To delegitimise the technocratic elite is to legitimate Trumpian rule by meme. — apokrisis

:up:
Our knowledge as a species is so great (mirroring a super-differentiated economy) that the individual is forced to blindly trust a system which no one can see in its entirety...hence simplifying fantasies of heroes and villains with simple motives, with a real grip on the controls.

Do you think that's a good thing? You know, evolutionarily...?
— Agent Smith

Hell no. It’s game over for a species that depends on toilets that flush, energy, food and lighting at the click of a button or app. — apokrisis

I sometimes feel my body's a machine and there are things, like lighting up my coffin nail, I can do apparently as easily as clicking a button. I dunno. :chin:

Likewise, I'm confident with these tres hombres Epicurus => Sextus Empricus => Spinoza. — 180 Proof

Systems thinking connects my three. What connects yours? Ethics? Equanimity? How to live?

Obsessing over fashion or the faddish moral vocab of the day, at the cost of understanding even basic physics — jas0n

Even just being rational about public health choices, like the crazy anti-vaxx arguments from folk who are then only too keen to take horse worming tablets instead. Or the 5G conspiracies from folk who think a diet of industrial corn syrup and seed oil is not going to kill them faster.

I'd prefer to quote Popper himself, but I don't have a digital copy. — jas0n

Doesn't this require a theory that others exist and write stuff down for you to then read later? How is that any different than trusting scientific theories? Seems to me that many here are using scribbles they see on some paper as the foundation of everything.

It's strange that we question our senses when doing science, but not philosophy, or at least in reading late philosophers' writings?

A certain kind of pragmatist might take technology as the essence of science/knowledge — jas0n

It seems to me that language itself is a technology.

He literally set out to create a ‘science of consciousness’. That is all. He was not dismissive of science merely critical of the physical sciences encroaching upon psychology and such - rightly so imo. — I like sushi

Right. Seems to me that a proper theory of consciousness would resolve this issue. But then how do we go about doing that if not by our own observations of our own consciousness and the reasoning that goes along with it? It would seem to me that if consciousness is real and in the world, then its functions are part of the world too, and possibly exist in other places in the world (as in other minds).

Husserlian phenomenology is not directly concerned with what is or isn’t. The focus is purely on the experience. The experience is the experience. That is the starting point and it is not finitely reducible.

Meaning whether something ‘exists’ or is ‘imagined’ is of no concern from the phenomenological perspective as the experience (‘real’ or not) is still an experience.

Systems thinking connects my three. What connects yours? Ethics? Equanimity? How to live? — apokrisis

Ontology (relational, actualist) and ethics (eudaimonia praxis) "connect" them for me. From this genealogy, as a consequence, deflation of epistemology (e.g. fallibilism, methodological naturalism, absurdism) preoccupies me.

Husserlian phenomenology is not directly concerned with what is or isn’t. The focus is purely on the experience. The experience is the experience. That is the starting point and it is not finitely reducible.

Meaning whether something ‘exists’ or is ‘imagined’ is of no concern from the phenomenological perspective as the experience (‘real’ or not) is still an experience. — I like sushi

Then Husserlian phenomenology is concerned with the existence of experience. That is the starting point and from there it must be asked why it exists the way that it does - as an experience of an external world - if an external world doesn't exist (the external world is imagined).

No. If you read a bit about it somewhere you will come across the term ‘bracketing’. This is something like not denying that something exists or not, it is about ‘bracketing out’ any idea of something existing.

It is a little like solipsism yet completely NOT that :D You just put things like that aside and notice objects of experience whilst not looking at them as necessarily there or not but investigating the experience.

He refers to ‘parts’ and ‘moments’. For example removing a leg from a table still leaves it as a ‘table,’ but to remove the mass of the table is simply not something comprehend. Or to think of a sound with no timbre … we cannot. Other views are to notice that things are what Husserl likes to call ‘pregnant’. Meaning when you see the table you understand it as having only a partial view of it yet you experience it as a whole object with inside bits and bits at the back.

Phenomenology lacks empirical measures. But phenomenology is a method of approach rather than a universal view. Its aim is endless.

The 'self-knowledge' of the 'distributed operating system' is also distributed. The 'subject' with 'experience' is a body plugged into a 'dance' with other bodies using language and technology. The 'minds' of these subject/bodies are themselves bundles of memes and habits (another level of distributed operating systems?). — jas0n

So something like this from Merleau-Ponty:

” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471)

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413))

Or this from Shaun Gallagher on ‘socially distributed cognition':

“To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group members or the group as a whole.”

“Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy) of their own and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us to other possibilities."

