I then asked you to provide an example of an overarching meaning for life from any other metaphysical system, Buddhism for example, which you failed to do. — Janus

I did not 'fail to do it'. I referred to a source, by a Buddhist, about the very question, which explicitly addressed it. As for the rest, you are of course entitled to your opinion.

Where in the quote from that source is the ultimate meaning or purpose of life consistently and clearly given? It reads like suggestive nonsense to me. Like poetry, such a passage might evoke some feelings, yearnings or even vague aspirations, but there is no clear proposition in it that can be rationally discussed and critiqued. So apart from your usual complaints about "something" that has been lost, some mysterious 'we know not what' that is purportedly not understood by modern philosophers, what are you actually trying to say?

This raises a question in my mind: would this eternal entity be inside or outside of space and time? If inside, then differentiation would be possible after all, and it opens up the possibility that there could be multiple eternal entities. If outside, then temporal unfolding would presumably not be possible. — Esse Quam Videri

I think the idea is that the eternal is not inside or outside space and time, but that space and time are expressions of the eternal. Differentiation is thus also an expression of the eternal.

As a somewhat crude analogy, think of the expressions on your face; is your face inside or outside them? Does such a question even make sense?

This would seem to imply that there are a multitude of eternal entities – namely, every entity (event) that has ever passed away. — Esse Quam Videri

Their multitudinousness would only be a spatio-temporal phenomennon, though.

my understanding is that Spinoza tied causality to the principle of sufficient reason. Everything in his system requires a reason for its existence, and causes provide those reasons. Since god (substance) is the only entity in Spinoza’s metaphysics that provides its own reason for existence, it must act as the causal ground for every other entity (modes) in the system — Esse Quam Videri

I think this is right, and that Spinoza explicitly stated that God is the ultimate efficient cause of everything. I don't think of it that way, but rather I think that everything is the spatio-temporal expression of the eternal ( "God" or "substance", if you like). but I also think that spatio-temporal phenomena must in some 'final' sense determine themselves, within the constraints of efficient causation, and of course not inconsistently with it. So, I don't entertain Spinoza's notion of inexorable determinism and necessity.

not because it is not the case that some physicalists (such as apo) might understand entropy to be a kind of ultimate telos — Janus

On the contrary, i agree with Nietzsche that the demand for such an ultimate purpose is what leads to nihilism — Janus

I should mention that my physicalism is of the systems vairiety. So an imperative towards entropy is also matched by one towards negentropy. Thus nihilism is avoided by all things being dichotomies rather than monisms.

And so this is like the Buddhist notion of co-dependent arising. Or Hegelian dialectics.

Even finality is dualised in the sense that entropification take organisation. The Heat Death is a state of extreme order as much as extreme disorder. Everything becomes as much alike as possible.

So a proper Peircean view here is that the Cosmos describes a phase transition from absolute vagueness to absolute generality.

Entropy is a convenient local measure of something that seems to increase with time. But we could just as well measure this transition into a state of maximum generality by 1/entropy, or negentropy. The Heat Death is where change effectively ceases and spacetime finally achieves its flattest, most eternal, universal condition.

And so this is like the Buddhist notion of co-dependent arising. Or Hegelian dialectics. — apokrisis

Yes, this makes sense, except that I think the final cause Wayfarer is looking for must, according to him, lie outside (be transcendent to) the system, which really makes no sense. So, I tend to think that Buddhist philosophy and Hegelian dialectics are not in any sense philosophies of transcendence in the way Wayfarer seem to conceive it, quite the opposite in fact.

Even finality is dualised in the sense that entropification take organisation. The Heat Death is a state of extreme order as much as extreme disorder. Everything becomes as much alike as possible. — apokrisis

This is a really interesting point. At the heat death, thermally speaking, there would be the ultimate degree of order, which is changelessness. But in terms of the spatial distribution of (dead, cold) matter it would be the ultimate disorder or lack of order. I've long thought that is a kind of weird paradox about entropy. Wayfarer also refers to it with his "I'm not sure which".

what are you actually trying to say? — Janus

Something that you never understand.

