When we conceptualize flux, we imagine things like waves, wind, changing patterns, orbits, chaos, etc. But although this picture's contents are changing, the concept itself is not. What is being presented to us - the given-ness - is the same. — darthbarracuda

What do you mean exactly. If flux only manifests as a regularity of pattern, aren't we then talking about form rather than matter?

I prefer to reason that the only thing that never changes is that there is always change. So the regularity of pattern talks about the relative success the world has in constraining irregularity to at least a reasonable level of patterning. But beyond that, only shifting sands.

It's when models cannot be made near the fringes of thought that the models break down. — schopenhauer1

It is a genuine issue that modelling is procrustean. If you have a hammer, everything is a nail. Existence might be ontically vague, and yet still we want to model it in terms of definite counterfactuals.

So yes, this is an issue. But also - pragmatically - we can be aware of it. Even model it.

That is what science means when crackpots come up with ideas that are "not even wrong". Or they produce theories with too many parameters and so can be adjusted endlessly to fit any data.

So there is a tension between the bottom-up causality of material and efficient causes and the top-down causality of formal and final causation. — darthbarracuda

Yes, a productive tension. Formally, they are complementary kinds of causes - free construction shaped by emergent limits.

But what needs to still be explained is why the whole drama of evolution played out the way it did: why such-and-such happened and not something else, and not just by an appeal to material/efficient causation (i.e. science). — darthbarracuda

But material/efficient causation does a very poor job of explaining why accidents happen. Whereas contraints-based thinking explains accidents as the result of systematic indifference.

If there is a global telos that cares, then that also represents a global unconcern in terms of what doesn't matter, what doesn't need to be controlled.

Thus what I am seeing as final causes are not just tendencies or habits as a system evolves but as seemingly static "laws of nature" — darthbarracuda

Where's the problem? Habits don't need to change if they continue to work. We can call them laws to show that we believe they have become that fixed. But that smacks of transcendent mechanism. And so in the end, the idea of developmental habits is a better way to show how regularity arises because it also provides its own means to keep reconstructing itself. A habit is a state of organisation that keeps perpetuating itself through its action.

Which is why I don't think dynamicism can fully account for all of nature. The plant can wave in the wind but the roots keep it stuck in the ground as they are themselves static. — darthbarracuda

But my account requires stasis as well as flux. It just says stasis emerges via a limitation on flux. Whereas you have the Parmidean puzzle of how stasis could ever allow change.

So if we wind the developmental clock back a bit beyond your rooted plants, in what sense was there solid ground during the radiation phase of the Hot Big Bang?

I like Heil's version: properties are dual-nature, both a quality and a disposition. — darthbarracuda

That again just reserves reality for bottom-up constructive causality. You have quality standing for material cause, disposition for efficient cause. And top-down constraint - the contexual causality of formal and final organisation - gets left out of the picture again.

So yes, there is a duality here. But of bottom-up vs top-down modes of causality. And substantial objects are what arise inbetween as the causal actors (in a relatively a-causal void).

Dispositions is talk about the way a world of objects acts (having an empty stage to act upon). But that doesn't say why those relational possibilities exist. For that you have to step back to the metaphysical view that can account for both actors and stages. What global constraints suppress general possibility in a way that produces the matching thing of particular local being? How is a cool and large vacuum created so as to leave atomistic particles standing small and sharp?

These are the kinds of questions a systems approach answers.

It was you who talked about non-conscious creatures. So I just went along with your use of terminology.

Did you want to distinguish now between sentience (in jumping spiders), consciousness (in squid) and self-consciousness (in language-equipped humans) now?

I think I am defending the notion that entropy-in-action is asymmetry in action. Maybe the state of maximum entropy (heat death?) can be understood to be, in some sense, a maximally symmetrical state, but I have also heard it referred to as a state of maximum disorder, which suggests maximal asymmetry. — John

Yep. The asymmetry refers to the path or negentropic structure that gets you there. And then the symmetry is where the journey starts and ends.

However that is the simple view. And as you get into the detail, it becomes more awkward to make such an absolute distinction stick. This is because symmetry and symmetry-breaking aren't two distinct things, just two contrasting aspects of a general developmental trajectory (in my book).

This is why thermodynamics has a bundle of laws including the third. If you imagine a simple system like an ideal gas - non-interacting particles rattling around inside a container - there are two opposing states of maximum order. You could start off with all the particles in the same corner. Or instead, you could start off with all the particles exactly evenly spaced on a lattice or grid.

So two states that maximise order. And so disordering becomes the state sandwiched inbetween this upper and lower bound. If you release a gas from either of these two states, it will scramble both of them to arrive at a Gaussian statistical mix of positions and momenta. The gas will average itself away from being either stuck in a corner, or spread out with the geometric perfection of a lattice.

It seems that being released from a grid leaves a shorter distance to arriving at pure disorder. But still, that lower bound on entropy is why a third law of thermodynamics was needed.

So in this way, if you keep scrambling things, you could wind up coming out the other side to start getting more ordered again. And this is what the second law forbids. The equilibrium state is when all sources of constraint and freedom are in thermal balance - local differences cease to make a global difference.

This is a good article on the subtleties still being discovered....

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160712-hyperuniformity-found-in-birds-math-and-physics/

Torquato and a colleague launched the study of hyperuniformity 13 years ago, describing it theoretically and identifying a simple yet surprising example: “You take marbles, you put them in a container, you shake them up until they jam.”

The marbles fall into an arrangement, technically called the “maximally random jammed packing,” in which they fill 64 percent of space. (The rest is empty air.) This is less than in the densest possible arrangement of spheres — the lattice packing used to stack oranges in a crate, which fills 74 percent of space.

But lattice packings aren’t always possible to achieve. You can’t easily shake a boxful of marbles into a crystalline arrangement.

So note how maximum achievable disorder is the fluid solution. Marbles can only compact so far down through random motion - motion that does not pick out marbles and arrange them individually, just relies on an average degree of common settlement. Every marble is free to reverse its path during the shaking - there is a classical time reversal physics symmetry describing its individual motion. But collectively there is an emergent asymmetry as the marbles do evolve towards a single global average that tightly constrains their disorder to a single packing number.

So again, what ties it together is the semiotic definition of symmetry-breaking or asymmetry as a difference that makes a difference. And symmetry as differences that don't make a difference.

For a thermalising system, it makes a difference globally that it has gone from an ordered state to a disordered one. But a system in thermal balance is one that changes constantly without the changes making a general difference.

Did Aristotle argue for self-generalizing habits? I thought that was Peirce's addition - after all, Aristotle did think the universe was eternal if I remember correctly, and that there were distinct natural kinds, something that would have come into conflict with evolution and general cosmological findings but Peirce managed to fill with his idea of habits. — darthbarracuda

Yep. Aristotle mixes and matches a few different strands of thought and so it can't be said he spoke unambiguously for a single organic vision. But see for instance his notion of entelechy. Or the way he echoed Anaximander on the origin of the four elements.

But if these powers exist outside of a substantial form, how do they exist? The mother that aborts the baby still has powers herself, namely, to abort the baby. — darthbarracuda

Well yes. But that is exactly the kind of complex purpose that complex life/mind is capable of evolving as something internal to its system.

We have not only the clear notion of abortion, and well-developed material means, but also a strong framework of law.

So really, mothers have the power only in the sense that there is a social machinery in place. They can make a choice in that context.

If we watch the creature's behaviour, and notice that it appears to act with purpose, we have reason to believe that it acts with intention. However, we see all kinds of creatures that we know are not conscious, which appear to act with purpose. Therefore, acting with purpose, or intention, is not a good indicator as to whether or not a thing is conscious. — Metaphysician Undercover

The essential difference here would seem to be that we call purpose conscious when it involves a conscious choice. That is, when the organism knows it is doing one thing and not another.

I could give money to a beggar because it will make him feel good. Or maybe the real purpose is that it just makes me feel good. So am I acting out of generosity or self-regard? To the extent that I can sort my intentions into polar alternatives, I am taking another step up in my consciousness.

