psychic memory of failed gambling must hang over these places in a way that ensures a steady statistical level of loss on their games of chance. The casino owners think they win because of the mechanical design of their pokies and roulette wheels. But in fact it is this alternative psychic force.

You can see why science as an institution does roll its eyes when you have jokers that can't show there is some effect in want of a theory, then invent theories anyway that apply no matter how the world behaves. It might sound like science to the uninitiated, but it breaks the philosophy of science on at least those two basic counts.

You have to consider all three laws of dynamics as a system to see how the second law scales local symmetry breaking.

So the first law establishes energy conservation/symmetry at the local scale - the inertia of bodies. Then the third law does the same at the global scale - zeroing the baseline in terms of action and reaction so that all the causes of change are defined as being internal to the system. Then the second law describes the symmetry breakings which are the dynamical changes that can now be seen to take place against a generally unchanged, energy conserving, local~global backdrop.

The impulse becomes the cause of change. The momentum becomes the resistance to change. We get that useful distinction between kinetic and potential energy. We can track the conserved quantity of change being moved back and forth across this line on the presumption that as observers we are also fixed by a common frame of reference.

So the definition is not circular but embedded in a hierarchical relation. Change is being confined by the establishment of fixed coordinates both above and below. It takes three laws to describe a system.

(Which is why at the next level, you had to have classical physics bookended by quantum mechanics and relativity. One to fix the local grain of action. The other to make spacetime now fully closed for the conservation of action. That is, both QM and GR open up the conservation issue, but then give you the tools by which to define a closure that makes the Universe safe for a broadly classical description.)

f PSI were shown to be true, it would 'overturn the basic facts of physics and chemistry'. — Wayfarer

Not to mention the profitability of the casino industry.

So do you believe Sheldrake's theory has been experimentally validated?

I dunno. I in fact had a close interest in parapsychology research in the early 1990s as an example of science in real world action. Even did a ganzfeld psi test (as a sceptic, of course it didn't work for me - the "experimenter effect" I guess. :) ).

Same with research into meditation, OOBs, homeopathy and anything fringey. I talked with a lot of those researchers.

So I agree that scientism is alive and well and not willing to listen. But on the ground, there are a lot of believers who actually hold down research positions and who get to publish what the heck they like in journals or at conferences.

Frankly cranks abound in science. I've met a heap of them. And science - as a social institution - can afford to be pretty tolerant of "heresy" because it can trust in the overall rationality of its process. It is self-correcting in the long run and doesn't need to impose its authority on every idea.

Of course when it comes to public funding, attitudes tighten up. But really I never saw any general attempt at suppressing way out ideas so long as they were in some way "science" in being in at least some sense prospectively testable.

And, you see, the reference to 'folk metaphysics' really does put you more towards the reductionist end of the spectrum, I'm afraid; after all, it is the elminativists that speak of the mind in terms of 'folk psychology'. — Wayfarer

But I would be a weak eliminativist in that I am only arguing that there are models that are better or worse in the light of some purpose.

So folk models are those that may be actually good for what they are meant to do - produce a conformity of thought targeted at the creation of an enduring social system. While scientific models are meant to serve a different purpose - talk about the world at the level of abstract, globally invariant, "objective" formalisms.

So my epistemology recognises the part that purposes play in the production of models or paradigms. A basic "subjectivity" in this regard is built into the pragmatic position. Whereas you are talking as if this is a competition between rival objective truths. That is why - in attacking scientism the way you do - you come off as championing the alternative objectivity of the occult.

No, it's deeper than that. It's no coincidence that Dennett in addition to describing humans as 'moist robots', is also an evangalising atheist who sees himself locked in a battle of (rational) science vs (superstitious) religion. — Wayfarer

Or is he a blowhard that likes the thrill of public controversy and big publishing deals?

I find it hard to think he actually takes himself that seriously. He actually seems smarter than that. But also his ego shines through. So its his way of having fun.

And yes, it is also legitimate for rationality to be in a fight with religion. Immanent naturalism is up against transcendental discourses that want to leave the window open to creators, miracles, dualism and other kinds of supernatural goings-on. Naturalism's point of view is that it has gone around closing all those windows and so is creating a picture of nature which is self-organising or closed for causality. The idea of a unified Cosmos makes sense. So to now make a case for transcendent causes, you can't just talk about "the essential mystery of it all". To be playing the rational game, you have to come up with rather more concrete evidence of something that naturalism seems to have missed.

So it is not that there isn't a subject matter. However where I personally part ways with the reductionists is in taking a systems or holistic point of view. And that in turn brings me back towards some fairly "religious" sounding metaphysics.

It's complex. :)

That's similar to my response to Apokrisis (the paragraph about 'where science is in the hierarchy of understanding), although perhaps not so clearly stated. — Wayfarer

Are life and mind any more "mysterious" than matter? The problem with the idea of 'mystery', is that it suggests something hidden, something occult, that might be somehow uncovered, rather than just the simple fact that matter, life and mind are thinkable in their temporal, finite senses, but as ultimate, absolute, infinite and/or eternal, cannot be fully grasped by a finite mind. — John

As John points out, there is a difference between expecting the mystery to be cleared up in some radically different way (revelation? poetry?) and accepting that science - as the refined form of rational inquiry - is a finite exercise. (Or even, as I always argue, pragmatically myopic in that it seeks control over reality much more than it seeks any "truth" of reality.)

