But my own argument doesn't deny the observer. It explictly includes observers along with observables. That is why it is properly holistic.

Where I depart from your (theistic? dualistic? transcendental?) POV is that I naturalise the observer too. The obsever is no longer modelled as "a mind" (with all its theistic, dualistic, transcendental baggage) but as "a Peircean sign relation".

So yes. This is essentially scientific in that you take the particular phenomenon and then generalise the hell out of it. But that's not a problem. Its the nature of explanation. Its the way we go about structuring our phenomenological experience so it honestly becomes a map of the territory. We make peace with Kant and stop pretending that even our perceptions are anything greater than habits of sign.

We don't see the noumenal directly. We only ever form a phenomenal relation with the noumenal. And what we all agree is that this relation is "good" when it has a productive balance for us. If seeing reds and greens is a wonderfully efficient way to carve our world at its joints, then just do that. But also don't confuse the modelling with the modelled. And don't believe there can be the modeller or the phenomenal beyond the holistic ambit of the modelling relation itself. Actual transcendence doesn't make sense.

Some variation on "play nice" ... — unenlightened

Yep. Some balance of competition (play) and co-operation (nice) that is in generally conducive to the persistence of the state of being which is the author of that balance .

Isn't this, though, an ontological claim about ontological arguments? — darthbarracuda

Yep. And being consistent, I argue for it holistically. And I argue that holism is just an ontic modelling relation, so that is then argued on epistemic grounds. Then to complete the Peircean circle of affirmation, that model of the epistemology is found to look just like the ontic model. So there is a demonstrable unity of thought ... whichever way you look at it.

So right there you can see why I'm never bothered by accusations of natural fallacies or transgressing the boundary between transcendent unknowns and pragmatic realities (as in your usual claim that I am leaving out the subjective first person point of view on moral questions).

A reductionist can only see circularity or tautology as a logical singularity - red alert, general systems failure!!! Self-reference causes arguments to collapse because ends can't shape their means.

But a holist - of the thorough going kind - starts from the other end and has a model based on the constraint of freedom. Wholes do shape their parts in developmental fashion.

So as usual, you latch on to the self-referential bootstrap nature of my position (or Peirce's and systems science in general) as if it is just an obvious bug - the first thing anyone schooled in reductionist thinking is going to see. But it is that generalised demand for holistic self-consistency which is in fact the feature of my brand of metaphysics. A holistic argument is a generalised constraint on our state of mental uncertainty, not a construction built out off already certain premises or elements of thought.

That doesn't make ordinary logic unreasonable, any more than Newtonian physics is unreasonable, or materialism is unreasonable. They are great tools for thinking within a world already concretely given. Assume your axioms, and syntactically you're good to go.

But when you do want to step up to the metaphysical whole of things - questions about fundamental being - now a holistic logic is required. And regular metaphysics has a proud tradition of doing that (one not employing simplistic deduction but the full Peircean arc of abduction/deduction/induction).

These sorts of "ontological arguments" as you call them aren't the only thing ethicists use. I prefer counterfactuals myself because I consider myself a constructivist of sorts and counterfactuals force us to consider consistency and universality. — darthbarracuda

So then you agree that the whole natural fallacy/is-ought line of attack is pretty irrelevant to metaphysical strength thinking?

If our goal is to recover the fundamental symmetries of existence, we have to go at it dialectically - identifying the local symmetry-breakings and then generalising our way back to their global origin?

Perhaps the most striking problem with natural laws theories (including the rehashed naturalists) is that they have trouble prescribing specific action. — darthbarracuda

Again, you are back to thinking as a reductionist. A constraints-based holism says that the specific is going to be just accidental or contingent "in the end". That is why atomism eventually fails. It can only arrive at the contingent when pursued to the limit.

Again, I have explained this many times. Constraints encode a telos or purpose (they must do to persist and thus "exist"). A purpose is then itself self-limiting because it doesn't care about differences that don't make a difference. It only constrains or shapes the differences that do. Thus eventually at the limit of constraint, things become completely accidental, uncontrolled, contingent. It is all just noise - fluctuations, variation, pure meaningless difference.

Now apply that to morality. The natural philosopher says the existence has its general constraints or habits - like the laws of thermodynamics and dissipative structure. The Universe exists because what it is doing makes some generally coherent evolutionary sense. That sets a backdrop within which there is a broad kind of telos - and also a considerable degree of indifference to how its general purposes are being achieve at any particular locality, like down here on planet earth.