And so this is like the Buddhist notion of co-dependent arising. — apokrisis

But without Nirvāṇa, for the sake of which pratītyasamutpāda is taught in the first place. I'm afraid your philosophy is nihilistic, which is why, incidentally, you can only ever conceive of Nirvāṇa as being stasis, which it explicitly is not.

Likewise as with your gloss on Aristotle's 'four causes' where heat death is the final cause; whereas in Aristotle, the final end of existence is the 'contemplation of the eternal ideas'.

Something that you never understand. — Wayfarer

No, it's something that you will never admit that you cannot explain. As Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus:

1.The world is all that is the case.
2. What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with sense.
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
(An elementary proposition is a truth function of itself.)
6. The general form of a truth-function is [p¯,ξ¯,N(ξ¯)]
This is the general form of a proposition.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Also: “Anything that can be said can be said clearly.”

But without Nirvāṇa, for the sake of which pratītyasamutpāda is taught in the first place. — Wayfarer

But that cannot be the overarching ultimate purpose of existence, that would make no sense, so it is merely a final human purpose within the system.

merely a final human purpose — Janus

‘Nihil ultra ego’ - nothing beyond self. That’s how we see things nowadays.

Regarding Wittgenstein, see this post.

I think that's not relevant. Even if you, more modestly, claimed that modern philosophy sees nothing "beyond the human"; that might be true of a few modern philosophers but certainly not of all. Physicalism, for example, sees plenty beyond both the self, and beyond the human.

As to the post you cited: Wittgenstein's "mystical statements", say nothing that supports your position; it's quite the opposite; he's just saying the same thing there as I am; that you cannot say anything sensible (in any propositional sense) about the mystical (or ethics) so they must be 'passed over in silence".Of course, you can say things that may have power to convince others, but the power will be, not rational, but rhetorical or poetical, and I have never denied that. So, I really am perplexed as to what you are going on about. Most of it just seems to consist in expressions of your own dissatisfaction.

you cannot say anything sensible (in any propositional sense) about the mystical (or ethics) — Janus

What do you make of these, then?

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.

- 6.41

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.

(Ethics and æsthetics are one.)

- 6.421

I would have thought, according to your interpretation, this is something that ought not to have been stated.

Even if you, more modestly, claimed that modern philosophy sees nothing "beyond the human"; that might be true of a few modern philosophers but certainly not of all. — Janus

Which modern philosophers do you think that’s not true of?

I don't interpret those as metaphysical statements at all, but Wittgenstein is merely saying that what humans feel value in, what we really care about, is the human side of things, which is not part of the sheer happenings and states of affairs that can be captured in propositional statements and which constitute the (empirical) world.

All of this other, human side of life includes poetry, the arts, religious feeling and faith, love and friendship, trust, care, compassion, respect and so on. None of this says anything at all about the nature of any metaphysical reality; that is the point.

Well, ironically enough the only modern philosophers you seem to favour at all, like Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, the idealists, existentialists and the anti-realists would be the ones who you might say (on certain interpretations, mind) "see nothing beyond the human". It is the physicalists and materialists, the realists, the thinkers of biological evolution, ecology, and 'systems' and process thinkers, on the other hand, who see the most beyond the human.

Yes, this makes sense, except that I think the final cause Wayfarer is looking for must, according to him, lie outside (be transcendent to) the system, which really makes no sense. So, I tend to think that Buddhist philosophy and Hegelian dialectics are not in any sense philosophies of transcendence in the way Wayfarer seem to conceive it, quite the opposite in fact. — Janus

Correct.

This is a really interesting point. At the heat death, thermally speaking, there would be the ultimate degree of order, which is changelessness. But in terms of the spatial distribution of (dead, cold) matter it would be the ultimate disorder or lack of order. I've long thought that is a kind of weird paradox about entropy. Wayfarer also refers to it with his "I'm not sure which". — Janus

This is a very subtle technical point in cosmology. The total entropy content of a “co-moving” region of space never changes. If the expansion and cooling of the universe is a smooth unfolding that maintains its original equilibrium, then the entropy count never changes despite all that cooling and expanding. The change is adibiatic.