Dennett, in particular, is desperate to 'de-mystify' the nature of mind and life - to say 'at last, science has unravelled the mystery'. You see, I think that is in some sense pathological - I think it's driven by the actual fear of the mysterious nature of life and mind. It is instructive that Dennett, Dawkins, and the like, are always obliged to deny or obfuscate the mysterious nature of life and mind. Robert Rosen, I suspect, would never do that. — Wayfarer

This was the bit where you had a go at scientific inquiry as refusing to acknowledge its epistemic limits when really, even these arch-reductionists would see themselves as being anti-occult explainers. So they don't pathologically fear "a mystery" - your suggestion of some personal foible. They quite sensibly oppose "unnecessary mystification" - and so express a communal standard that rationality seeks to apply to the scope of speculative hypothesis.

If it ain't testable, it ain't in the game. And that is a deliberate choice that arises from accepting practical limits to making models of the world.

Of course I then agree that Dennett, Dawkins, the usual candidates, play a part in the great dichotomising cultural war of Enlightenment monadic materialism against Romanticism's dualising transcendence. So outside of the formal boundaries of science, you have this other big show going on as a folk metaphysical battle.

But I like to keep the two things separate.

To get outside of your faculties doesn't mean to be left with none; it means to have changed. And my claim is that this is perfectly commonplace. — The Great Whatever

I don't believe Kant would disagree that we get outside of our capacities in this sense that they are changed by something greater. — John

I think Kant can be credited with creating a ground zero for epistemology. Ultimately we can't know the noumenal in any direct fashion, we can merely suppose. But then for pragmatism, that's fine. We can build up quite reasonably from that.

So Kant leaves us in the position where our only certainty is of some change or development in our state of conception. And then we can either attribute this change to "the world", or the alternative would be strict solipsistic idealism. And that doesn't seem a hard choice given that believing in the world results in a greater predictable regularity of our state of conception. It minimises the change, the confusing flux, that we experience (as in for example the contrast between dreaming and being awake).

So we get down to ground zero - in the end, all our impressions of a world could be a big dream. Yet the way to minimise the flux or uncertainty of our impressions is to believe in the fact that there is the noumenal out there acting as a some external set of constraints.

We can't transcend our capacities or faculties to sneak a direct peek. But it is completely reasonable to think that if we have worked to minimise the flux of our impressions in any way possible - such as principally by believing in "a world" - then by definition, that puts us in the best position to notice further "facts" about the world. With our created backdrop of stability, we are now in a position also to recognise what is a surprise or some new change "out there".

I wouldn't go overboard defending Kant (as my position is essentially Peircean here), but it might rather flip perspective on his great "failure" over non-euclidean geometry. Could we have imagined bendy space without having already fixed an idea of flat space? It took the Newtonian certainty about the one to fully sensitise us to the other as a now measureable "objective" surprise.

To say that the truth is always in the middle seems to be contradictory, doesnt it? — rickyk95

This is a tricky issue because it depends whether you are reasoning about the particular, or about the general.

When you are making claims about the particular, you can expect it to be the case that either something is true, or it is not. The thing in question is either present, or absent. Possible or impossible. It is a black and white bivalent choice with no grey.

But when you are making claims about the metaphysically general, you wind up with a dialectical argument or, formally, a dichotomy. You get two opposed extremes - both of which are "true" in being the limits of the conceivable. A dichotomy is that which is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. So it is a system of thought for reducing vague possibility to two complementary alternatives - with the result that all actual possibilities will be found in the gray area in-between the book-ending extremes.

So we have all the classic categorical dichotomies that drive metaphysical level thinking. Is X discrete or continuous, substance or form, accident or necessity, plastic or static, determined or random, atom or void, etc.

We find that if anything is definitely the case, then it must fall within two bounding and apparently contradictory extremes of being. It might of course approach either bound with arbitrary closeness. Yet it still needs the "other" to secure its identity. You can only know you are close to one of the bounds because you know you are far from the other bound. So that leaves actual being always somewhere in "the middle" - the middle being the spectrum of all the states intermediate between to anchoring boundaries.

And this is why arguments play out the way they do. At first people are uncertain about the right answer, but they have some intuitions. They push the argument strongly in some direction, and that naturally exposes the dichotomous "other" that they are hoping to move away from and indeed leave completely behind. But then other folk can seize on the alternative and start to see its essential rightness.

The space of the possible get sharply dichotomised by a dialectical debate - and eventually it becomes obvious the sensible answer is "somewhere in the middle", the middle now being itself sharply defined in some measurable fashion as a result of the argument. An argument for black vs white results in 50 (or an unlimited number) of shades of grey.

You can actually make a still stronger argument than this.