Then human history is another much more local story of the development of some set of constraints or purposes. There are ways of doing things which are habits that work for reasons that are fixed as local structure. Yet then again, in the end, there is always a practical limit to that constraint and so a starting point where it all starts to become pure contingency - differences that don't make a difference (at least right now and not yet - although maybe later if enough others start to join in and something collective starts to build to "change history" and construct revised global constraints).

So a natural philosopher would view morality in this fashion - a cascade of constraints that encode the pragmatic habits that enable "existence", yet which at the same time eventually fritter out at some point in a bunch of difference that doesn't make a difference (except that it then represents a storehouse of potential - the requisite variety - that stops a system from freezing senescently and allows it to continue adapting and learning).

Thus again, as ever, your bug is my feature. If you think "law" should prescribe every specific, then that is the mechanical state of complete constraint with no freedom. Such a system is brittle and not fit for survival as it has no organic store of creative potential from which it could learn.

From the organic point of view, your demand for mechanical determinism is patently "immoral" in being against nature. It is wrong because it is too rigid. And yet also - dialectically - things have to have some structure or rigidity. Thus as usual, the moral debate becomes about the productive balance. Which in turn is going to be historically conditioned - like are we talking about what's best for human organisation living within the ecological constraints of the solar flux, or what's best for human organisation predicated on the combustion of free shit-load of fossil fuel?

Reductionism cannot answer everything, but it's important for things like this, so important that I think it takes precedence over your holism. — darthbarracuda

Sure its a balance. But you want to invert the natural order of that balance. I talk about the dialectics of constraint and freedom. You talk about atomistic construction - and live with its thousand paradoxes, like is the world random or deterministic, competitive or co-operative, subjective or objective, etc, etc.

Reductionism is fine as a tool for the everyday scale of reasoning, where all the holism required to keep it sensible can be provide intuitively as "commonsense". But it just fails when it comes to the big picture level questioning. But hey, if you're not actually interested in metaphysics, just your own state of mind, what the heck?

Morality begins and ends with people and the basic interactions they have with each other and their phenomenological environment. Nothing more — darthbarracuda

Just because it is that way for you personally doesn't mean it ought to be that way for serious metaphysics.

Your arguments are crooked because they are not straight. And to what degree are they not-straight? Completely crooked in being as closed to efforts to straighten them out as possible. We are not even orbiting in the ovaloid ergosphere of your informational back hole. We have reached the perfectly spherical bound of its event horizon. Catch my heels Jim, I feel I'm dissappe.... . .. ...

1.) Whatever does not help increase the species' survival is unnatural
2.) Homosexuality does not help increase the species' survival
3.) Homosexuality is therefore unnatural
4.) Homosexuality is therefore wrong

BREACH! This argument does not work without an added premise:

*.) What is unnatural is what is wrong. — darthbarracuda

Or perhaps this entire pattern of reductionist reasoning is wrong when dealing with holistic realities?

So yes, one can "construct an argument" in good old reductionist predicate logic fashion. And that is a very useful tool for certain purposes. But it utterly fails when it comes to the kind of holistic thinking that answering questions at a metaphysically general level entail.

So for example, from my Peircean organic point of view, sure one can construct an argument based on this kind of hierarchical organisation of cascading constraints, but the irreducible vagueness of logic means there will always be "suppressed premises" at every point. An unlimited supply of them in fact. We can model reality as if it has this kind of propositional closure and get all syntatic on its arse, but reality itself is semantically open ... or at least that is my particular holistic model of the situation. ;)

Then taking this particular premise - 2.) Homosexuality does not help increase the species' survival - it is obvious that evolutionary psychology does apply an is-ought argument on convincing grounds. The natural assumption is that homosexuality must in fact help increase a species' survival. Or at least, make no difference.

Well actually, it is not about the species as a whole, but the genes floating around the gene pool. Yet still, if the choice for genes is either to be favoured or disfavoured, then "homosexual genes" (whatever the heck those really are in terms of the massive complexity of neurodevelopment) should either come to completely dominate or be completely eliminated.

Or wait. Maybe gene pools permit homeostatic equilibrium of traits. Perhaps "homosexual genes" are part of maintaining the "requisite variety" that is the other side of the coin to the winnowing sythe of natural selection that is forever removing variety. Etc, etc.