So while the Heat Death is often characterised as a maximum entropy state, on a larger view, nothing entropically changes. All that happens is that those degrees of freedom - the initial burst of radiation considered as a bunch of rays - are more stretched out and so as cold as possible. But unless there is something to compare their temperature to, there is no real difference to speak of. The total number is the same.

That again is why we need yet a further dimension of reality - the vague~crisp - to measure the transition from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. The beginning would be seen as a state of maximum indeterminism of those degrees of freedom, those radiation particles, and the end would see them have a maximally determinate existence. They would be in their simplest energy state in the flattest possible world.

Note that at the Heat Death, I am presuming all the cold matter has been fizzled back to radiation again by being first swept up by blackholes which then decay to release all remaining matter back to this simplest possible state.

Although it also works that at the end of time, space gets so expanded that every individual particle disappear over an event horizon. So even if things get down to a dust of protons, there would eventually be just a single proton inside any light cone region of the universe.

Also note that this particular scenario - where there is an actual Heat Death at some point in an eternal future - depends on the dark energy or cosmological constant that provides a faint continuing accelerative push. And making sense of that negentropic force, when talking about the cosmological entropy balance, is yet another headache in getting the sums to come out right.

But anyway, the Heat Death is usually described in very simple terms as a maximum entropy state. That is only a very simple introductory idea. The discussion quickly gets metaphysical and dialectical after that.

I'm afraid your philosophy is nihilistic — Wayfarer

And I’m afraid that is bollocks. My entropic approach takes meaning so seriously that it can measure it. Yours is theistic wishful handwaving.

There are some really tantalizing ideas in there apo; unfortunately some of it is over my current scientific head, so I can only get a kind of 'feel' for it. :smile:

Wittgenstein is merely saying that what humans feel value in, what we really care about, is the human side of things, which is not part of the sheer happenings and states of affairs that can be captured in propositional statements and which constitute the (empirical) world.

All of this other, human side of life includes poetry, the arts, religious feeling and faith, love and friendship, trust, care, compassion, respect and so on. None of this says anything at all about the nature of any metaphysical reality; that is the point. — Janus

I didn't introduce the term 'metaphysical' to the debate. According to Ray Monk, who wrote a biography of Wittgenstein, the point was that "his style of thinking is at odds with the style that dominates our present era. His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand....If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face."

Well, that's one view of what Wittgenstein was primarily about. Another view is that his main philosophical concern was to deflate metaphysical claims, just as Kant had done earlier, but in a different way. The difference with Wittgenstein's approach was that it was a semantic, rather than an epistemological approach. Kant demonstrated the limits of knowledge, confining it to the synthetic a priori and the empirical, whereas Wittgenstein demonstrated the limits of sense.

I agree that Wittgenstein opposed scientism, but I already explained my interpretation of why he opposed it. It was not because he believed in anything "transcendent", but because he thought that the arts, religion, ethics and other deeply important human concerns lay outside the purview of science.

The term 'metaphysical' was always intrinsically relevant to this debate, since this thread is entitled "Speculations about being".

He thought that the arts, religion, ethics and other deeply important human concerns lay outside the purview of science. — Janus

Which is simply another way of saying that such issues transcend scientific method [where ‘transcend’ means ‘to be or go beyond the range or limits of a field of activity or conceptual sphere’.]

Sure, I have no issue with the term 'transcend' in that kind of context. That's a usage of the term which I, and I believe Wittgenstein would, agree does have a sense

The part played by a prime mover would be the thermodynamic imperative or least action principle. — apokrisis

I am no theoretical physicist, but I think that I can understand the basic idea here. In your metaphysic, the least action principle is the prime mover in the sense that it imposes a universal constraint upon the behavior of all physical systems. It plays the role of final cause for the universe at large in virtue of foreclosing possibilities and thereby "forcing" nature down one particular path (or set of paths) rather than others as it hurtles toward its ultimate, "pre-ordained" end - namely, the eventual heat death of the universe.