Saying the truth is in the middle feels a little limp and compromisy. As if we are just happy with a gray muddle. But take an argument like whether intelligence is the product of nature or nurture. Or whether individuals should be free or constrained.

In the end, it feels dumb to say IQ is something like 60% genes and 40% upbringing, or whatever. You want to assign 100% value to them both. And this is because the sum of the two is more than the parts. It is like yes, both are completely true. Both of them contribute fully - and can do so because they are coming from complementary directions and are not treading on each other's toes. Their mixing "in the middle" is not subtractive - a dimming of each other's light. Instead it is multiplicative. By being sharply divided, they make any mixing a much more definite kind of mix.

It is like cooking. The best food combines strong and antagonistic flavours - salty and sweet, crunchy and smooth. You don't want to cook with bland muddled ingredients. It is contrast which produces rich complexity.

So the middle itself now needs to be understood as not just some bland state of greyness but itself a potential dichotomy. It's own "truth" could indeed be bland grey - a simplest possible outcome. Or it could be a zingy, zesty, complex mix of extreme contrasts.

But now we are clearly into territory that ordinary models of logic don't venture. As I say, most people's idea of logic goes no further that reasoning about particulars - the bivalent approach which wants to reduce a claim about a thing to the counterfactually definite options of true or false, yes or no. It is quite exotic even to suggest some kind of trivalent logic which uses the options of yes, no and maybe. Or 1, 0 and -1.

Then metaphysics is built on dialectical or dichotomistic reasoning. Yet for some reason, even this is not a widely understood fact.

Beyond that, I guess it is only over the past 40 years that people have really started to develop a mathematical-level appreciation of complexity - the rich mixture that characterises highly dichotomised middles. And here you would have to turn to hierarchy theory, and fractal or scalefree models of reality, if you want to see a proper "logic of middles".

Hierarchy theory is all about the middles that emerge between complementary bounds. It is a formal way of making the argument I outlined. It is the meta way of escaping the apparent circularity you identified in the OP.

But you want to preserve the mystery because you believe in the mystical already. Your epistemic arguments are soaked in self-interest. You must reject naturalism in any form if it threatens to weaken your case for the supernatural.

That is why you constantly seek out the worst examples of scientism you can find. You need its blatant folly to spare your blushes.

But quite plainly the semiotic approach to epistemology takes the observer seriously. The whole point is that the "observables" of any theory are not objective facts but only "reasonable signs" that mediate a relation with "the world".

You have to keep forgetting that semiosis builds in the observer so you can keep strawmanning me as just another bloody materialist. It gets tiresome.

Dennett's new book is basically a re-hashing of this idea. — Wayfarer

I discount Dennett as a serious voice. Frankly I find him all over the shop. Early on he was saying good things about intentionality and even the socially constructed nature of "self". But then he seemed to lose it with the popular success of Consciousness Explained. I couldn't extract a coherent position from that and haven't bothered reading his stuff since.

So whatever account is given of the neurological and evolutionary processes that apparently give rise to consciousness, also rely on judgements which are themselves imposed on those accounts. (I think that is the meaning of the 'transcendental nature of judgements'.) — Wayfarer

Yep. The semiotic view of life and mind says it is "judgments" all the way down. Nature is perfused in sign. Even the receptors studding a cell wall are making semantic interpretations in deciding what gets in.

Sure, there is something syntactical or mechanical about being a biological switch. But the switch is always acting with lived meaning. It matters to "someone" - the organism - what it does.

And that sure ain't the case with hardware and software ... unless there is a human just off to the side making sense of all its hurried electronic switching activity.

So when eliminativism says that the 'socially-constructed notions' have to be 'stripped away', then why should the neurological and so-called scientific accounts of consciousness have any more weight that what has been stripped away? Don't you think that is the essence of 'scientism' - that it privileges the scientific account of the nature of mind, over the first-person appraisal or insight into the nature of mind? — Wayfarer

But the whole notion of "first-person appraisal" is a linguist social construction. The first mistake about being a mind is to think we "just need to look to see what is really there".

As I say, even an animal might be phenomenal - there would be something it is like to be a bat - yet that is a still a biological construction. This is why pioneering semiologist Jacob Von Uexkull tried to imagine the 'Umwelt' of a bee - the world as it would appear as a pattern of signs serving a bee's purpose. See pix at http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/175316new/lecture_notes/lecture_16/lecture_16.html

So we see "red" or smell "sweet". But to think of those as "mental qualities in themselves" is a very particular way of parsing experience. It is a habit of thought that every philosophy of mind student sure learns to pick up as a social necessity. However psychological science would like to talk about how its not really an ecologically-valid construct.

Our awareness of red is always the awareness of something red. There is an embeddedness that gives the experience a meaning and purpose. It is then a philosophical version of scientism - let's call it idealism :0 - to suppress the always interpreted nature of experience and just try to talk about the uninterpreted "bare particulars".

Qualia talk gives unjustified realism to "sensory impressions" just as much as scientific materialism wants to talk too substantially about "the material world". It is all part of the strong causal dualism at the heart of Western thinking. And that is what Peircian semiotics in particular tries to get away from.