So take any premise and already it dissolves into a mass of uncertainties and qualifications. It ceases to seem so reasonable as a standalone claim.

This is why so little progress has ever been made with "ontological arguments". Even if the syntactic structure is not a problem, they simply can't prove anything about reality because of the irreducibility of semantic vagueness.

And this is where is-ought arguments fall down - in that general fashion where ontological arguments can't be constructed using a propositional form. To talk about the big picture, you need a big picture mode of thought. Hence why the history of metaphysics has been a fruitful conversation based on dialectical or systematic reasoning.

I've shown how you are making an is-ought argument, but based on a false mechanical view of nature and false pessimistic representation of phenomenology (in a normal undepresed person at any rate).

And yet schoolboy maths contradicts you.

Intuitively, curvature is the amount by which a geometric object such as a surface deviates from being a flat plane, or a curve from being straight as in the case of a line.

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

And curves are measured using the reciprocal extremes of tangents and osculatory circles. Perfect lines or perfect circles.

Why use the reciprocal in defining curvature? It is natural for the curvature of a straight line to be zero. Imagine straightening out a curve making it into a straight line. In the limit the circle of best fit has infinite radius giving zero curvature.

https://nrich.maths.org/5654

Nor will you get an accurate measurement of the crooked thing using the straight ruler. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is what then doesn't make sense. If the crooked is the not straight (in some degree), then only something straight could be used to measure the degree of that non-straightness.

Curve = "...having a regular deviation from being straight or flat, — Metaphysician Undercover

That's the point. You finally got there.

None is the opposite of straight. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yet all of them are defined in reference to the straight. That being the point.

No, I don't agree. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course not. You would argue the toss even with a dictionary.

All those words have a particular meaning, referring to a particular shape. — Metaphysician Undercover

Great. And what particular shape does each of those particular words refer to then?

Curved = ?

Bent = ?

Twisted = ?

So do you agree that "straight" is routinely understood as being the antonym of these various forms of crookedness - "bent", "twisted", or "curved"? They are all ways of asserting "not straight"?

The rest of my argument follows of course, so no need to repeat it.

So when you plug "bent", "twisted", or "curved" into a thesaurus and click the antonym button, does it get all squirmy and evasive, protesting why are you asking, I don't understand? Or does it simply reply that the antonym is "straight"?

We can feel an emptiness at the end of pursuits, a disappointment, a world-weariness. — schopenhauer1

Sure. And we can feel the opposite. So from which "is" should we derive the "ought" here?

You are saying because you, in the end, experience "nothing but harms", then that ought to be the outcome of everyone's "self reflection". If it isn't, you get angry and tell them that they are fooling themselves and not being honest with you.

But if it is natural to feel mixed feelings upon reflection, and we can see a pattern to what feels better, what feels worse, then why shouldn't that be the real deal? Why can't we use our self-awareness to make sense of our world in that fashion?

You want to argue from an is to an ought, and that's fine. But it is just the wrong "is". The way people feel is at least mixed.

Then likewise you employ an outdated mechanical characterisation of nature. You talk in reductionist terms about a nature without purpose or order. So your is-ought argument there becomes nature has no meaning, therefore our personal existence can have no natural meaning.

So your argument is rife with naturalistic reasoning. You simply have an overly simplistic model of nature. Just as you have an overly simplistic account of what it is to experience being alive.

By rejecting an organicist metaphysics which sees nature as reasonable and the only possible source of telos, you do the Romantic thing of making meaning and purpose transcendent. That used to mean God moving in His mysterious ways. Since God died, the standing outside of nature is now left to your own good self - Schop who must judge his existence and finds it wanting.

But again, I say that comes down to a particular cultural way of looking at things. You didn't actually figure out anything new. You just read some books and decided nature is mechanical and so any "submission" to nature is bogus. Life has been thrust upon you without giving you a choice. Feelings of harm have been thrust upon you without any choice.

You see the appeal to transcendence that soaks your argument through and through? There is this "me" that is forever retreating from the advances of the world. Hey world, you force life on me, you force feelings on me. But in the end, what is this "me" doing all the complaining?

Clearly it claims to stand outside nature. Yet I would say - from a naturalist point of view - that it is just a cultural habit making its particular noise. It's a meme. A trope. An example of brain washing. We just don't get to stand outside nature or reality in this way.