So when we watch a creature act, we might be able to see it could have acted differently, but is that a choice it was aware of?

And so this is what justifies a graded spectrum of intentionality or telos in nature of tendency/function/purpose.

Telos in nature starts out as a propensity - the likelihood of something happen that has a vague family resemblance.

Then it can become crisply functional - a hardwired response to a learnt situation.

Then it can become crisply optional - it is a choice within a context. Action is justified in terms of it not being its binary other.

So telos is the universal growth of reasonableness. It starts out as the most generic kind of constraint on freedom - a tendency. And it achieves its most definite form when it is fully dichotomous - a crisp choice between two formally contradictory life paths.

Recently there has been an increase in power ontologies, which is reminiscent of Aristotelian and Scholastic metaphysics, especially since powers are "internal" to things. Power (or dispositions) act like a causal web. — darthbarracuda

Things were going well until you smuggled this reductionism back in. :)

Formal and final cause are better understood as contextual properties or powers rather than intrinsic ones. Material and efficient cause are rightfully located within substantial objects. But the shaping and directing of matter is something that comes from without.

Now this is what leads to the problems of transcendental metaphysics - the idea that nature is ruled by external laws, Platonic forms, or hands of gods.

But there is also the immanent metaphysics of Aristotle where form and purpose are developmentally emergent and self-organising regularities. So the world itself must develop intelligible order. And having done so, that order is imposed locally everywhere to create substantial being.

And that fits right in with modern physics, especially quantum theory. All electrons in the universe are identical (and hence entanglable) because they all express the same symmetry-breaking structural regularity. For an electron to be, it has no choice but to have that contextually-dictated form.

Where a confusion arises is that life and mind is based on symbolism - digital codes - and so has a way to internalise formal and final cause. Biology can form memories for its shapes and goals. It can bury that kind of contextual information deep within itself as - principally - the program that gets stored in a genetic code.

So with biology, what was in physics strictly outside the shaping of substantial being, gets moved inside. Symbolism creates a new kind of internal dimension where constraints (formal and final cause) can be curled up into a tiny ball of memory, to then be exercised "at will".

So the danger here is being anthropomorphic and thinking that formal and final cause are naturally inside things as powers or properties, rather than outside them as the global context or constraints which give matter shape and direction.

Now physical objects can also have a form of memory. Rocks or rivers are complex arrangements that bear the imprint of their past and so do also seem to own the power of a shape and a direction. So on that score, the world does start to seem as if it has internalised the form and finality in a local fashion.

But again that is not the most generic view. The generic view - as taken at the quantum or particle physics level - is that every event is fundamentally contextual. Particles are just excitations in a field. Like a plucked string, they have no choice but to sound the note that is dictated by their structural context.

So formal and final cause stand for the global contextual constraints which emerge to regulate local particular material being. They are completely external as causes.

However that fundamental view then gets complicated because there is also the possibility of substances developing memories. Either just because not every process flows at the same rate (rocks are too cold to respond fluidly to the world like hot larva), or because constructing a memory became possible through the evolution of semiotic codes (membranes, genes, neurons, words, numbers), then formal and final cause could come to be something that sits "inside" a substantial being. The rules for shaping matter could be a power internaliised.

What you say here seems to be in agreement with what I was saying, and yet you seem think you are disagreeing. — John

You seem to be defending the notion that entropy = asymmetry.

I am saying that a state of entropy is a state of equilbrium - so a general symmetry in terms of its local fluctuations or differences.

But that then describes closed systems gone to equilibrium. And how this aspect of the thread got going was when far from equilbrium thermodynamics was introduced - or the still more generic thing of self-organising dissipative structure.

So the dissipative structure view talks about how symmetries can be broken by structural asymmetries - paths that point down a hill to (relatively) higher entropy states.

And then to talk about the Universe - which is a dissipative structure that is also its own heat sink - takes us up yet another level to where both symmetry and asymmetry, entropy and negentropy, have to be understood as two sides of the same coin that emerge synergistically out of a more foundational vagueness or quantum indeterminism.

So we start off with conventional closed system mechanical notions of entropy - the classical Boltzmann ideal gas type models - and move progressively through ever expanded notions of system thermodynamics to arrive at a self-organising cosmos that is dissipating vagueness in effect. Both order and disorder are being produced in equal measure by breaking the even more foundational state of "symmetry" which is the unbounded apeiron.

So rather than disagreeing with you, I have been trying to provide some sense of how the essential question - is entropy symmetry or asymmetry? - might be viewed across a spectrum of increasingly holistic or systematic thermodynamic models.

And on the whole, a state of high entropy is measured in terms of a state of high symmetry - a state in which there is plenty of particular difference, but it doesn't make a general difference. Change happens freely - in the same way as trapped gas particles rattle around inside a flask forever, or blackbody photons rattle around inside an event horizon. But the temperature and pressure of the system remains unchanged despite all this apparent difference, all this apparent busy action, just as a circle looks the same whether it is at rest or spinning at any speed.

When I spoke of asymmetry and entropy being the same I had in mind systemic asymmetry not the asymmetry of individual entities. From a systemic perspective, considered in terms of gravity or mass, the black hole would seem to be the supreme asymmetry. — John

But your point of view is the unrealistic one that is imagining a single black hole in an unbounded void. So it is asymmetric in the sense of being everything massive lumped in the one place.

Yet as said, a black hole - as an event horizon of some entropic size - is as simple and symmetric state as it gets. A smooth sphere. So it has a temperature and a size, and that's it.

It is an asymmetry from one point of view - being hyperspheric curvature in contrast to the flat spacetime around it. But from its own point of view, it is a state of high symmetry.

And then from the world's point of view, the black hole is never alone. At the very least - for there to be a world that is generally flat - it would have to exist as part of a fractal distribution of black holes, an entropic symmetry from that point of view.

If all the black holes started to collect, then the whole of the Universe would be gravitationally collapsing and becoming a single ball of hyperspheric curvature.

In fact, the cosmological problem of a few years back was that the Universe appeared under-dense in terms of gravitating mass and so should be expanding and diluting rather faster than it is. This is why the further ingredient of dark energy or the cosmological constant fixes things. It ensures the Universe expands with a slightly hyperbolic curvature and so - in Red Queen fashion - it will in fact bottom out eventually in the scale symmetry of a heat death.

We will be bounded by event horizons at a fixed distance just a little larger than our near heat death condition today. So in a way, it will be like being inside a black hole looking out. We will be closed off by a wall of maximum entropy that makes further change inside our region of spacetime meaningless. You will still have a quantum sizzle of thermal fluctuations - the black body photons emitted by the event horizon - but it will do no work and not change the entropy.

A symmetry is a difference that doesn't make a difference. An asymmetry is a difference that does.

So for us as human scale observers, a black hole in our vicinity makes a difference. But for a Universe, the black hole doesn't if it is part of an even fractal distribution of such clumping (the cosmological flat balance), or as now seems the case, it only has to be roughly fractal as any clumping tendency is already being overwhelmed by many orders of magnitude by a general dark energy acceleration of spacetime - an acceleration that will put us inside a fixed event horizon that puts an end to thermal events that make any difference to the state of what is left within.

I see two senses of the word reductionism being used here.

One is the familiar one of a reduction to mechanical or atomistic ontological models of reality. The other is the simpler thing of just being the reduction to an ontological model.

So we can oppose reductionism to holism - contrast two different ontological models. Or we can talk about the epistemic fact that all knowledge of the world is a semiotic modelling relation and reductionism is formalising the fact that we seek models to structure our experience in rational ways.

So to reduce in the modelling sense is to break the messy substantial world of given experience apart into theories and measurements - formal ideas and relatively informal acts of inductive confirmation.

Even the naive brain models in this fashion. If a baby sees a dog disappear behind one end of a wall, it will learn to look to the other end in the expectation it will reappear in a moment. So the baby has a theory or idea. And then checks that model against a measurement - the act of watching the other end of the wall in expectation that its idea of the world will be empirically confirmed.