Why do you think that the elimination of mystery is a requirement? Humans are after all subject of experience, and you may never know what it is that makes another subject 'tick'. You can't write a specification for a person. I think the impulse or desire to scientifically explain the nature of the mind really is a form of scientism, whether you want to call it biosemiotic or whatever. — Wayfarer

Maybe I am just more curious than the average dude. I like to know how everything works.

But scientism is different in that it is a self-satisfied reductionism. You know that my semiotic approach talks only of minimising vagueness or uncertainty. So it builds in a notion of its own proper epistemic limitations. It accepts that it might in the end only be a sophisticated form of instrumentalism. And that more closely fits any philosophy of science definition of scientific inquiry.

Plus why should we think the mind is so beyond explanation given the vast number of things we now understand very well and are no longer a mystery?

I'm not following because eliminative materialism doesn't seek to say the mind doesn't exist. Rather the point is that folk psychology conceptions of it - conceptions we have to use to introspect - are quite clunky and culturally scripted.

So with freewill, society promotes the notion of a self that is in complete control, whereas science would say the "self" doesn't describe any particular functional unit, it is the name we give to the functional unity that can be observed over time. The self is an illusion in that sense.

Likewise having a conscience seems to be a big deal for some societies. But that is a very socially constructed thing as you can tell by cross culture comparisons.

So perhaps calling things illusions sounds too strong. We do construct actual habits and patterns of thought that answer to their folk psychology conceptions. If you push me on the existence of freewill, I will demonstrate it by lifting my hand without a problem when "I" decide.

But we also know from science that all phenomenology is a kind of illusion. Roses look red and smell sweet, yet the material reality is that there is some balance of reflected radiation and floating molecules whose bonding shape excites a particular interpretation in the nose.

So in a sense, eliminativism seems to want to talk about "real illusions". And the objection then is the degree this becomes a rather negative and paradoxical framing of the situation. It has a dismissive and scientistic ring - as if science can already explain things through its computational analogies in particular.

I of course say that computationalism - the mainstream paradigm - is itself just more folk psychology. The brain is not a machine like that. Which is why I instead take the neuro-semiotic view as the way to eliminate the general air of mystery. The idea of the mind as a modelling or sign relation is a more accurate theory in not seeking to reduce all reality just to material causes.

However as a general project, eliminativism makes sense. We have to strip away the socially constructed notions of what a mind should be to start to understand the mind from a more objectively and empirically founded point of view.

But who believes in this fiction of either "the happy man" or "the unhappy man"? What's wrong with "the man with a normal emotional range".

In other words, if we deny the veracity of things like free will, or the Self, or the mind in general, etc by appealing to things like scientific data, we immediately end up pulling the sheet out from under us. — darthbarracuda

But this is only a problem if perception and conception are conflated.

You have an idea that you have freewill. But that is a folk psychology concept - a theory you use to account for the observable phenomenology, like when you suddenly decide to clap your hands together in demonstration.

Then science might offer a different conceptual framework. And that may in fact address the phenomenologically observable rather better by stressing how much we don't have to consciously plan for useful motor actions. Most of the detailed timing and execution can be (in fact must be) left to learnt subconscious habit.

So what you really have are competing explanations for your experience.

There is the familiar cultural script where we are all meant to be "observant selves", personally responsible for our impulse control and our individual actions. The fact that we are largely always acting through established habits is not treated as much of an excuse. Society operates on the principle that we are in ceaseless charge of our thoughts and actions.

Then there is the more neuroscientifically realistic account where "consciousness" is attentional priming of a state of mind - a setting up of expectancies. Then subconscious mechanisms pull it all together in a fluid and integrated fashion. The role of attention in the moment of action is not to will anything in self-conscious fashion. That is just an extra load on the mind sure to fuck things up. At best, attention is there at the last split instant as "free won't" - ready to put the brakes on if a motor response is coming out wrong for some wider reason.

So neuroscience gets under the covers of the motor act and can explain the phenomenology in much greater detail. If you try to attend to the exact moment you decided to push some experimenter's button, neuroscience says the first time "you" concretely knew about it was when a reafference message was broadcast across the brain in a fashion that would allow your self-caused motion to be subtracted from the resulting lurch in your general perceptual state. If you turn your head to look at something, you want to know that was you turning and not the world. And even then, only so you could in fact ignore the very fact that you acted and so actually continue to experience "a stable world" as you bumble about doing stuff.

So the neuroscience view explains in fact why you have such a sense of a stable world in which you can then freely act. Conception and perception are the complementary possibilities that arise by this neural trick of distancing "a self" and "a world".

If you wave a videorecorder about (as kids untrained in camera work do), then the resulting images are like a mad crazy collage that makes no sense. Yet that is what our eyes do all the time. But "we" don't notice because all the motion is cancelled out at a preconscious level.

And in the same way, we have this social fiction of being individual observers acting out of freewill or conscious voluntary control. And the fiction works because the brain really does learn to divide our impressions of the world in a way where there is just an "us" that has an intention, and a world that then co-operates with any wishes in fairly predictable fashion. The less we have to think about, the more in control we feel.