This meme that has invaded your head of course fears greatly for its own preservation. That is why it flinches every time the words "positive psychology" is mentioned. The pessimist's meme has a horror of being re-written and goes on the attack.

It's nature at work as usual. Pessimism works to ensure its survival by resisting its annihalation. Do you ever wonder why you feel forced to keep saying and thinking the things you do?

If something is not bent, what is it? If something is not twisted, what is it? If something is not curved, what is it?

Just say the word. :)

Sure, you can define crooked as not straight if you want. But there are all kinds of different ways that something can be crooked. It could be bent, twisted, curved, etc. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now you have all these other description of crooked - bent, twisted, curved, etc. If something is not bent, what is it? If something is not twisted, what is it? If something is not curved, what is it?

Do you object violently to the description of "straight" for some reason?

Describing an object is completely different from measuring it. — Metaphysician Undercover

And so you change the subject yet again.

My point remains the same. Crookedness is defined in terms of a departure from straightness.

Or the alternative is to be able to imagine "idealised crookedness" as the other pole of being from which actual being can then be measured. So now you would be measuring a reciprocal lack of crookedness (and thus an approach to the opposite ideal of absolute straightness).

This is simply how measuring the world works. We have to find some believable ideal and then measure the degree of deviation in terms of that. Then those ideals turn out to believable because they are self-defining by dichotomous logic. We see that reality is in fact bounded by its ideal extremes - and the bit in the middle we want to measure is now a position between the two bounds.

So talking about measuring crookedness by creating a crooked bit of string is not measuring anything. It doesn't give a number that reflects a position on some natural idea of a spectrum that is anchored by "fixed" bounds - or extremum principles, ideal limits.

Do you mean apart from the pun on Tau and Tao? The whole argument is that a full 360 degree rotation is a more fundamental natural unit than a half 180 degree rotation. Then yin-yang is a completion of the circle like that - going through the light, then the dark, to arrive back to begin the cycle again. But it seems a mention tacked on for a bit of fun and has nothing to do with the argument really.

OK. So after telling me how long something is - after all its crookedness has been flattened out - when are you going to tell me how crooked it is?

Huh? That was the bees in your bonnet.

So you keep avoiding my question of how you would actually measure crookedness. Is there any way other than comparing it to what it is most directly not?

You keep trying to shoe-horn your jargon-ridden metaphysics in where it doesn't belong. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. Look at all this talk about naturalistic fallacies and false dichotomies. Who knows what these crazy folk are talking about. Why can't they speak plain english.

And like I've said several times now and you've conveniently ignored, the experience machine thought experiment basically elucidates the core of axiology - welfare. Not some abstract entropic neo-scientific Taoist b.s. — darthbarracuda

Are you deliberately spouting gobbledegook now to make some clever point? It's all way over my head.

We all recognize that no value exists in the real world. — darthbarracuda

But ... but ... but ... I just said that is exactly the only place any valuation is taking place.

Why are you not familiar with things like depressive realism, terror management theory, or observed repression techniques? — darthbarracuda

Goodness gracious. All this jargon I'm meant to know.

...rant continues in same vein... — darthbarracuda

Zzzzzzzzz....

So how are you measuring crookedness? You have thrown away the notion of its converse - the ideal of the perfectly straight. What now? Talk me through your solution. What is this better tool that doesn't base itself on the ideal of the perfectly straight?

I explained that I would object to using a straight ruler to measure a crooked object. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is a crooked object one that is not straight in your view? If so, you have just defined it in contrast to straightness. You are claiming to have measured some degree of departure from the ideal.

But please, if you are measuring crookedness in some other fashion, explain away.

How are you defining naturalistic fallacy? The original version was the claim that what feels good is what is good. And clearly that isn't what I argue in any way.

Your version is "what nature does is what is good". But I don't see that as a fallacy. And also as I say, that is because I don't believe in "goodness" in the usual transcendental fashion. It is the Platonic belief that "the good" is some objective quality that I reject - and so any version of the notion has to be naturalistic and immanent in my metaphysics.

If you ask me what is the good, I would have to say look to nature and see what it is doing. It seems to like entropification but also negenentropic stucture (as you can't have one without the other in fact). It seems to like homeostatic enduring balances (as what else could exist?).