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'. — StreetlightX

But is reductive modelling - the familiar division into generals and particulars, concepts and percepts, theories and measurements - a bad thing or the natural thing?

I argue that this philosophical/scientific practice is simply a formalisation, a conscious refinement, of how minds already work. We break the world apart into its formal structures and material events for a very good reason. This is how modelling works.

And pragmatism accepts the anti-realist epistemic point that to exist in a realm of our own reductive conceptions is as good as it gets. Our view of reality is always trapped inside the model we spin. That is obvious enough when it comes to concepts or ideas - the stuff of theories. But it is also true even of the measurements or confirming impressions.

The baby sees a dog re-emerge as expected and so its belief is confirmed. But is it the same dog? Can this baby yet tell the difference between a dog and a goat? Etc.

Science just goes all the way and constructs theories that are confirmed in terms of numbers - symbols read off dials. The Kantian impossibility of actually grasping the thing in itself is dealt with by reducing even material experience to acts of counting - signs of the theory in mind.

So reductionism in the broad sense is the acceptance that all knowledge is a modelling relation. And that in turn leads to a dichotomy of theory and measurement which is what it is to model. And so reductionism is going to be at its best when taken to its epistemic extreme as it is in scientific reasoning - when experience is fully structured in being fully broken apart into formal concepts and answering acts of measurement.

Gravitational clumping would be symmetrical in its asymmetry if the distribution of matter ended up fractally spread.

Fractals have scale symmetry in that things look the same or self similar no matter what scale of observation is chosen. So a fractal is a maximum entropy condition.

This is exactly the kind of thinking which I am being critical of. Instead of singling out, and understanding the particular acts themselves, to see which one has which effect, they are all lumped together as random noise. However, within all that seemingly random noise, one intentional act may have a huge outcome over an extended period of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well what makes a fluctuation intentional rather than just actually being random noise?

Local intentional acts are possible. We humans - as the most complex kinds of thing - produce them all the time. But here we are talking of physics - the metaphysics of simplicity.

But you were clearly referring to how things "begin". So your analogy, that there are balls already rattling around, doesn't suffice. Introducing a new efficient cause into a sea of efficient causes does not describe a beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are just persistently grabbing the wrong end of the stick every time you face some fresh example. The point was that regardless of beginnings, context is what rapidly matters. A system - especially a Newtonian one with no foresight to avoid accidental collisions - is going to develop towards its equilibrium average behaviour pretty quickly.

Either way then, the direction of the tiny event may have great significance over the final outcome. — Metaphysician Undercover

From what point of view exactly? Especially if the outcomes all look generically the same.

So sure, the tale feels significant if you have a metaphysics dependent on every big event having its tiny triggering cause. But instead this is about how regularity arises from randomness in a self-organising fashion.

In that light, efficient causes become a metaphysical red herring. Or at least, it only makes sense to talk about them in retrospective fashion from some perspective where a form or purpose is said to have been achieved.

Didn't the revolutionary minority and the unrevolutionary majority get switched somewhere in this OP about the Trumpish appeal of authoritarian leaders? :)

But that was a funny analysis of Trump - particularly in highlighting his disgust of womanly secretions. There has to be something deeply wrong about a guy so intolerant of the unruly that he has to glue down his hair.

Did the article say Trump would be bold or simply rash and petulant? In truth, the summary I thought was that Trump is an empty narcissistic shell of a person constructed on the competitive notion of "the deal".

So he has internalised the idea that negotiations in life are about putting up a tough front. But then you need experts to help you out because you don't actually know much, and you might need to compromise once around the table, so every principle becomes flexible.

So the overall impression is that he would be a president whose prime goal was always to come out of every situation looking good - the winner in the deal - whatever unprincipled thing it took.

Are you attempting to deny that a small event can make a huge difference over a long period of time? — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm making the point that material/efficient cause gets overplayed in regular metaphysics. The butterfly effect was understood by many in just the way you say - the smallest initiating event can have incredible consequences. Yet really, what it says is that the critical event was no better than random noise. There were any number of butterfly wings beating that same morning. To single out one as the prime mover is thus a retrospective fallacy. Especially if there was always a global attractor saying that every path was the first step to the same final destination.

So the beating of the butterfly wings is as contingent a material fact as you can get - just a fluctuation. And the weather that developed was the kind of weather that always develops - being ruled by formal/final cause.

But then you make a conclusion completely opposed to these observations, all paths are going to lead to the same eventual outcome. Where is your evidence, or what kind of principles are you following? — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, this was the important thing that chaos theory modeled - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor

Changes closest to the beginning of any event have the most potential to change that event. This is due to the reality of momentum. From any point in space, motion can begin in any direction. Since such a beginning is necessarily an acceleration, the difficulty in adopting a different direction is exponential with the passing of time. Therefore the act at the beginning, being furthest back in time has the greatest influence over the final outcome. — Metaphysician Undercover

This may seem true of linear Newtonian mechanics. But it is not true of non-linear worlds in which feedback both amplifies and damps action at a collective level of interaction.

In real world full of interactions - like a chaos of billiard balls rattling around a table - any new ball you fire into the mess is going to have a high chance of being redirected. Most of the collisions are going to decelerate your ball, although there is also the slim chance that some collisions send it going even faster in the direction you intended. But either way, your initial act of acceleration to the ball will have exponentially less to do with its actual continuing behaviour over time.

A verbal animal would probably also need a reason to talk about the unpleasantness of one's mate, for instance (its mate, not your mate). — Bitter Crank

Or more than that, the animal would have to have the capacity for grammatical construction.

Words are one thing. Animals can learn hundreds of them. Rules of recursive sentence structure are a different matter. What Koko and all the other experiments show is no non-human develops the grammatical fluency which is part of human biology.

So you don't need to have a reason to talk. But you do need grammatical capacity to be able to speak in reasoned fashion.

The habits of thought, which would make someone posit something like a chance fluctuation, to facilitate one's metaphysical belief, have developed into a particular form of laziness which permeates the intellectual society. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not really. Instead, what it says is that if you try to strip reality back to some foundational material monism, what you arrive at is quite different from conventional linear notions of efficient cause. Instead of the particularity of some cause creating some effect, you instead have just thermal noise - pure fluctuation.

This is what the butterfly effect in deterministic chaos models was all about. The most innocuous fluctuation, like a beating wing, could retrospectively be blamed as the efficient cause of a big storm halfway around the world. But what that means is that in a non-linear world, trying to separate causal signal from causal noise in the usual way is futile. At the time, anything could have been the crucial trigger.

More important is the way events snowballed. And even more important is that there was some generic attractor - a global finality - towards which any such snowballing fluctuation was always going to tend. It really never mattered what might be said to break the initial symmetry as all paths were going to lead to much the same eventual outcome.

So this is the ontic message of dissipative structure theory. It doesn't really matter how things begin. Any old fluctuation will do as the fluctuations simply represent the infinity of particular ways to get rolling towards the one waiting generic global outcome. It is formal and final cause that tell the story.

And learning to tell such a different story of reality hardly seems intellectually lazy. The ball on the dome paradox is simply meant to illustrate what a basic problem the old Newtonian model of things in fact had.

According to Newtonian laws - which are all about crisp material/efficient causes - a ball sitting still would never have reason to move. But a view of reality founded on indeterminism says the opposite. Spacetime itself fluctuates on the smallest scale. It is noisy or grainy in a way that can't ultimately be suppressed.

And from there, the fact that fluctuations are largely suppressed - on our classical scale of observation - can be retrojected to the question of initial conditions. The beginning of everything must logically be a case of fluctuation unbounded - a roil or vagueness.