But that then creates this clash of theories when it comes to folk psychology vs neuroscience. The folk psychology - as pursued by Descartes for example - wants to argue for some actual dualistic split between a perceiving soul stuff and a perceived world. Consciousness can't be this neuroscientific account of benignly pragmatic neglect - a refusal to sweat the detail. No. Consciousness must be in charge the whole time, all the way through, start to end ... otherwise there is no self, only automaton!

But as I say, freewill, the self, the mind, consciousness, experience, whatever ... these are all social constructs - conceptions used to organise our understanding of who "we" are. And society doesn't need us to have a deep theory about that. The aim from society's point of view is only to inculate the general habit of being attentive to what we do and self-regulate in a socially productive fashion.

However once we start to philosophise about mind, that is when a folk psychology level of conception can really screw us over. We are chasing a social fiction essentially.

This is another advantage of Peirce as a philosopher of mind. He had students like Jastrow as well colleagues like James. He was right in the thick of early psychology where the role of habits in the "machinery" of consciousness was a hot topic. So his semiotics incorporates that basic insight.

It is interesting that SETI, forensics, and certain other fields that are widely acknowledged to be properly scientific rely on the presupposition that the outcomes of intentional processes are objectively distinguishable from the byproducts of natural processes; yet the same principle is somehow ruled out of bounds in biology. — aletheist

I like Charlie Lineweaver's take on the issue....the counter to the argument that we will be able to detect aliens by their wasteful radiation.

Hawking also said that to understand the lights of Earth, you must know about life and minds. What are these lights that shine from planet Earth and what do they mean? I think those lights mean that someone left the lights on.

All of those lights are inadvertent waste. For the past 100 years the Earth has been wastefully beaming radio and TV signals into the universe, not because we wanted to share I Love Lucy with the universe, but because our broadcasting strategies were primitive.

This “shining of the Earth” that Stephen suggests is a sign that the universe has become aware, is maybe more correctly interpreted as a sign that something on Earth has become wasteful.

As we become more knowledgeable and efficient, signals that were once broadcast into space are squeezed into fibres. Earth will soon stop broadcasting its millions of mobile phone conversations. Routers and cell towers will migrate into the wall paper of every living room. The Earth will stop shining.

The conspicuous consumption of resources and the inadvertent beaming of info-waste into space will end.

Arthur C Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but I think Karl Schroeder’s modified version may be more relevant for SETI searches:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature […] either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems.

http://theconversation.com/what-is-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence-actually-looking-for-44977

The key word here is BALANCE. — schopenhauer1

True that.

I also do not consider the pain involved in exercise or learning something new a "harm" so you don't have to include that red herring, which you are prone to do. — schopenhauer1

Is that because the pain/effort of exercise/learning are somehow naturally part of a greater balance? So we can enjoy the short term signal pointing towards the long term gain?

It is hardly a red herring that in an ecologically valid setting - life as it is lived - your monotonic moan about "bad feelings" becomes exposed as childishly simplfied "philosophy".

Are you suggesting that I take some ethical stance that whatever someone believes is the right action must be the right action? — schopenhauer1

I realise that you are happy to derail another thread to promote your pessimism, but I thought the topic was ethics. So yes, getting back to the subject, I see a lot of loose talk about "good" and "bad". You want to reduce all analysis to how things make you feel. Yet clearly there is a reason for folk also taking a more hierarchical and abstracted "right and wrong" based view of ethics. The general good can outweigh the individual benefit in most folk's view.

But hey, you might be solipsistic enough to think paedophiles and crack addicts have a right to their phenomenological well-being.

Likewise, you might say that virtue and self-sacrifice are socially-imposed burdens/forms of self-delusion because your "feelings" are always paramount in the ethical sphere.

I mean this shows why pessimism is such a shallow subject once you've got the point. Yes, living involves always a measure of pain and struggle. And yes, existence probably does have no transcendent meaning.

But living is also fun and interesting. Nature is full of immanent meaning - human minds, being the products of nature, can't help but find meaning everywhere.

You can stay on the ride to see where it goes, or hop off the bus and get it all over. But sitting in your seat and moaning the whole trip seems the dumbest choice.

I don't know what letting "the perfect become the enemy of the good" could even mean. — John

It's a common saying - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

What are you talking about? Are you denying that my phenomenological experience is in fact a balance of the positive and the negative?

Does personal, first-person experience with complex variety not occur for you?

Anyway, you were addressing my question about paedophiles and crack addicts. Do you think their "is" should be our "ought"? No matter how good they think something is, would you not wish to draw a moral line on behalf of society?

Accordingly, mind it is nowadays assumed that mind is a product of nature. I think the biosemiotic approach does offer an alternative to that - that is the direction it's heading. But I think, culturally, we're not there yet. There is another scientific revolution in the making, and I think biosemiosis is one element in that. — Wayfarer

It all boils down to the organisation of power. And power is organised through systems of signs. In nature, that is all mind is - the organising and directing of material flows in pursuit of purposes.

Religion and tradition used to control individual minds. Only social-level thoughts were thinkable. The duty of the individual was to police even their own feelings. Now that was power!