So we can look to nature and see its basic necessary logic when it comes to the question of Being. And clearly my naturalism doesn't attach any superfluous human valuation to what nature "likes" - even as it does turn the metaphysical conversation around to now grant existence its own "mind" in terms of formal and final purpose.

So the difference between our perspectives is that I say Being has to be a story of hierarchically-organised structural constraints on material freedoms. That simply is the definition of Being.

And within that metaphysics, talk of non-Being makes no sense. It wasn't an alternative possibility. If there is Being, the only alternative (the state from which things begun) would be the everythingness of disorganised possibility - a Vagueness, Firstness, Apeiron or Chaos, to use the various technical metaphysical terms.

Well you can in fact have non-Being as a finality. Where existence is all ending up is in the crisp emptiness of a Heat Death universe. An utterly generic structure with utterly reduced freedoms. So nature is heading there - and we would call that "good" if we were still trying to play your game of applying transcendental valuations to a tale of immanent self-organisation.

But clearly, that isn't how I would think about the good. My argument is that - naturalistically - the good itself is going to be a dichotomy. So that is why it makes some naturalistic sense that both negentropy and entropy feel good to us humans...and also feel bad.

We are surfing a wave of entropification. It is exhilarating to carve out shapes on a crashing wall of water. And so that seems a metaphor to me for how to live life.

But you refuse to engage with that other way of looking at things. You insist that you can start apart from nature and judge it transcendentally. You can focus on suffering and burdens and every other thing that already takes your own notion of the good as its reference point, so as to justify the claim that living is irretrievably shit.

None of what you argue rings true to my science-informed view even though I can see why you would say it.

For example, it is no surprise that "consciousness" - that is attentional level processing - seems to be full of the negative. Attention is what is reserved for dealing with the uncertain, the unstable, the threatening, the unsolved. So if you focus on what mostly catches your attention while living, mostly it is another problem to solve walking in through the door.

Yet psychology will tell you that most of life is lived as a matter or habit or automaticism. Like an iceberg, the bulk of life is assimilated smoothly with barely making a ripple. That is, if we are well-adjusted. Life just flows and suffering or effort feels minimal.

So that is why I keep referring you to positive psychology. It diagnoses the facts of the mind correctly. There is a natural way that things are meant to work. And your obsessing on a pessimistic "philosophy" that might justify a lack of fit and flow is not going to help.

Sure, I agree that the world isn't perfect and actually does have some deep issues that require critical thought. I continually point out the clash that has arisen between a humanity adapted to live at the pace of the daily solar flux and our recent switch to a life predicated on blowing up fossil fuels instead. Humanity has adjusted rather too successfully to blowing up the planet. We have a real life problem and it is quite right to step back and question that (especially if you have kids to be concerned about).

So my objection to your pessimism is that it is not just shallow metaphysics but an actual distraction from facing the realities of nature. You can't fight global warming if you have some pollyannish view that what humans are doing in wanting to surf this really collossal wave is somehow unnatural, so everyone is suddenly just going to come to their senses and fix things for the environment.

Again, you are fighting battles that are already out of date because the response follows on a generation after the emergence of the new possibility.

Romanticism was the natural reaction to the Enlightenment. Existentialism was the natural reaction to Industrialisation. Even anti-natalism is some kind of delayed reaction ... kill me now as I reject your relentless Consumerist affirmation of life as an exponential trajectory of entropy production.

Philosophy, if it is to be any real use, has to be more up with the play than that. But then that's the power of the transcendental romantic tradition I guess. It is its own thing, sitting in a dark corner and thinking up ever more extravagant ways to complain.

What jargon were you struggling with exactly in the bit you quoted?

But given your rhetorical strategy is to keep tooting "naturalistic fallacy", there's not much to say. One is either a immanent naturalist or a transcendent romantic on these issues. You've made your choice. You believe the mind stands apart from its own conditions of being. You are not interested in being part of nature. Well fine.

Crikey. That's nothing like how Kerr explained it. He said his metric was a mathematical description of a flat space containing a spinning object. Those were the two parameters that finally popped out as the solution to an appropriate simplification of the general equations. But hey, what do these "experts" know, eh?

I feel like responding to you is exactly like chucking information down a black hole. The maximum entropy condition applies. Understanding is bent until no light could ever escape the perfect orb of denial.