No, black-holes are not an exception. Black-holes have vastly more entropy than the matter that created them, be that a perfectly spherically distributed ideal gas or a solar system. Every state on the way to creating a black hole has greater entropy than the previous state. — tom

And yet black holes evaporate. So while clumping increases the entropy in terms of dissipating gravitational degrees of freedom, dark energy expansion is then a further complication that overwhelms that clumping given enough passing time. The highest entropy state becomes the blackbody radiation of minimal temperature cosmic event horizons on current physical understanding. It all ends with a fizzle of photons with a wavelength the span of the visible universe - the inverse of the Planck-scale state of things at the hot Big Bang.

What I am trying to get at is that it seems to me that without asymmetry there is no entropy and without entropy there is no asymmetry. Asymmetry seems to be the frozen image of entropy and entropy the moving image of asymmetry. — John

Symmetry and symmetry breaking do have to be flip sides of the same coin. That is basic metaphysical logic. Each has to be each other's other. That is why we talk about entropy and negentropy, or constraints and degrees of freedom. You need two opposites to tango.

Again, SX and I aren't just talking about entropy but the larger thermodynamical story of dissipative structure. And this ties together the two aspects of being that result in a world of structured dynamics.

So the asymmetry here speaks to another fundamental physical principle - the least action principle. When anything energetic happens, it must take the most direct route possible. It must in fact employ the path that results in the least overall effort. And so - as in the convection currents that form in a heated fluid - you have the apparently paradoxical situation of order erupting to further the production of disorder.

But rather than being a contradiction, this simply reflects the fact that nature must first divide itself into two for there to be anything systematic about existence at all. You have to have the yin and yang of the order that maximised the disordering.

For there to be a state of higher entropy, this must be revealed by the matching fact of there being the asymmetry of the path to access that more wasted state of global symmetry. To arrive at the bottom of the hill, there had to be the slope which was the hillside that was the path of least action.

I agree, but it is only wasteful (or not) from some perspective, no? — John

Great. You agree there is always the telos that is what makes for a point of view then. Observerless physics can make no sense.

But wouldn't the energy that gets wasted in any specific causally efficient process we might be focused on, always be the efficient cause of other processes? — John

Well given some other formal and final cause setting up a different design to achieve this other goal. The crumbs that fall off the table could feed the sparrows and ants.

But every such level of dissipative structure must be wasteful in its extraction of work. That is what the second law captures.

You are simply speaking of the world as if Newtonian atomism was the truth and not simply a working model.

So we are both dealing in theoretical constructs. You just don't seem to realise it.

And in fact this last, that the regularities due to efficient causation we witness everywhere and interpret as 'order', is really just entropy at work is just what I had thought you and apo have been arguing. — John

No. In thermodynamics, work is work, not entropy. It is that part of an energy flow which does get used in materially efficient causal fashion. Then the part that gets lost as heat and waste is lost potential - the entropy. It is the part of the flow that doesn't do work towards whatever purpose you had in mind.

It seems to me that entropy just is symmetry-breaking, which just is energy flow, which just is efficient causation. — John

If you are talking about a "state of maximum entropy", then you are talking about a state of final equilibrium symmetry - where things can't get messier even as things continue to freely mess around.

So "entropy" is a macroscopic quality - a formal description of final goal - in this sense. And then an entropy gradient is what you have when some system starts with the kind of asymmetry which represents some more ordered state - a state that could be far more messed up if allowed to evolve in time.

But entropy becomes a confusing word because we have got so use to counting systems in terms of information - local degrees of freedom or microstates. So it can also come to sound like we are talking about the constitutional events - the material and efficient causes - rather that the qualitative macrostate which is a state of global symmetry.

Also consider a model of an entropic potential - a ball resting on top of a dome. Under classical mechanics, the puzzle is the ball is at rest and so should never have reason to roll off the dome. So there is an entropic gradient - a different position for the ball that would lower its potential energy (and release waste heat and noise in the process). But the ball seems stuck forever.

Models of spontaneous symmetry breaking have to introduce a material efficient cause to break the symmetry. There must be "a fluctuation" that disturbs the ball enough that slope and gravity take over.
Then the ball rolls until it falls off the dome and reestablishes a state of symmetry - sitting still with all forces in equilibrium.

So the formal and final causes of the ball and dome describe the shape of the situation which creates a potential asymmetry, and then the desire for the second law to be fulfilled in a way that a more stable state of symmetry is achieved. And to get the ball rolling takes this rather ill-defined idea of "the inevitability of some tiny triggering push".

Of course quantum mechanics now says noisy fluctuations are an irreducible aspect of reality, so this is not such a metaphysical problem. But it does also say that material/efficient cause - the initiating event - is the least remarkable aspect of a story of symmetry-breaking processes. The fluctuation that seems to determine everything, is really just noise that can't in the end be completely suppressed.

I guess I took that to mean better technology to correct the problem. — schopenhauer1

We have plenty of sustainable technology. We lack the social organisation to make the change.

So the life-long process of limiting the contents of human consciousness (for reassurance and comfort to avoid panic overload) is natural and "healthy"...what does that say about our state of affairs? — darthbarracuda

The problem with the Romantic model of human psychology is that it is pathological rather than scientifically valid. The argument starts and stops with the facts.

Also, you seem to assume the trope by intellectual-types that humans need to exist for the X-reason of discovery and novel technology. — schopenhauer1

This is yet another example of how you project on to my arguments things I've never said.

If you want a tentative metaphysical principle, then I'd offer mine to be that the universe evolves surrounding constraints that emerge from Scarcity and the subsequent Fatigue (or Entropy). And, as Zapffe pointed out, as we scale "up" in awareness, so do we scale up in Concerns. So the unconscious rock has no Concerns, the lizard has a few Concerns occupying its day-to-day life, and the human being has a surplus of awareness that allows him to hold a surplus of Concerns, notably that of meaning.

According to Zapffe, the utter lack of meaning, means that we have to find ways to deal with this void of Concern. So we isolate, distract, attach, or sublimate ourselves to avoid panic. Suicide, then, is a natural death from spiritual causes. — darthbarracuda

Sure, I agree in a way about your story of an ever-escalating capacity for "concerns". But that is also baking in the very helplessness that you claim to derive as the conclusion of your argument.

So in my view, the concerns expand in concert with the value that is returned. Pragmatism in a nutshell. Properly organised concern - adaptive concern - is not open-ended in its agonising. Instead it is self-limiting because it builds in its own proper level of indifference. We don't seek control over what we can't control.

This is the big difference. We both agree that reality can't be controlled in a cosmic sense. But the pessimist then fetishises that as an open-ended source of agony. The pragmatist says that is the way things are - and it really doesn't matter. The whole point of widening the scope of concern is to take control of what can be controlled. So focusing on what can be done, rather than what cannot be done, is the psychologically healthy and natural approach.

The bottom line with any of the higher spiritual teachings, is that what the aspirant finds through them, is better than sex, money, fame, wealth, or any of the other seeming goods that most people spend their lives pursuing. So that is not simply indifference for its own sake, but putting aside something lesser for something greater. — Wayfarer

I agree that it is about connecting with something "higher", but then the question becomes whether this is your transcendent spirit or my immanent nature...

The basic difference is that you can do something about the suffering-as-a-mental-state but you have limited to no control over its causes. For example, we can't have a life that is ever free of diseases, death, stress-inducing events, etc. but we can somehow control how we react to these situations. — OglopTo

...and so here is where I question the very idea of wanting to control such things. Life without a struggle, without hardship, may not be life at all.

If the higher principle that would give our lives a meaningful context is immanent nature, then that embodies the principle one would aim to ultimately respect.

The egocentric response I'm am criticising in Pessimism or Nihilism is that it treats the (mythical) self as the ground of being. And I agree that is hard to avoid - in a modern culture which is hellbent on producing that very thing of the self-conscious, egocentric, human individual. But then philosophically, it is that egocentrism which is false.

Now again, there are the two ways to escape such egocentricism. Wayfarer speaks for the value of making a connection to a spiritual level of being. I would speak instead for a realism of nature - an ecological level of personal equilibration. It feels right that if society as a whole were founded on sustainable principles, then everyone would live much more happily as a result.