Then came the Enlightenment (the resumption of the Greek philosophical project). A new understanding of power - control over material flows - was created. It needed a new scientific language - a new level of semiosis. But the social stranglehold was broken. The abstractions of mechanism rapidly eroded the mental hold of the church.

But then the Enlightement led to Romanticism. The individual wanted a complete rupture and the right to claim authorship over their own symbols. Every person could - and thus should - craft their own private realm of semiosis. Interpretation of reality became solipsistic as a social right.

But as I say, this Nietzschean inversion was really about a pragmatic power grab - at least for those not too muddled in their thinking to appreciate the development of this new secular game. What more fun is there in the modern world than to be a priest of high culture?

Dress up in black, learn a few Nietzsche quotes, display your messed up tatts and your gender confusion as the stigmata of the blessed, get invited to the right openings, and you are good to go. Yep. It is all about organising power with systems of sign.

That goes without saying. If you are promoting the idea that the only important knowledge is the knowledge that can be determinately modeled, then you are promoting scientism and you are devaluing the humanities, the arts and religion. — John

How many more times must I say that my semiotic approach is founded not on determinism but indeterminism. Constraints and freedoms co-arise in mutually synergistic fashion.

And note how in progressive society, art is on the rise, religion on the demise. There are a lot of things you don't want to talk about in creating your "unified front" against Scientism.

The church once controlled social iconography and acted pretty viciously against the pagan alternatives. Modern art can still create a slight frisson with its "Piss Christs". But generally - in the secular civil society that now dominates the power discourse - the battle has been long won. Transgressive freedom is the new norm - the social marker for being a member of the true elite. Look at me. I can shove outrage in your face. I win.

So "art and religion"? Hah. Whether it is telling me that your big daddy in the sky is going to come and get me, or yours is the exclusive back-slapping club to which I can't belong, it always comes back to the pragmatics of social power.

Of course a balance is desirable, but I don't believe the kind of balance you are extolling here can ever be precisely struck, and nor should it ever be attempted. — John

If a balance is desirable, then why shouldn't a balance be attempted? Why would you let the perfect become the enemy of the good? (Or is this one of those non-commonsense examples of religious/artistic wisdom that I was asking for.)

That would amount to social engineering. — John

You mean like ... politics?

One of the consequences of the scientific revolution was science as a 'mode of knowing' that proceeded by deliberately bracketing out the subjective. — Wayfarer

But isn't this exactly what my semiotic naturalism is about - bringing four causes thinking back into scientific thought?

So there is a dualistic divide which most of the posters here embrace - matter vs mind.

And I speak for a pansemiotic holism - matter and sign.

The idea was that what was amenable to mathematical quantization is the primary reality, and what is subjective is delegated to the mind/soul/observer, and made in some basic sense private. — Wayfarer

Yep. There is a good reason for mathematical quantification to be the "ultimate" in this regard.

Once we accept semiosis as our epistemic condition - we can't experience the world in transcendentally direct fashion, we can only form a pragmatic sign relation - then numbers are the most honest way of dealing with the noumenal. We drop all the pretence of dealing with reality in phenomenologically direct terms and treat our signs as openly and transparently just signs.

We didn't invent maths and science because it was a crazy thing to do. We did it to lift ourselves out of the merely biological to become a community of thinkers, self consciously employing an asbtracted system of sign.

But it's still not a 'first philosophy' in the sense of being a guide to lived experience, in my opinion - which is what I presume John was referring to in 'literature, the arts, and religion'. — Wayfarer

Sure, the mechanical view of nature leaves out most of what might matter. But I'm not arguing for the mechanical view here am I?

Literature, the arts, and religion do a much better job when we want to get beyond purely practical (pragmatic) considerations. — John

Folk are always saying this kind of thing. But on what grounds should my freedoms be constrained by artistic or religious notions? Can you provide a specific example that isn't simply already commonsense.

You are making a pretty huge claim in saying "Literature, the arts, and religion do a much better job...". You might need to back that up with the evidence.

But I also acknowledge that there is room for more than one view on these kinds of questions, in the sense that others are entitled to their views, and that a diversity of views, even if some of them must be wrong, or at least less right, is nonetheless a good thing; do you? — John

No, I don't support a diversity of views just so that folk can be wrong. I don't see that as an important right to uphold. Paedophiles, psychopaths, crack addicts, nazis ... I'm quite happy with the idea that diversity has its limits.

This is of course a natural principle. In a flourishing system, a balance must be struck between stability and plasticity, constraint and freedom. So the genetic variation of species is tuned to suggest many small tweaks and avoid creating a generation of "hopeful monsters".

A natural system will evolve an appropriate balance of diversity. There is a creative optimum where the system ensures it has sufficient variety so that it can continue to learn and adapt, given the irreducible unpredictability or vagueness of the future. Things are "good" when the degree of diversity matches the degree of uncertainty in accurate fashion.

Right. So there are two ways you are prepared to view my contributions here. Either I'm wrong, or if I'm right, I'm only stating the obvious.

Cool.