But first we must figure out why the straight ruler is not giving an accurate measurement. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you don't think GR might help with that? Or do you accept the calculation of geodesics - only not in the vicinity of a black hole for some reason?

the straight ruler wont tell you why the thing you are trying to measure is crooked — Metaphysician Undercover

Except GR is telling you why your (Newtonian) ruler has a limit to its crookedness. The metric might curve, but it it can't be more curved than the surface of a sphere. A sphere is absolutely crooked - crookedness gone to its equilibrium limit. Talk of things being rounder than a circle is unphysical craziness.

And GR also defines the opposing limit of non-Euclidean curvature in saying that rulers could be bent hyperbolically the other way. Kind of like a white hole. Or the "inside" of inflation. That again is a limit-based argument. You can't diverge any faster than at an exponential rate. Crookedness in both directions has its geometric limits.

So a straight ruler has to live in an actually flat world - perfectly poised for no particular reason between the hyperspheric and hyperbolic limits on curvature. Or else we accept it bends with its world due to the world's gravitational contents, but we have ways of factoring that energetic out of our measurements. We know how to make relativistic corrrections so we can treat the world as if it met our demands to just be flat ... and its material contents don't make a difference to that.

But I'm not the one complaining about the fact there exists a whole world out there where people talk funny.

So, the intent of your whole account is not to represent reality? Has the " implied need for realism, completeness, faithfulness. etc." "dropped out' of it? — John

That's a good point. I was talking about the biological level of neural modelling. And that is much more strictly pragmatic. Animals really are locked into a practical relationship with their environments.

Humans - though the development of words and numbers - have shifted to a far more abstract and philosophical relation with existence ... apparently.

But then the counter to that is check out what we mostly actually do and it is still pragmatic. We are simply learning to see our environment in a way that gives us greater technological control. We are imagining the world as a set of concealed sources of energy and material that can be redirected to fulfill our general (entropic) desires. So a colonial settler arrives in a new country and sees immediately forests that could be fields, hills that could be forts.

And yes, I would be quixotic perhaps in wanting to step back from all that practical activity to try to see its reality - stand outside of it to make sense of it ... knowing it is still just another exercise in mapping perhaps.

But there are reasons to think that it is not just a new level of arbitrary mapping. Reality is turning out to have mathematical or Platonic strength irreducibles. That is how I regard the metaphysics of Peircean semiosis. It captures the fundamental causal logic of existence. And so what begins as mere epistemology becomes the ontological hypothesis being empirically explored.

So semiosis starts as a model of human psychology. And it turns out (the reason I got involved) to be precisely how biology now understands the causal logic of living systems. Then the next step after that is to see that even the new science of dissipative structures (all that stuff that used to be classified as the new maths of fractals, chaos, complexity and self-organisation) is accounted for causally by the rational machinery of semiotics.

Thus semiosis is of course just another metaphysical map. But also it could prove to be the ultimate mapping in being the one that arrives at the mathematical limits of abstract conception.

Yet even if that is so, you could say that knowing this is itself not particularly pragmatic. How does it help to know why the Universe must exist in the form that it does? What use is that information to a biological creature really?

It is like why venture into outer space? You can't breathe there. Ultimately it is quite pointless - a distraction from your job of living a life down here on Earth.

But to get back to philosophy of mind, the semiotic perspective is instead a corrective in that it does bring you down to Earth in fact.

It says that the famous explanatory gap - why is "what it is like" actually what it is like, and not something else? - is a failure of proper pragmatism. It is a mistake to think that this is the kind of thing science should be able to explain. Explanations are there to serve purposes, and so can only deal with differences that make a difference - the actually counterfactual. In Wittgensteinian fashion, if red qualia could be inverted as blue qualia - and it would be impossible to stand at any viewpoint where the difference might show - then it is simply muddled conception to claim to be troubled by a difference that cannot make a difference.

So the thread illustrates that. All the talk about what colour a wavelength is really. All that matters to a modelling mind is the fact that wavelengths are discriminable in a way that has direct ecological validity.

So what should drop out of a science of the mind, or even a metaphysics of the mind, is this obsession with discovering what the "mind" really is. The fact that we even reify the process of being mindful as a noun - the mind - shows that already we are presuming a metaphysics of substantial objects. Instead, we should be in search of a process, and a process we can account for in the most metaphysically generic terms. My argument is that semiosis is turning out to be that generic model - a metaphysics of matter and sign rather than matter and mind.