And yes, having any personal influence on society in this fashion feels like an impossible task. It is a Romantic vision as things stand. Which is why my response is to take the analysis a further step and consider how the current consumerist/neoliberal settings of the world are entirely natural as a response to a cosmic desire to burn off an unnaturally large store of buried fossil fuels.

From this perspective, things really are shit for humans. We have a biopsychology (a biology that includes all our general social organisation settings) that was adapted to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, but it is a biopsychology that is quite poorly adapted to the entropic explosion that is the modern industrial era.

So we can point to a source of suffering which is new and imposed upon us as modern humans. But what is then the proper response - throwing up your hands and whining with learned helplessness, or treating it as a really big speedbump in the human story? We need to find a better adaptive balance - or indeed suffer a mass extinction event around 2050.

So I don't deny something is deeply out of kilter right now. But it is not a cosmic wrong. It is just a question whether we have the resources to make an adaptive shift back to some better biopsychological balance as a species. It is a local spot of bother that one way or another can't last too much longer without some form of drastic self-correction.

On the larger/metaphysical perspective, maybe the presence of causes-of-suffering and the fact that we are forced to experience them, is also a signal that there's something transcendental/wrong about the very nature of human life itself. — OglopTo

I'm arguing the wrongness is immanent and natural, not transcendent and spiritual. But of course, in stressing the biopsychology, the two are not so far apart in terms of life practices, life advice, because both would be talking about what it is to be a mind in the world.

I think darthbarracuda was trying to explain that the FACT that suffering EXISTS to be figured out is a tragedy in itself. — schopenhauer1

Yeah. And it is this egocentric one-noteism that I say is so tedious and overwrought.

To talk about a feeling existing in this fashion simply ignores all metaphysical sophistication about the very question of the nature of "existence".

Does suffering "exist" really? I know my suffering is part of my experience. But to then elevate that to the level of a cosmological fact - a fundamental feature of reality that is solipsistically present, and so supposedly could have been absent - is just a wild exaggeration.

It is hard to take seriously for a minute any argument that begins with such a bum ontological basis.

An entirely symmetrical universe would dissipate symmetrically, foreclosing any sort of self-organizing capacities. The exact source(s) of cosmic asymmetry are hotly debated, but it's these asymmetries which account for self-organizing tendencies which do not violate the second law. — StreetlightX

I suppose the (I guess we must think universal?) operation of entropy is itself the most basic asymmetry, since it would seem to produce temporal directionality. You say that a symmetrical universe would dissipate symmetrically.Thinking about this the question that comes to mind is whether in an absolutely homogeneous, that is absolutely symmetrical, universe any dissipation of energy would occur at all. — John

SX makes the critical points very nicely. I will add a few thoughts.

The baseline state of the Universe was set up by the symmetry breaking that was the hot Big Bang. The Universe started out as a simple spreading/cooling bath of radiation. So from one perspective, it was an entropic gradient - the Universe was running down the hill from the Planck temperature towards absolute zero. But then because the Universe was effectively its own heat sink - it cooled by metric expansion - you could say that this creation of "new space" was a matching negentropic order.

So from a global perspective - one that counts degrees of freedom or microstates - it is difficult to say the entropy count actually changes. The essential change - the symmetry breaking represented by the Big Bang - already created a maximum entropy state. The radiative contents were already as messy as they could be. The now locked in story of a constant c rate radiative expansion and cooling had been "paid for" in terms of the phase transition that resulted in such a world with its orderly Planck scale structure and three dimensional, radiation dissipating, geometry.

So if we ask the usual question of how the Universe started in a state of high negentropy - an initial orderliness which could then be the fuel for a second law trajectory towards messiness - one answer is that the Big Bang was itself a mathematical-strength structural asymmetry just waiting to happen.

Before the Big Bang was a vagueness or quantum roil - a state of unbounded fluctuation or infinite dimensionality. There was action happening in any direction and so no actual global geometry or real dissipation. For structural reasons, limiting this wild chaos by constraining the action to a 3D heat sink - grabbing a chunk of this primal energy and spinning it into a cool/expanding fabric of radiative events - was a way to make a world. It created a realm of distinct pathways - the three dimensions that allowed powerlaw dilution of thermal action - that could then roll downhill towards a maximum separation between the complementary things of position and momentum, the container that is spacetime and the contents of this expanding box which was its gas of particles or thermalising events.

So before the Big Bang, things would (logically) have been so symmetrical as to be vague. Action was unbounded and so nothing existed to say that anything was happening in some direction. The Big Bang was then the dualised creation of the very split by which negentropy and entropy could even be distinguished. The emergence of an expanding spacetime dimensionality as the organised container was what made possible a matching story of spreading and so cooling particles or thermalising events. Structurally, it locked in a trajectory in which particles could make symmetric exchanges of energy among themselves - there was no trajectory of change at the individual level. But then emergently, statistically, the particles would find themselves behaving asymmetrically, the hotter particles always on the whole yielding to the probability they would make radiative exchanges with cooler particles.

This very simple initial universe - a spreading/cooling gas - then hit further symmetry breakings as its temperature dropped. Like a tide going out, suddenly a rocky deeper structure was exposed and rock pools of trapped negentropy formed.

The critical one was the electroweak symmetry breaking that saw the Higgs mechanism switched on and particles becoming gravitationally massive. This happened all at once at a critical temperature and so represented a sudden entropic deceleration everywhere in the Universe. There was a shift from the steady entropification rate where radiation was spreading as fast as it could - the speed of light - to a Universe where a good chunk of its hot contents was now dragging along at sub-light speed. The balance of the Universe was suddenly out of equilibrium, setting up the need (the telos) for a new level of dissipative mechanism. The Universe was spreading/cooling at a sub-optimal rate now. And so that paid for any further negentropic structure that would help it catch up, re-accelerate the entropification.

Hence stars. Mass clumped gravitationally. But then as a further twist of fate, it caught fire and started turning mass into radiation.

That then left its own negentropic residue in the form of heavy elements and rocky planets. And so afresh, you have the negentropic platform for life to emerge and add its (fantastically tiny) contribution to the universal cause.

So my point is that second law entropy thinking explains a heck of a lot. But metaphysically, we then have to recognise how entropy and negentropy are two faces of the same coin in some deep way. And rather than chasing some chicken and egg question of which comes first - the symmetry or its breaking - we need to have a story where they both co-arise in synergistic fashion from an even more primal state - the state that can be dubbed a chaos, an apeiron, a roil, a vagueness, an unbounded dimensionality of fluctuation.

But it is still the case that the Big Bang looks to represent a properly crisp symmetry breaking. That was the instant when a strictly limited dimensionality clicked into place. And from there, with spreading/cooling as a locked in story, further mathematical outcomes become a historical inevitability. Once action was confined to the point where it had highly constrained properties - once it was playing out in a world in which crisp dimensionality underwrote definite symmetries like those of translation and rotation - then the structural mathematics of those definite symmetries became an inevitable emergent fact. As the Universe cooled enough, it would have to go through the symmetry breakings that are represented by gauge symmetries or lie groups in particular, and so result in the Standard Model family of fundamental particles.

Long-term of course, all matter should be returned to pure radiation even if it has to be swept up into black holes first. At the Heat Death, following a history of sudden global decelerations and subsequent slowly catching up local re-accelerations, the Universe will get back to being a homogenous entropic equilibrium. It will become just the lingering black body fizzle of cosmic event horizon radiation.

But that of course is a steady-state fate that is itself underwritten by the new thing of dark energy or the cosmological constant. Everywhere the spatial fabric of the Universe is undergoing a further faint acceleration for some reason.

This is the reason we can now say the Universe will coast to a halt in terms of cosmic event horizons and so - in third law of thermodynamic fashion - actually arrive at a minimum entropy condition (rather than cooling endlessly). In Red Queen style, the Universe will still be expanding/cooling at c. But that will become running on the spot for event horizons as the underlying spacetime will be continuing to accelerate away at superluminal speed.