I'm sure that there are many nuances in the maths that I am glossing here, but does that capture the basic idea?

But, Quine and his ilk are not representative, in that they’re philosophers, and are sufficiently educated to realise the difficulties inherent in abandoning realism with respect to abstractions. But as a rule of thumb, most nowadays believe that the human intelligence is an evolved adaptation, and that therefore the basic explanation for it is - and can only be - biological in nature. — Wayfarer

That may be true, but the point stands that naturalism is not equivalent with the elimination of abstractions from one’s ontology.

This point is basically the same as that which underlies the ‘argument from reason’ - which is that reason itself is a faculty for which there is not a physicalist or naturalist explanation. — Wayfarer

I am quite sympathetic to the idea that the operation of the intellect cannot reduced to physical processes, but I am also open to considering proposals to the contrary. Much depends in this discussion (as in most philosophical discussions) on how one defines one’s terms. Many times, people end up disagreeing without realizing or bothering to discover that they are using words in fundamentally different ways.

I am quite sympathetic to the idea that the operation of the intellect cannot reduced to physical processes, but I am also open to considering proposals to the contrary. — Esse Quam Videri

I find on forums, and I think modern culture generally, there is an almost universal assumption that, as humans are an evolved species, then the nature of intelligence can be understood mainly through the lens of evolutionary biology. Now, I'm not the least interested in intelligent design which I regard as type of fundamentalism, but at the same time, I think this reflexive appeal to evolutionary biology is inevitably reductionist. It reduces questions of the nature of intelligence, mind, and consciousness, to questions of biological adaptability, which in turn amounts to a form of utilitarianism in philosophy, and appeals to neuro-science and biology to respect of the nature of mind. Such attitudes are all intrinsically physicalist in origin and intent. I frequently refer to Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False in this context, as it is one of the few actual philosophy texts which addresses this issue (Aping Mankind by Raymond Tallis is another). But these attitudes are so deeply a part of the matrix of secular culture that questioning them amounts to a form of subversion.

'm sure that there are many nuances in the maths that I am glossing here, but does that capture the basic idea? — Esse Quam Videri

That’s it.

In case you are interested, there is this nice paper on the Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf

And I highlighted the "mysteriousness" of the PLA in this discussion - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/178536

Also I follow Stan Salthe on how to keep telos unmystical within philosophical naturalism - http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/Purpose_In_Nature.pdf

This naturalistic approach recognises nested grades of purpose. So you have {tendencies {functions {purposes}}} as the physical, biological and then psychological levels of telos. The prime mover at a generalised physical level is simply a global tendency, nothing grander. More organised states of purpose then evolve locally within organisms as higher levels of systemhood.

I’m still digesting your biosemiotics paper. I’ll make some comments soon. I just thought I’d add my two cents that I find it harder to apply this principle to the psychological principles without inserting your bias. Appeals to majority can also be suspect as justifications as people can be conditioned to do several routed that are the current norm. Taking what is as what should be is a fallacy, especially when that is is exactly what is the condition at this point of time. I know you think change is possible, but that can go in many variations. Anyways, it may be considered a category error to use the mechanisms that control more physical processes to value.

I can see you are approaching the paper with a completely open and unbiased mind. :up:

I’m not even really referring to that in this case. I actually find the concepts in the paper very interesting and gives me a lot to think about in regards to symbols and physical laws. I read the tail end of this discussion here and thought just your pragmatism is harder to apply to value theory. I mean this in terms of physical processes versus value theory.

I read the tail end of this discussion here and thought just your pragmatism is harder to apply to value theory. — schopenhauer1

Maybe read the discussion then. It's not about value theory. Or at least no version in which values would be something with an objective or transcendent existence.

Ok because in the past I’ve seen you defend a sort of ethics whereby the majority’s preferences as they are justified as right simply because it is what the majority prefers.

That sounds like a position stripped of all nuance. Maybe you are thinking of Jamesian pragmatism?