Well, we differ in opinion clearly, because I think you will necessarily get a mistaken result if you start from the premise of the perfect symmetry, and work backward away from this, to describe something which is not a perfect symmetry. It's like starting from a false premise. — Metaphysician Undercover

I suppose on the same principle you object to rulers that pretend to be straight, and clocks that pretend to be regular.

It is physically impossible that they are, so we must simply throw all rulers and clocks away.

Or, you could just not use pleonastic terminology. — darthbarracuda

Or you could get used to the fact that academia uses technical language for the sake of precise thinking.

Not a flat earther, but a perfect circle denier. — Metaphysician Undercover

You latched on to a phrase in a way that shows you don't understand the physical argument. Relativity would model the gravitational curvature as perfectly spherical, yet the definition is still asymptotic - the approach to a limit.

So Kerr models the ideal final state in a way then allows the calculation of actual physical histories. We can start to talk about real black holes in terms of their more lumpy and haphazard story of getting crushed down in practice towards the simple ideal.

Just check out the variety of modelled "imperfections" that in practice would break the perfect symmetry the description of the absolute limit describes....

The Kerr geometry exhibits many noteworthy features: the maximal analytic extension includes a sequence of asymptotically flat exterior regions, each associated with an ergosphere, stationary limit surfaces, event horizons, Cauchy horizons, closed timelike curves, and a ring-shaped curvature singularity. The geodesic equation can be solved exactly in closed form. In addition to two Killing vector fields (corresponding to time translation and axisymmetry), the Kerr geometry admits a remarkable Killing tensor. There is a pair of principal null congruences (one ingoing and one outgoing). The Weyl tensor is algebraically special, in fact it has Petrov type D. The global structure is known. Topologically, the homotopy type of the Kerr spacetime can be simply characterized as a line with circles attached at each integer point.

Note that the Kerr geometry is unstable with regards to perturbations in the interior region. This instability means that although the Kerr metric is axis-symmetric, a black hole created through gravitational collapse may not be so.‹See TfD›[dubious – discuss] This instability also implies that many of the features of the Kerr geometry described above may not be present in such a black hole.‹See TfD›[dubious – discuss]

A surface on which light can orbit a black hole is called a photon sphere. The Kerr solution has infinitely many photon spheres, lying between an inner one and an outer one. In the nonrotating, Schwarzschild solution, with α=0, the inner and outer photon spheres degenerate, so that all the photons sphere occur at the same radius. The greater the spin of the black hole is, the farther from each other the inner and outer photon spheres move. A beam of light traveling in a direction opposite to the spin of the black hole will circularly orbit the hole at the outer photon sphere. A beam of light traveling in the same direction as the black hole's spin will circularly orbit at the inner photon sphere. Orbiting geodesics with some angular momentum perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the black hole will orbit on photon spheres between these two extremes. Because the space-time is rotating, such orbits exhibit a precession, since there is a shift in the {\displaystyle \phi \,} \phi \, variable after completing one period in the {\displaystyle \theta \,} \theta \, variable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric

Again, your jargon obfuscates your argument. — schopenhauer1

Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar.

Something I'm not quite following here is how you escape the charge of representationalism. — Moliere

I'm saying that the intent is not to re-present reality to the self - display sensory data so it can become the subject of experience. Instead the intent is to form a pragmatic modelling relarion with the world. So signs might mediate that, but the implied need for realism, completeness, faithfulness, etc, drops out.

In reality, the physical difference between green and red wavelengths is nothing more but a slight variation in wavelengths. But the mind sees two absolutely opposed things. Red and green can't mix as far as experience is concerned. So the mind is introducing a completely fake boundary into its view of the world. It is certainly not representing the continuous variation of the same thing - radiation - in constructing a model where a binary difference is what gets represented ... even when the physical display, as with the strawberries, doesn't emit any red.

And we can understand that from the way maps don't have to recreate territories. They just have to tell a tale of critical actions we would take at certain points in a history of motions. That is how they become a model - a model of our interaction with the world, not a model of the world as such, and so that is how a self arises. The self is the thing of the model representing some state of "selfish" intentionality in representing a set of critical actions.

So the mentality becomes the fact of a coordination between a body and a world. The sensory display is not a picture awaiting interpretation, it is the act of interpretation or mediation itself.