Yet while this negentropic dark energy acceleration is a further energy that makes certain the general entropic tale of the Universe is drawn to a close, it is of course now a new source of mystery. The hope is that a better understanding of the symmetry breaking that was the Big Bang will reveal how dark energy is again the negentropic flip-side of some larger entropic symmetry breaking. It must be another tiny source of order that paid for a lot of extra mess in some fashion.

So our explanatory instinct is always to try to arrange existence into a temporal order of causes and effects. If we are talking about entropy and negentropy, mess and order, spacetime and material contents, symmetries and symmetry-breakings, we want to decide which is chicken, which is egg. We want to impose a temporal linearity that conforms with our metaphysical prejudices.

But while that is indeed a useful way of looking at things, and even a true way of looking at things once a state of crisp organisation has developed, there is then a deeper way of looking at things which is dependent on seeing symmetry and symmetry-breaking as itself the two sides of one coin. As each other's dichotomous "other", each has to arise in the presence of its opposite even to be crisply actual.

Four causes thinking can get at this by treating finality as "lurking structure awaiting its inevitable expression".

Who knew that the entropic cooling/spreading of a 3D bath of radiation would have to get interrupted by a cascade of further negentropic symmetry-breakings as it passed critical temperatures? Well those breakings already lurked in the future due to the necessity of structural mathematics. The path to ultimate simplicity was always going to be a bumpy ride as it jolted over these hidden symmetry features that define the Standard Model family of particle species - all the ways that spin in particular can have a complexity, an intrinsic asymmetry, in its directions.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure we can devise ways to achieve equanimity despite the suffering. But this does not answer the question: "what is the purpose behind the inevitability of suffering?".

Pessimism says there's probably no meaning behind this suffering.
Buddhism says there's probably something more behind this suffering.
Stoicism doesn't touch on this issue.

If it helps, I'd like to distinguish that suffering in this context is not the 'mental state of suffering' but instead refers to the 'causes of the mental state of suffering' like bodily pain, work-related stress, feelings of meaninglessness, angst, dread, existential boredom, etc. The mental state can be altered but the causes remain regardless of one's philosophy. — OglopTo

OK, you are asking good questions. My naturalistic answer - from a biological understanding - is that suffering, like pleasure, is a sign of something for us. It is useful information.

So there is no cosmic meaning in the sense it matters (to any deity, any transcendent principle). But it is a necessary aspect of biological being because if you don't react with feeling to the world, you don't have any reason to do things that might change those feelings. And we evolved those feelings because they lead us to do the right kinds of things in terms of biological success.

But then you say you want to distinguish between the mental state and the worldly causes? I don't really get that.

My argument is that the feelings are evaluations of a worldly state - how we feel about social and environmental situations. So to change the state of feeling we would try to do something in terms of what we understand about their causes.

Therefore your comment - "we can devise ways to achieve equanimity despite the suffering" - seems wrongly focused in trying to ignore what we can't control, rather than instead seeking to adjust in ways our feelings are meant to indicate that change is needed.

Now this is easy with simple hurts. If I step on a sharp rock, I jump quickly off it. But it is then true for humans - having socially constructed powers of understanding - can remember all hurts long after they have physically ceased, and can imagine all hurts long before they ever might happen. So that level of knowledge may indeed be a burden, creating pain or anxiety where there is no immediate cause.

So humans have the capacity to magnify their capacity for suffering by making the contemplation of everything that could be bad or wrong a constant mental habit. That's quite obvious.

But also, isn't the obvious counter to work on that as Buddhism suggests - meditative practices to be in the moment. Or as modern positive psychology suggest, the antidote to pessimistic angst is to realise just how of a habit it really is, and how a different habit of mind might have to be learnt.

What I react to in pessimism as philosophy is that it is usually just a crap intellectual justification for a certain habit of mind. I can understand why such a pattern of thought would arise so strongly in modern culture. But it is also a self-damaging one that shouldn't be encouraged by retrospective rationalisation. Philosophy shouldn't be used to prove the way you are is the way you ought to be because that is the way reality really is. Philosophy should be a tool that might get you out of such a hole rather than a tool to dig it even deeper.

Nice ad hominem, I continue to wonder why those opposed to pessimism get all bent out of shape if pessimism really is as silly as they claim. — darthbarracuda

Being silly is a silly thing. So that would be the reason for being opposed.

But yes, personally I find the constant harping of the pessimist on these kinds of boards very annoying. Such whining is only possible from a point of material privilege.

It is quite true that the materially privileged are precisely those who will find themselves born in a world of high social expectations. The cultural message is look at everything you have got. You have less reason than anyone to go out and use that advantage to really achieve as an individual.

So to be born advantaged is also to feel caught in a particular kind of trap. And it may be apparent that the social game being played is in fact quite phony (Holden, where are you?). Existence has no intrinsic meaning, yada yada.

But from there, adopting a position of cosmic helplessness is bad analysis. If the game is wrong in your opinion, get involved in changing it. And be prepared that the thing that needs to change most is yourself - because the issues aren't cosmic at all, merely local and social.

And given these studies we can come to realize that animals are much closer to us behaviorally than we might have expected.

That's bollox. In some aspects - which can be defined - we are just scaled-up apes. In others, we are radically altered by the individuating power of language and cultural evolution.

Do you think chimps and dolphins feel pessimism? Is that an abstraction that might rule their waking lives?

In relation to this thread, I'm seeing Buddhism as falling under (1) and Pessimism under (2). I'm not sure though where to place Stoicism because as I infer from this thread, Stoicism doesn't even ask the question of meaning behind the suffering in the first place. — OglopTo

Wouldn't Buddhism generally be a form of equilbrium thinking in being a practice of ceasing to care in terms of a personal reaction and instead taking on a cosmic indifference. Stoicism would be similar.

So where I would criticise that is we shouldn't want to simply "rise above" the world in some transcendentally dispassionate fashion. Instead we should aim instead to equilbrate our feelings with the world through our actions. So we should stay part of life, and then work to negotiate towards outcomes that feel balanced - in terms of us and our cultures, us and our ecosystems. The final one of us and our cosmos is probably too disconnected to really worry about balancing in practice.

Can we care about that which we can not affect? It would only be if we were making a social decision - such as to whether to seed the universe with our idea of life (the good life!) in some fashion. Like launch a billion nano-bots to the distant stars in panspermic fashion. :)

The whole point of teleology is that there is no necessity, that is what gives us free will. We are free to choose our ends, and the means. Necessity is artificial, created, it is not natural. We, as individuals, historically have created a sense of what's needed, food, shelter, etc. From this we develop a communal necessity, morality, laws, and eventually a logical necessity. Logical necessity is derived from this need, what is desired for a purpose, and this need is chosen. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, this seems right to you because of your ontological commitments. You are thinking in terms of directed outcomes - action that is the result of a big psychic hand reaching down to control material events.

But I am talking about an ontology based on constraints. So telos is about the evolution of such constraints. It is finality that is emergent and only "pre-exists" in the sense that even a chaos of possibility has only one generic way it will wind up organised. In hindsight, nothing else could have been possible as the way to average over all the tensions to result in an action that is the most efficient path connecting a start and its end.

So yes, humans are individuated within a historically-evolved social context. We are the product of a system of constraints. We are shaped by the culture within which we have no choice about growing up.

And yet that very culture - which has historically become pretty sophisticated - encourages this new thing of "freewill". We are encouraged to believe we all start off equal, the blank pages of an unwritten novel, and our job is to ink in that exciting life story. We are invited to demonstrate our individuation by kicking against the very thing of cultural constraints.

But as you say, this carte blanche is rather misguided. We actually still do depend on a social organisation to give us a place where we can actually live and flourish. So - if you go down the rabbit-hole of romanticism/existentialism - you wind up calling inauthentic the thing you most need to exist.

So one view is based on the notion that a positive form of freedom is what results from breaking free of all social and material constraints.