Or this from Gabrielle Chiari:

“In other words, it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.”

Sometimes I think you are willing to dissolve the subject. Other times you seem to want to make it foundational. — jas0n

That’s because you’re noticing a very strange paradox or seeming contradiction in my thinking, an apparent move on my part to dissolve and deconstruct subjectivity while at the same time maintaining a peculiar emphasis on self-belonging, assimilative consistency and similarity, pragmatic relevance and thematic continuity.
How can one possibly claim the latter features as irreducible to ongoing experience without supposing an ideal , rationalist , solipsist, foundational internal gyroscope operating behind the scenes to accomplish such an order? Isn’t this the very essence of a Cartesian Subject?

So the assumption here is that the kind of order depicted by ongoing pragmatic ‘self-similarity’, or as Derrida says, continuing to be the same differently, must originate in a fat content specifying the basis of this order. If events of meaning are claimed to be self-similar, they must be similar in the basis of conformity to an extant context of meaning that dominates and dictates this order. That’s what Cartesian subjects do, they reify content. Put differently, they arbitrarily specify a certain content as the basis of a rational order. So there would seem to be a direct relation between the ‘fatness’ of a grounding content and the violence and dominating , arbitrary force and power it is assumed to harbor.
When we deconstruct classic notions of subject and object, we divest these concepts of their arbitrary, dominating , polarizing ethical power.

In postmodern distributed systems approaches , all that’s left of the old subject and object are temporary nodes in self-transforming networks. Yet this temporary presencing of elements in a shifting network still harbor enough irreducible content to extend a force on each other, to arbitrarily condition and polarize.

The question I, Gendlin, Heidegger and Derrida
ask is whether such reciprocally causal dynamical
models still invest too much content in their grounding assumptions? That is , is it possible to deconstruct these dynamical nodes to locate a more originary basis for a cultural system than that of reciprocal causality?
Such a question led Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin to make the turn from language to temporality.

The website echoes the culture at large in assigning one name, one locus of address and responsibility, to some projected ghost that lives in each body. Is the notion of perspective not dependent on the everyday experience of eyes aimed at the world from different positions in space? — jas0n

Different positions that are synthetically correlated to
produce a unitary image in 3 dimensional depth.
The self is a synthetic achievement, not an a priori. The self can be lost though depersonalization, schizophrenia, etc.

Then Husserlian phenomenology is concerned with the existence of experience. That is the starting point and from there it must be asked why it exists the way that it does - as an experience of an external world - if an external world doesn't exist (the external world is imagined). — Harry Hindu

It exists as the experience of something in a certain. mode of givenness, as recollection, fantasy , perception, etc. These are distinctions between what is directly and what is indirectly experienced. But even what is directly experienced in perception doesn’t tell you very much about the ‘real’ world, because it only exists as what it is for the instant of its appearance. We don’t see chairs and tables and quarks , we see a constantly changing flow of senses of the world. We construct out of this changing flow what we call real objects. But Husserl says this ‘real’ world of spatial things is relative and contingent. It could always turn out to be other than what we construct it to be. So the external world thought of as the empirically natural world of real objects does not exist for Husserl as an irreducible fact, only as a conjecture.

In postmodern distributed systems approaches , all that’s left of the old subject and object are temporary nodes in self-transforming networks. Yet this temporary presencing of elements in a shifting network still harbor enough irreducible content to extend a force on each other, to arbitrarily condition and polarize.

The question I, Gendlin, Heidegger and Derrida
ask is whether such reciprocally causal dynamical
models still invest too much content in their grounding assumptions? That is , is it possible to deconstruct these dynamical nodes to locate a more originary basis for a cultural system than that of reciprocal causality? — Joshs

What seems absent here is the acknowledgement that yes, this distributed systems view of self-organisation and dynamical balance is correct. Even fundamental physics says the same thing in its attempts to create a grand unified theory, such as loop quantum gravity. As do neural network approaches to modelling the brain. So this is not just a now widely held view, there are many mathematical models of it.

But then also, all such models need some pragmatic goal or finality. They are maximising or optimising some value. It is this that determines the patterns of integration and differentiation, of the nodes vs the connections, of the particle excitations vs their vacuum backdrops, etc.

So if a culture is regarded as being deconstructable to its vacuum state - some level ground of pure reactivity; and that flatness would be the general potential that is language as a system of sign - a system that starts untextured by any meanings, and so is the originary state in lacking any intrinsic content, lacking any bumps and hollows or distinctions between what is a node, what is the network; then yes, we can imagine culture having the unbound plurality of that everythingness, that Apeiron which is a vacuum in its ground state.