I'm not so sure about that. What about other creatures? — Moliere

What about them? If I could look at the world through the eyes of a cat, I wouldn't expect to experience trichromatic vision. Just the same as I wouldn't through the eyes of a colour blind human.

It seems to me that the color-blind look at the same red in a different way — Moliere

They might look at the same wavelength energy in some sense, but we know that there is no counterfactual sensory judgement taking place, such that they see red and not green. And my argument is that experience is nothing but a concatenation of such base level acts of discrimination. Physical values have to be converted to symbolic values in which an antagonistic switching off a neural response is as telling as switching that response on. Now both 1 and 0 have meaning. Absence means as much as presence, whereas back in the real world, there is only the presence.

And why can't qualia only be perceived if one has both the right mind-stuff and the right body-stuff? What if the perception of qualia just is two proto-conscious bits on each side of the divide lining up? — Moliere

You are advocating Panpsychism it appears. For some reason the right wiring of a complex brain adds something different. The complexity of the patterns being woven lines up all the protoconsciousness to create not just bare mentality but mental content.

Yet that is still a mystical tale as the protoconsiousness remains itself rationally unexplained and beyond empirical demonstration. From a theory point of view, it is a hypothesis is not even wrong.

I sometimes get to thinking that experience is sort of its own thing -- and that our minds are first collective, and second individual -- there is a pre-existing mind to our birth, one generated by the social interactions of our peoples (sort of like distributed cognition and extended mind, as one could conceive of the scientific project, but less structured or intentional or teleological), which in turn generates our sense of self (usually through a mixture institutions -- the family, the church, school, work), and an individual contact with this more general structure. — Moliere

I certainly agree that the self-conscious human mind is socially contructed. The ability to introspect in an egocentric way, rationalise in an explictly logical fashion, reconstruct an autobiographical past, etc, are language-based skills that we learn because they are expected of us by the cultures we get born into.

So that is part of the semiotic story. Adding a new level of code - words on top of the neurons and genes - allows for a whole new level of developmental complexity.

Qualia are perceptual qualities and so are a biological level of symbolisation. Even a chimp will experience red due to a similarity of the circuits. But only humans have the culture and language that makes it routine to be able to introspect and note the redness of redness. We can treat our brain responses as a running display which we then take a detached view of. Culture teaches us to see ourselves as selves...having ideas and impressions.

So the point then about the red strawberries is that there is also still the actual biological response that can't be changed just by talking about it differently. And this shows that the biological brain itself is already a kind of rationalising filter. We never see the physical energies of the world in any direct sense. The world has been transformed into some yes/no set of perceptual judgements from the outset. It is already a play of signs. And so the feeling of what it is like to be seeing red is somehow just as much a sign relatiion as the word "red" we might use to talk about it with other people.

If you are a physicalist, you want to somehow make redness a mental substance - a psychic ink. And if we are talking about colour speech, we are quite happy that this is simply a referential way of coordinating social activity or group understanding. The leap is to see perceptual level experience as also sign activity - a concatenation of judgements - not some faux material stuff.

The mind is a modelling relation with the world. And after all, it should feel like something to be in that kind of intimate functional relation, right?

It is your apparent attachment to "substance" that would be scientifically anachronistic here.

And yet the application of GR equations to cosmology immediately had the effect of predicting spacetime curvature so extreme that an event horizon must result. So the equations did exactly that - obliged us to posit ontologically real outcomes (of which black holes are one of many now empirically supported examples).

Is that really what information semantics claims? To me it seems the kind of semiotic, constraints-based, approach I've described.

So meaning is use. The utterance of "dog" stands as a sign mediating a habit of relation with the world. Thus while the vocal act is particular, it only has meaning by virtue of the coordination it might bring between a mind and the world (the world including other minds that might have an interest in being likewise oriented to the world beyond themselves).

You talk about mental particulars (concepts, ideas, impressions?) representing information. But informational semantics seems to be making the same point that they don't. What signs buy as the mediating mechanism is the possibility of an externalised habit of coordination rather than an internalised state of information.

So "dog" as a concept is not the representation of a doggy essence - something closed and internally represented - but instead the anchor of a habit of coordination between self and world. Doggyness characterises all we might do, think and say in a "doggy situation". So as a "concept" it is creatively open ended - while also being still usefully or pragmatically constrained enough to function as a lexical unit, a syntactic element, of some "propositional" sentence.