The other view says that is simply a recipe for chaos or vagueness. It is the evolution of constraints that are responsible for powerfully shaped degrees of freedom. To remove those constraints results in psychic collapse. You can't make definite choices unless you exist within a sharply definite reference frame - one that includes purposeful directions that you can either then go with, or act against, as a further locally individuated fact.

One way to think about this is to make the distinction between teleology and teleonomy. — StreetlightX

I meant to add that there is also Stan Salthe's hierarchical approach to a definition here that recognises various grades of telos, ranging from the brutely physical to the complexly mindful.

Salthe offers the stepping stones of {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. Or in more regular language,
{propensity {function {purpose}}}.

See for instance: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284

So rather than getting stuck in an either/or argument, a hierarchical definition says that the whole of existence is teleological in a generic (and quite dilute) sense. And then a strong version of teleology is what arises intensionally - immanently within the generic condition - via semiosis, or the growth of reasonableness in complex systems.

Stoic equanimity works well in the classroom and the textbook. Out in the real world, not so much. The fact that we have to limit (balance) ourselves means there is a problem that must be resolved. — darthbarracuda

Again, this simply repeats your metaphysical presumptions - the very thing I question.

Your foundational view of reality is that existence must be based on some solid ground of some kind - something that is the opposite of the dynamism or contingency we see in the world itself.

But I take the other view where the foundation of existence is instead dynamical freedom - Hericlitean flux. All is chaos until it is stabilised. And so balance - a state of dynamical equilibrium - is how the stability of things arises.

These are diametrically opposed ontologies. So where you would expect something to be the monistic solid foundation for existence - like pain or suffering - I would instead expect a dynamical balance to be that "solid foundation" for what persists. I take chaotic flux to be the unbounded "ground", and stable balance to be the emergent basis of "a world".

So given that dynamical ontology, it is not a problem that we would seek balance. The only problem is that in the "real world" - that is life as rich westerners live it in the 2010s - might be a radically out-of-equilbrium biological lifestyle.

So the point of philosophy is to be able to put a finger on what is actually wrong (if it is indeed wrong) in terms of a common culture. And not to conflate some bad social design with a metaphysical verity about the foundational condition of existence.

Equanimity is artificial, contrived. It's forced into existence and held into existence by the sheer will of the psyche - I will be virtuous, I will not descend into panic, I will kick all my miseries under the rug and pretend everything is fine and ignore everyone else's tragedy, etc.

That's just rubbish. I've already said that panglossian optimism is just as fake as your universalised pessimism.

Equanimity is a natural goal because the balancing of dynamics is the only real way for existence to achieve stability and solidity of any kind.

So your response here - to protest against being expected to contribute to your own balancing by claiming cosmic helplessness - is childish. Except even children don't believe they are actually helpless.

How do you know what ideas animals have? From a harm-based perspective, we ought to assume that behaviorally-similar organisms possess similar psychological facilities. — darthbarracuda

As usual, one doesn't claim to "know things" in some sceptic-proof absolute way. One simply has made the pragmatic effort to minimise one's uncertainty about a claim. So yes, comparative psychology, and even the neuropsychology of pain responses, is something that has been closely studied.

So again, all the resources are there! We know all about this stuff, in detail, with plenty of scientific backing. People just need to read them, take them up, and digest them. — StreetlightX

Yep. But I would add two things stand in the way of a widespread understanding of four causes holism.

First, classical reductionism sells itself not just because it is simple, but because it has good immediate pay-back. If you imagine all reality to be a machine, then that is how you get good at building machines and imposing machinery in ways that control existence. There's a lot of dollars in that.

Then related to that, no-one has produced a proper mathematics of holism. There is a ton of mathematical bits and pieces, like chaos theory, tensegrity, or whatever. But no-one has boiled it all down in the way Newton boiled down the mechanics of dynamics. So building holism in the world is hard due to a lack of first principle mathematical models.

To everyone here: let's face the facts: there's two aspects of human existence: suffering and fun. If you're having a lot of fun, you usually don't care too much about suffering. And if you're suffering, you usually don't care too much for fun. — darthbarracuda

There is of course the third option of whatever lies inbetween. So it is quite wrong to construct a philosophy around a forced binary view when the reality is that most of existence is meant to be lived as a balance between two bounding extremes.

Your approach is flawed at its root.

The point about pessimism is that suffering comes naturally. We don't control our bodies, we don't control our environment, we don't control our desires as much as we wish we did. The prevention of pain by the satisfaction of concerns is the primary purpose of human existence. Whereas fun requires effort and does not come naturally. Suffering is a structural aspect of life, fun is an accidental aspect of life. — darthbarracuda

There is some truth in this, but look at how you keep needing to mention the "we" who fail to be in control. You take it for granted there is the "self" who is at the helpless centre of things, when psychology tells us such individuated being is a social construct. Animals just don't have the same ideas about life and so don't bewail the limits and efforts of being "a self" in the way you claim is so natural.

So what would be natural - in the biological sense - would be a condition of equanimity and flow. The uncertain world would be well-predicted enough for life to run smoothly on an even keel. That would be the target animals by their neurological design would be shooting for. A homeostatic balance.

But humans construct their own psychological world. And in modern life, we paradoxically have both far more, and far less, control over that construction. Modern life has a way of sorting us more sharply into winners and losers. It creates the ladders to status, success, reward, etc. But in sharpening the definition of the way to live in this fashion, by promising the greatest intensity of fun awaits at the end of the climb, it also sharpens its opposite, the consequences of failing on the climb, or even attempting to avoid being part of the social race to society's chosen destinations.

So the point of that is that we are social creatures, but are we now creatures still targeting a natural state of equanimity? And if not, why not?

Pessimism is thus just a symptom - the flipside of optimism. And both are essentially equally meaningless in a naturalistic context. Or at least, they should rightfully be passing psychological states if the long-term state of adaptedness ought to be one zeroed on smooth stoic equanimity.

If pessimism or optimism becomes a fixed state of mind, that tells of a mind that is no longer really thinking (and finding the path that points back to an even state of balance).

The point about chance in biology is that it is something life has to mechanically manufacture because it doesn't really exist in nature.

Now that is a confronting way to put it perhaps. But consider the parallel with a tossed coin or rolled die.

As humans, we can imagine this Platonic thing of pure or crisp chance. Following the laws of thought, we can imagine reality being divided in a digital or binary fashion into a definite set of possibilities that then either definitely happen or definitely don't happen.

And then we can produce physical models of such absolute chance. We can really go to town to machine a flat disk so that it has an insignificant degree of asymmetry to bias any fair toss. We can really go to town to produce a perfect cube, with rounded corners, so that it to will have only inconsequential levels of bias when rolled on a flat surface.

So the physical world is analog. But we can make digital devices. Or at least we can approach our Platonic notion of absolute chance so closely as not to make any practical difference, given our purposes - which can be using chance to gamble, or chance to decide who serves first, or whatever.

So the point is that a world with digital perfection of this kind - a perfect symmetry of an outcome-generating process that removes any predictability from some assignable cause - does not exist normally in the world. It has to be made. And to get made implies someone with an interest in that happening. It is already a purposeful act to arrange reality so as to produce chancy outcomes.

We think of natural systems being intrinsically chancy. So a tornado could take any path, a thunderstorm could pop up anywhere. But this is vague chance, or analog chance. Yes, there is unpredictability, But it is just as mixed with inevitability. In hindsight, the thunderstorm had to happen the way it did because so many confluent events panned out that way. However there is not the sharp binary consequence that is taking one path and not another. Instead there was an infinity of trajectories - and most of them were bunched together in the way described by a chaotic attractor. So you have this muddy form of chance, this analog chance, where generally things pan out in a certain direction, and the finer detail of what happens doesn't make much difference.

With life however, it was all about sharpening up muddy chance into sharp chance. The genetic mechanism separated aspects of structure so they became discrete traits. You could take bits of the whole and ask whether going in direction A or B was the better binary choice.

So life always was about the evolution of evolvability. Life arose out of the analog organic soup by being able to pose digitally crisp questions. Intelligibility in a logical sense was the big move.