Yet humans are already neurobiologically enactive systems, embedded in a world that imposes existential challenges on their integrity as organisms. The minute that symbolic language exists to originate a flat and endlessly open world of reference, it is already being closed by the pragmatic demands of negotiating a state of cultural relations that are fundamentally constrained by that prior existence of a body in an actual physical world.

Endlessly deferring reference and infinitely plural interpretation may exist in theory. But in practice, they become just an informational resource to be consumed. The business in hand for the social organism is surviving and spreading in the real world. That is the optimising function. And to the degree that is not being recognised in a culture's organismic economy, the organism is sick, pathological, dysfunctional.

Maybe you have the intention to recover this pragmatic functionality, this natural finality, once you have established the flat plurality of language as a new technology of reference or interpretance?

But that would be my point. The semiotic value of language is that it can indeed refer to anything. Yet there is no actual value in that until sharp choices have been made. The plurality of possibility is what the relevant optimisation function erases. Meaning arises via the constraint of all that is irrelevant. Signal is filtered from noise by the discard of information.

“In other words, it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies. — Joshs

Yes. And I generally agree with the other quotes too.

Let me stress again the distinction of body and ego. The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention.* It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. Accounts dissolving the 'foundation' of bodies in a world tend to depend on what they dissolve and lapse into an absurdity that's hard to recognize in all the smoke.

I think we are both challenging the assumption that "reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths." Feuerbach understands the alternative as "thinking is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual....In thinking,I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

Of course different bodies have obtained different degrees of participation in 'one and the same' reason. Feuerbach's transitional account is still trailing clouds of glory from Hegel. So we can jump forward to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida...or to any thinker who dissolves the subject (not the body) into culture or language or social habit.

*The issue of whether it makes sense to talk of a 'pure witness' is something else. I can only grok it in terms of a collapse of consciousness into being. 'It's not how but that the world is there that is the mystical.' A healthy brain in some external world is the condition of possibility for experience a world in which there are healthy brains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip ?

Endlessly deferring reference and infinitely plural interpretation may exist in theory...The business in hand for the social organism is surviving and spreading in the real world. — apokrisis

:up:

The plurality of possibility is what the relevant optimisation function erases. — apokrisis

:up:

The self is a synthetic achievement, not an a priori. The self can be lost though depersonalization, schizophrenia, etc. — Joshs

:up:

...peculiar emphasis on self-belonging, assimilative consistency and similarity, pragmatic relevance and thematic continuity... — Joshs

These qualities seem to apply to both the individual 'subject' and the tribe's self-understanding as a whole. That fits a distributed operating system metaphor. If 'I' am an experimental version of the tribal ego, then 'I' am going to be similar to 'us.'

The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention. It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. — jas0n

Well put. This is social psychology 101 ... well, for some, like Andy Lock and the semiotic/symbolic interactionist/Vygotskian psychology crowd.

A useful resource here would be Andy Lock's summaries of George Herbert Mead, Jacob von Uexkull, and Lev Vygotsky.

I was just looking into Vygotsky, found some online texts. A summary will be helpful. Thanks.

It'd maybe be better to have at least two, and to methodically exercise differing approaches with each. — jas0n

Only two? I thought you had many more than that. And yet the approaches do not differ enough such as to be unrecognizable as one. Keep trying I guess.

.

But you have trouble following a single thread, so maybe don't concern yourself with the idea... — jas0n

How do you know I have trouble following a single thread?

I wasn't meaning to offend you; I thought that was what you were referring to; your multiple personas on this site. I have had only one, but it's true I did change the name of that one from John to Janus.

Why so upset, such as even to refer to me as "bitch"?

'Perspective' is parasitic on the singularity of the body. It's only contingently true that each body 'plays' just one handle here. It'd maybe be better to have at least two, and to methodically exercise differing approaches with each. As 'a' philosopher, I feel like a team of explorers. But folks are confused if you switch gears/masks to quickly. Folks are maybe too attached also when forced to play a single mask. — jas0n

Two would be enough if we could force folk to be have both a self and anti-self. You would have to show a dialectical self-duality by being jasOn and anti-jasOn .... just like the only Superman plot twist that was worth a damn. :razz:

I'm waiting to see the anti- or bizarro- you, apo, and his respective philosophy. If you present it I ought not to be able to tell it is really you behind the mask.