But the point of all the abstruseness is to get beyond the commonsense level of analysis and develop general mathematical models of natural phenomena. A theory of these things allows for concrete measurement and prediction.

Commonsense is always handy. But knowledge is more potent.

This approach to Aristotle can with quite a bit of pushing and pulling be shaped into the sort of systematic 'new naturalistic' approach that apo favours, as I read it. It certainly has an ecological ring. — mcdoodle

Natural philosophy is this hierarchical approach to telos. The telic is understood as a cascade of increasingly specified constraints.

So telos can be parsed as {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. That is, a hierarchically developing gradation from universal tendencies to general functions to private purposes.

The Cosmos only has to have its telomatic tendencies to be considered telic. But for Baconian scientism, even this maximally attentuated notion of human purpose is heresy. So naturalism is outside the mainstream in that regard.

See for instance http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/Meaning_as_Finality.pdf

In order for Nature to become susceptible to a semiotic analysis, we need to reconstruct our model of the physical-chemical world, as irreducibly triadic. This amounts to a need to incorporate into our accounts of Nature some generalized form of meaning. I suggest in this paper that such meaning can be assimilated to finality.

We probably don't value the difficulty of climbing the mountain simply for itself, but more likely for the changes that overcoming the difficulty in order to climb, or simply the act of climbing, might bring about in us. — John

So you agree that gravity has a direction in that regard? For some reason, making an effort is morally improving. The underlying entropic telos of nature has come into sight right there.

In any case gravity itself is not the value, but merely provides the difficulty (and in a global sense the possibility) we find ourselves faced with if we want, or need, for whatever reasons that do involve vales, to climb a mountain. — John

Sure, the difficulty is the value. That is, the difference in gravitational potential that has been thus created.

So this is the simple example that illustrates the general principle. Human morality is naturally focused on the notion of building the potential for powerful action. We have to sweat to build muscle - whether that is physical, mental or emotional muscle. It costs a lot of entropy production to get there, but we see it as the highest good to build a psychosocial capacity for negentropic action.

So how, in your solipsistic ethics, do you handle paedophiles and crack addicts? They are just doing what makes them feel good, right? Should you be able to curtail their pleasures by introducing some kind of constraint on their lives?

And is virtue not a good even if virtue means some degree of personal sacrifice?

Where do your ethical simplicities stop and some real moral theory start?

Which do we celebrate more - going up the mountain or trotting back down?

So do you have to care about gravity or not?

What I explain is both what we need to care about and what we don't. The world is a hierarchy of increasingly generalised constraints. So something like gravity or thermodynamics are global constraints on our freedoms. And yet if we work within those bounds, that by definition becomes our degrees of freedom.

It's hardly rocket science. But the difference lies in accepting this is the logical structure of nature. Humans aren't nature's exception. We play by the usual cosmological rules. And so even ethical and aesthetic complexity can be explained as pragmatic. Organisation that reflects the "spirit" of the Cosmos.

For anyone interested in the actual application of dissipative structure theory to social order, books are being written about it - http://download.e-bookshelf.de/download/0000/0015/66/L-G-0000001566-0002335645.pdf

We're too moral for this world. — darthbarracuda

Now that's funny,

Even if the desire the Universe encodes is its heat death, isn't Thanatos or a death drive recognised as a telos in Romantic/Freudian thought?

But don't make the mistake of thinking I have to anthropomorphise the Universe to make sense of it's tellic nature. That gets it exactly the wrong way around. The Universe doesn't have to be characterised by some overall tendency that I recognise as being "typically human". It doesn't have to be about love or destruction or peace or intelligence. To approach metaphysics with that kind of is-ought thinking (as we are, so ought the Universe) would be ridiculous.

But on the other hand, if we arise naturally as some local expression of that Universe, then we should expect to see some impact of whatever happens to be its most general tendency. So the way the Universe is would have to have an ought attached for us - to the degree that the Universe needs pragmatically to give a fuck. Which as we all know, is not very much. All that is really forbidden is the building of perpetual motion machines.

Why do you assume morality must be like science? — darthbarracuda

But that misrepresents what I say. I certainly think natural philosophy (or four causes science) is the right way, the best way, to look at ethics and aesthetics. So that can be assumed as a hypothesis and then checked against the facts. Where's the problem exactly?

What does your ethics fundamentally look like in the every-day, and how does this differ from more popular ethical theories? — darthbarracuda

But you've already heard the answer many times. Mostly I simply support commonsense notions about the hierarchical balancing of dichotomous impulses. Society is founded on being able to encourage both competition and cooperation - global integration and local differentiation, global constraint and local freedom.

So the only difference is that my triadic approach explains its dichotomous underpinnings as being natural, and not unnatural. It is meant to be a case of competition AND cooperation, constraint AND freedom. It is not a case of having to reduce nature to one or the other as the good, or the foundational, or whatever the heck else a reductionist feels to be the imperative when "caught on the horns of a dilemma".