And its more than just about DNA. Bacteria have unfocused sexual lives. They can share genes at any time across different species. But multicellular life developed a more binary approach to sex. You eventually get individual acts of breeding where sharp mating choices are being made. It now becomes an either/or fact of history whether A mated with B, rather than C, D or E.

So a simplistic ontology of life does stress that what is different is that evolution is ruled by chance. It is a story of the blind watchmaker and cosmic contingency. But this is a view of chance that already presumes a digital physics - a world where absolute determinism rules, and so chance is defined in terms of there naturally always being absolute crispness about what did happen vs what didn't happen in a material sense.

But a more organic conception of reality sees it as analog or muddy when it comes to its variety. Nothing actually starts in sharp distinction. Distinctions or individuations are things that have to be developed. And to varying degrees, material individuation can arise of its own accord due to contextual factors. Yet it all remains entangled or unseparated in some degree too. A bit soupy.

Life then came along and imposed a Platonic digital rigour on this soupy organic possibilty. It framed the chemistry with cell walls, enzyme rate knobs, molecular motors, receptor pores and all other kinds of digital devices. The chemistry was organised by a tight set of yes/no paths and switches.

So developmentally, chemistry became informationally regulated. And as the flip side of this coin, the regulating information was made exposed to blind evolutionary selection. Ways were found to put as much of this digital machinery on show, out in the world for natural selection to play its part, as made sense, given the purpose of wanting adaptive plasticity to go along with the adaptive stability.

So chance - as we digitally conceive of it in its Platonically-ideal splendour - is something that life has become good at manufacturing as it is so useful. Just as life has become good at manufacturing its opposite - a regulated, homeostatic, stability. The kind of purposeful state in which strong determinism appears to rule rather than strong chance.

This is a view of the Universe that can't be seen from a classical Newtonian perspective. But it is the thermodynamic view of a Universe that is mostly a vague entropic mess spreading and cooling its way downhill to a heat death. And out of this sludge, life arises by a negentropic dichotomy. It divides the sludge into a more regulated aspect, and a more chancy aspect. It creates a new, more mechanical, level of self-interaction that makes the sludge both more self-organised, and less self-directed, than was the case.

So the "paradox" is that life seems both more purposeful and more chancy than the world it arises in. For monistic thinkers, this creates a deep problem. Life as a phenomenon ought to be reduced to one of these two ontic categories - necessary or contingent, determined or random, cosmically inevitable or cosmically accidental.

But a systems approach to existence says instead that reality is triadic. It always has this extra dimension which is the developmental one of the vague~crisp. The laws of thought, with their insistence on classical binary possibilities, is just one end of this spectrum - the crisply developed limit. And so our logic has to be larger. It must include the more radical kind of ground that is the muddy analog swamp out of which crisp counter-factually has to emerge.

And it is this triadicy which explains why there are always the dichotomies. For life to be more self-determining, it had to also be more deliberately chancy. It had to go in opposite directions within itself as a material phenomenon to break away from the entropic muddiness that was its initial conditions.

That is why theoretical biologists like Rosen break life down into the dichotomy of metabolism and replication, why they talk about the centrality of the epistemic cut. It is not about which came first - the development or the evolution, the metabolic processes or the genetic regulation. The first thing to happen is the division itself - the division that sets deterministic development and chancy evolution apart.

StreetlightX appears to desire confusing the issue through equivocation, first using "chance" in my way, in one post, then using it in the other way in the following post. Failing to properly distinguish these two uses of "chance" only propagates the myth of chance, through the apparent contradiction that something with an "absence of design or discoverable cause", is also caused. This allows those who support "chance" to argue that there is no design or discoverable cause behind things such as some specific mutations, yet these things are still caused. Does this indicate that there is a belief within the scientific community that there are causes which are undiscoverable? What type of causes would these be, final causes? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. There is an issue here as SX is promoting a reductionist paradigm - one that is antithetical to the reality of formal/final cause. So what he says is a good way to think about it from that particular view, but a holist would want a fuller view of "chance".

So for example, where SX wants to treat peppered moths and the soot blackened trees of the industrial revolution as a kind of contextual accident - a contingent fact - I would instead see it as a global constraint and so a source of teleomatic necessitation.

Predators have eyes because they need to eat. Prey has camouflage as they need to hide. This is the relationship that captures to necessary aspect when it comes to evolutionary causality. There are real desires in play. Then changes in the wider world that are unpredictable from that point of view are contingent in a sense, but not in the sense that the relationship itself is already developed to a point where it must track any such change.

So SX focuses on the contingency of the situation. But there is also another view that can be developed by focusing in the necessity and teleology involved.

But even so, SX is right in drawing out how chance and determinism are not cleanly separated in the way most people imagine from, for example, mechanics. Really, they are two ends of a spectrum - a spectrum which I, as a holist, would describe as the difference between the strongly constrained (the most mechanic) and the weakly constrained (the most randomly free).

For example, one naturalistic way of talking about this is common cause vs special cause....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cause_and_special_cause_(statistics)

The causes of things going in some direction might be strongly identifiable - a strong constraint or special cause. The tree fell because the axeman chopped away at the base. Conversely, the causes might be due to "noise" or random fluctuation. This is saying that the small things that can't be constrained, or prevented happening, can accumulate in a way that makes a difference. A tree might get so rotten that any breeze at any moment becomes the fluctuation that proves its final straw.

So there is always some event that "is the triggering cause". And yet there is a spectrum that runs from the highly purposeful kind of directed action - the woodsman - to the highly unconstrained and unpredictable outcome that is a rotten tree suddenly giving way.

And so overlaying this apparent tale of efficient cause determinism is a counter-tale - a teleological tale - of a well-formed state of desire (the woodsman) vs a well-formed state of indifference (the decay). The holist view presumes there is always a well-formed state of teleology of some kind. And indifference is marked by the point where a system ceases to care about the detail. Desire just has no reason to control events beyond the limits of having its desires generally serviced. Noise is defined by the fact it can be safely ignored.

This constraints-based view of chance makes better sense of the proven evolvability of evolution. Chance is noise and the degree of noise is something the biology gets to define for itself. It wants a useful level. And what counts as a useful level can depend on things that biology learns over time.

Pure chance for biology would be noise or fluctuations so extreme that biology could not survive. On the whole, biology knows that every next generation is going to need eyes, legs, guts - a standard complement of organs. So mutation is restricted accordingly. It is scaled so that height, weight - developmental trajectories in general - shoot for an average and thus result in tightly limited Gaussian bell-curve variety. A purer (less constrained) form of chance would be log/log or powerlaw, not normal/normal or bell curve.

So chance in nature is in fact a really complex subject. But the use of theory of truth concepts - contingent vs necessary truths - does fit with this contrast between free noise as a cause of events, and constrained action as a cause of events. Things can happen either because of probabilistic inevitability, or because of orderly direction.

But biology is then deeply teleological in attempting to suppress noise - as much as necessary to ensure the regularity of development - and equally, to harness noise, as much as necessary to ensure the production of evolution's requisite variety.

Most natural processes, like soil erosion or weather patterns, don't have this kind of choice - to either suppress or harness noisy chance. But biology is all about about this duality of desires - the duality of metabolism and replication, or developmental regularity vs evolutionary variety.

Classical Darwinism focuses on the one at the expense of the other. Blind contingency is said to explain biological complexity because the harnessing of genomic noise is what evolvability is about. However the importance of developmental regularity is now much better understood, no longer taken for granted. And so the suppression of noise is likewise seen to be at the root of biological complexity.

And the ability to arbitrate between plasticity and stability in this fashion is then the further thing that makes for a real model of biological complexity. It shows that chance or noise isn't just shit that happens for life. As much as it can afford to, life is about setting the levels of chance that can be either welcomed or tolerated. Chance for life is framed by its own historically-emergent purpose. And to point out that the future is always still irreducibly chancy does not mean that a considerable measure of finality is not in play.