Let me stress again the distinction of body and ego. The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention.* It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. Accounts dissolving the 'foundation' of bodies in a world tend to depend on what they dissolve and lapse into an absurdity that's hard to recognize in all the smoke. — jas0n

Researchers in enactive cognition like Evan Thomson and Ezekiel DePaulo define a living body as a self-organizing system that can be defined by a certain operational closure or autonomy with respect to its environment, and link this thinking with phenomenological work on intentionality and being-in-the -world by Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger. This same autonomy defines it as a sense-making cognizing system. Sense-making is intrinsically affective because it is normative. Behavior and sense-making is oriented on the basis of purposes and goals that define this autonomy. Events matter to a sense-making creature , which means its ‘self’, its ongoing synthetic identity, is not dissolvable into a reciprocal mesh of socially distributed discursive practices any more than its body is dissolved into a reciprocal interchange between it and its environment. Sense-making is embodied ina body which is embedded in a world. That mean that sense-making cannot be separated from body and world. But neither can body understood apart from world and from sense-making. The three aspects are indissociable, but assymetrical in favor of the embodied cognizer.

“Living as sense-making in precarious conditions is systemically generated, with living beings enacting environments that pull them along into certain rhythms, behaviours, and internal transformations. (This point becomes especially important when we remember that the environment is always an environment of other living beings—bacteria do not live in isolation but in microbial communities.) The organism enacts an environment as the environment entrains the organism. Both are necessary and neither, by itself, is sufficient for the process of sense-making.

But now comes the tricky point. What we have just said implies that the relation between organism and environment is reciprocal, for each acts as a control parameter for the other. But this kind of reciprocity does not imply that their relation is not also asymmetrical, in the relevant sense of asymmetry. Although the physical and energetic coupling between a living being and the physicochemical environment is symmetrical, with each partner exerting more influence on the other at different times, the living being modulates the parameters of this coupling in a way the environment typically does not. Living beings, precisely because they are autopoietic and adaptive, can “surf” environmental events and modulate them to their own ends, like a bird gliding on the wind. Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to account for the directedness proper to living be-ings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality.

Cognition is sense-making in interaction: the regulation of coupling with respect to norms established by the self-constituted identity that gives rise to such regulation in order to conserve itself. This identity may be that of the living organism, but also other identities based on other forms of organizationally closed networks of processes, such as sociolinguistic selves, organized bundles of habits, etc. Some of these identities are already constituted by processes that extend beyond the skull. But in any case, cognition is always a process that occurs in a relational domain. Unlike many other processes (e.g. getting wet in the rain) its cognitive character is given nor-matively and asymmetrically by the self-constituted identity that seeks to preserve its mode of life in such engagements. As relational in this strict sense, cognition has no location. It simply makes no sense to point to chunks of matter and space and speak of containment within a cognitive system. Inspect a baby all you want and you'll never find out whether she's a twin (Di Paolo)

But I've always said that I am indeed my own anti-particle in that regard. My view sits beyond the dualism of the holism vs reductionism debate in metaphysics because it indeed shows them to be the two poles of the one larger dichotomy.

So I am the only fully unified poster around these parts. I am fluent in the logic of both extreme points of view. I can speak for the mechanical and the organic while showing how they are also one and the same.

That may sound like it means a need for three identities, but really it means that I am the only person who could rightfully claim to be a monist - as I accept the irreducible triality of the Peircean system. :cool:

I cash this self-duality out on many occasions. Who else says the secret of the holistic organism is that it is indeed based on the very mechanical thing of a switch - Pattee's epistemic cut.

And I also say what a big surprise that has been. Having started out as a reductionist - top in the class for that - I then swung to the "other" of holism, and the history of how philosophy, science, logic and maths have been trying to imagine that.

But with Peircean semiotics and Pattee's epistemic cut, the loop is closed. And in spectacular fashion with the biophysics and biosemiotics revolution of the past decade or so.

I will repost my old note on how machinery was eventually found to be at the beating holistic heart of life and mind - a synopsis of Peter Hoffman's very readable Life's Ratchet.

On the transition from non-life to life

Biophysics finds a new substance

This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.

The key finding: As outlined in this paper (http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf) and in this book (http://lifesratchet.com/), the nanoscale turns out to be a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.

So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.

This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transition from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. At the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.

The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.

So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.

So the big finding is the way that contrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.

The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.

In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.

A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where it needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.

It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.

A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.

This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.

The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.

But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.

It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.

So contra conventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.

As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.

And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.

Graph of the convergence zone: Phillips, R., & Quake, S. (2006). The Biological Frontier of Physics Physics Today 59

Two would be enough if we could force folk to be have both a self and anti-self. You would have to show a dialectical self-duality by being jasOn and anti-jasOn .... just like the only Superman plot twist that was worth a damn. — apokrisis

The move from one to two would be decisive. In the practical world, we need to track bodies, feed or age the right one, so merely changing one's legal name requires a preliminary public notice, almost nullifying this change, ensuring the legal name's function as a kind of toe-tag.