Ethics, as far as I am concerned, is always going to be un-moored from the rest of the world, as it's inherently tied to the individual and the individual's freedom of choice, which includes the phenomenology of transcendence beyond the immanent. — darthbarracuda

Yep. That's how it stands. Your belief system requires its foundation in the transcendent. That makes it essentially a position of personal faith. Champion.

What you are presenting here is, as far as I know, something not particularly similar to any of the mainstream ethical views or any ones in the history of ethics and so you'll have to pardon me when I say I am highly skeptical of your ambitious claims. If you're trying to start a Nietzschean re-evaluation of value, which it seems like you are, you will need to provide more than just a blueprint hypothesis. — darthbarracuda

You are very flattering. But even in this thread I posted what Peirce had to say. And there is nothing much I would say that would amaze a social psychologist or theoretical biologist.

Why should I in the end be overly concerned about what you in end claim to believe? That would be crazy, especially when you make it clear your beliefs in the end are non-negotiable. That's why I'm interested in the patterns of the arguments. Those are entertaining and frequently revealing.

As I suspected. You are not here to defend an argument. You just want an excuse to chip in with the ad homs. Stroll on buddy.

Glad we agree. — unenlightened

So you agree that "value" is a relation and not a thing? It is thus provisional on something other than itself and not a primary fact of being?

Big and swinging. Mind your head, coming through.

To remind folk of the key issue as I see it, ethics is generally a topic unmoored because it can't place itself in the world in general fashion. It winds up in transcendental modes of thought where either the conscious self is the solipsistic author of all value, or some appeal has to be made to the dualistic or supernatural, such as determining gods or Platonic ideals.

So I offer the natural philosophy alternative where the Cosmos is granted all four Aristotelian causes. Existence is organic, not mechanical. The Universe in a sense has a mind and a purpose in that it is organised by "reasonable" principles and has generalised habits or tendencies.

This organic view seems hard to swallow because the mechanical view of nature is so technologically triumphant. That in turn leaves notions of the mental or spiritual aspects of life no place to exist except "outside the world". But just because western intellectual culture has driven its articulated truck and got jammed up that particular cul-de-sac doesn't mean that organicism hasn't being off doing its own philosophical thing all the while. Organicism thrives inside science in fact.

Anyway, the point is to grant formal and final cause to cosmological being in a way that is sensible and scientific, not mystical or handwaving. And semiotics is about relations of evaluation or interpreting that start as spontaneous and hesitant suggestions, but which by positive feedback become established as robust habits that have formed their own "umwelt" or world of sign.

So a feeling of good or bad - approach or avoidance, reward or pain - are examples of biological level symbols. They are not perceptions of anything actually noumenal. Just like seeing red or green, they are acts of judgement. When we point to them, we are pointing to signs we have constructed as a reliable and pragmatic way of mediating our interactions with the world.

That is why it is ridiculous to point to feelings as metaphysically primary. They are merely ciphers that stand for an interpretation at the end of the day.

Of course they are ciphers with maximum meaning attached. They really matter to us. Yet still, they are the products of habit and thus emergent and developmental - meaningful to the degree they reliably reduce any requirement for actual further thought or inquiry. That is why "feelings" are fundamentally irrational or anti-philosophic. The Romantic waves them about to put a stop to any unpicking of his or her umwelt. The contextual subjectivity of the sign is treated as an objective fact of being. And when questioned about where this being exists, the Romantic has to give an anti-materialist response as justification. Feelings are have substantial being because they reside in some place called "the Mind", or "Platonia", or "the Spirit".

A cosmological naturalism based on a general four causes realism and the specific mechanics of semiosis (as the way to bridge the gap between "mind and world", or rather top down constraints and bottom up freedoms) instead sets things up as a hierarchy of being. There is a cosmological gradient from the simple to the complex, the entropic to the negentropic, the general to the particular, the necessary to the contingent, etc, etc.

So then from the point of view of the moralising human, we can look out across this orderly hierarchy of concerns and place ourselves within it. We do that intuitively already. We can decide not to eat cows on the grounds they are sentient, but eating cabbages is OK because ... we don't regard themselves as sufficiently sentient just because they can turn themselves to the light or communicate with their peers about pest invasions through chemical signals, or whatever.

Hah. Already I am returning to the point of how unmoored from scientific measurement most moral thinking is in fact. We still do want to apply all or nothing judgements on issues like sentience even when there is a gradient that more careful world modelling would reveal.

Anyway. The point is that naturalism puts mind and meaning back into the material world in a metaphysically rigorous fashion. It models it in a orderly and counterfactual fashion which is what makes it scientific and measurable.

Of course as an intellectual project, this "pan-semiosis" is not yet completed. However if it were a done deal, safely finished, I personally could hardly find it so interesting. The fun is seeing what is happening at the edge of human thought right now.

Ah, solipsism it is then. Pragmatism is the process view, and so it grounds being in acts of evaluation. It is not the feeling that is true (or good, or beautiful) but the sign relation that develops as a persisting balance between a "self" and a "world".

You over-estimate my concern over what you believe. The fun is in watching how the arguments play out.

What smells very fishy is the claim to ground value in the "being of human" and then to start equivocating when you are asked do you mean "human experience".