Of course going farther and performing opposed personalities is just madness. One is one around here, probably because it's an efficient way to integrate an organism into its group, and I'd guess there's even a biological basis as well at this point.

It seems norms proper to that realm are thoughtlessly dragged along into an online space that offers new possibilities.

Using two handles simultaneously violates the spirit and perhaps the letter of the rules, so I haven't and won't do it. But if the norms were different, I'd love to try to outdo some of my opponents at their own game, show them the opposition I'd love to see (because it'd force the best out of 'me.')

Researchers in enactive cognition like Evan Thomson and Ezekiel DePaulo define a living body as a self-organizing system that can be defined by a certain operational closure or autonomy with respect to its environment. — Joshs

I'm aware that one can stretch the term. Recall that I've insisted on a perhaps necessary ambiguity when it comes to specifying the 'practical' foundation of bodies in a world. Some kind of hazy indirect realism seems implicit in the philosophical enterprise. We are either talking about the same world or writing poetry. If you tell me we are co-creating the world (which may be true if limited to the social world), then you are saying something that's true only if/because everyone believes it.

I don't deny that the body/environment boundary is blurry or imperfect, an abstraction. I'm just floating the radical hypothesis that we are animals on the same planet who communicate using sounds and marks, primarily for 'animal'/practical reasons (to feed, breed, safely crowd into cities...)

Sense-making is intrinsically affective because it is normative. — Joshs

Do you mean to say that it is intrinsically affective as the body's physiology - ruled by the reciprocal economy of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system - must reset itself constantly so that the organism is not just perceptually or cognitively embodied in its world, but pragmatically in terms of the right physiological state?

The brain gives over as much cortical space to mapping the world in terms of orientation responses as it does to motor plans. And that is because the body need to marry its own variety of states to the variety of states it senses in the world.

We don't just see that a gang of Hells Angels are dressed in black and sat astride noisy bikes. We feel the tension and violence that is also "out there" in our Umwelt - because that is the physiological change in state we ourselves, as bodies, are rapidly making in anticipation of what actions to take and where next to look.

This may be "normative" in being a semiotic habit - buried deep down in the "reptilian brain". Is that what you mean, neurobiologically speaking?

But now comes the tricky point. What we have just said implies that the relation between organism and environment is reciprocal, for each acts as a control parameter for the other. But this kind of reciprocity does not imply that their relation is not also asymmetrical, in the relevant sense of asymmetry. — Joshs

I must protest. To be reciprocal is the definition of an asymmetry. And it doesn't seem a tricky point.

Though it also becomes easier to appreciate when approached through the structuralism of hierarchy theory that shows the local~global scales across which the symmetry as very literally asymmetrically broken.

Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to account for the directedness proper to living be-ings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality. — Joshs

Correct. :up: No point just having a dualistic division. It must be an enactive relation. An organism must model its world in the form of an optimising dynamical balance. Bayesian brain 101.

But again, that has surprises up its sleeve. The consequence is that the organism strives to be come a collection of habits and routines which - instead of being representationally conscious of the world - is in fact predicated on the effort to ignore as much of the world as possible. To function as an automaton.

Or to put it more believably, to already know the world in advance and so subtract that away and leave only the self - the model that just did the prediction - as the thing that might draw any attention to itself.

If in my mind I have already sweetly struck the tennis return, the only thing worth noting is that there was this "I" that imposed its will on nature. It is only when I then turn out to have fucked up the shot that instead the world exists in contrast to this "me", this locus of all will and meaning.

That is when "I" point to the divot that caused the bad bounce, or curse the small distracting noise in the crowd, or whatever else can take the blame, and so "other" the fuck-up as something external to my ego.

A simple name change is too exciting/distracting for some. Using two avatars/handles simultaneously violates the spirit and perhaps not the letter of the rules, so I haven't and won't do it. But if the norms were different, I'd love to try steelmanning my opponents, to outdo them at their own game. — jas0n

I like the idea of that challenge. Could I create a sockpuppet so convincing that it could never read as me? But practically speaking, I waste too much time here as it is.

I wasn't meaning to offend you; I thought that was what you were referring to; your multiple personas on this site. I have had only one, but it's true I did change the name of that one from John to Janus.

Why so upset, such as even to refer to me as "bitch"? — Janus

I apologize for the insult, and I regret losing my temper. We've discussed this topic before, and it wasn't a terribly pleasant conversation, so your bringing it up again seemed hypocritically aggressive. If you review, I think you'll see that it was a misreading, that I was clearly talking about more than a mere name change.