Didn't know Dr Jay Neitz talked about tetrachromic vision. — TiredThinker

He did the genetics and was searching for test candidates who had expressed two variants of the "red" photopigment gene.

The way that the developing retina could wire itself up and make use of whatever genetic variety got expressed was of course of clinical significance. For example, if you could make use of that to fix colour blindness by injecting the missing gene.

For whatever reason the golden ratio is most desirable. — TiredThinker

Neurobiology would want to seize on the regularities or invariants of the natural world.

I mentioned Fechner's Law as an example of how the brain latches onto proportional difference rather than actual difference - a log relation that makes perceptual judgement "scale free".

So we can recognise a tiny elephant the size of a fly as easily as a huge elephant as big as a mountain. The brain already stabilises the world in terms of what it really wants to extract - object identity. An elephant just strikes us as the same thing when seen at any size. The perceptual system has already filtered out the actual size because our recognition processes have built in a scale free memory representation.

The golden ratio is then perhaps something we have a similar built in sensitivity to. We can see even and symmetric patterns of growth because our neurobiology has already homed in on what is the most regular features of our environment. That makes it easy to pick out departures from such norms.

These things are more complex than colors, but we can make conclusions about them outside of particular contexts. Am I right? — TiredThinker

I certainly agree. (Although colour perception is perhaps the most fiendish of the sensory processes. It's complexity is significant.)

There seems to be a relation of sorts anyway; implications of "a bridge" might shed light on other things. — jorndoe

There’s definitely a bridge in my book. But it is neurosemiotic. Ain’t no one wants to talk about that. :wink:

So, it's not so much that "my red is the same as yours", more that there's enough interactional stability that we can find coherent ways to talk about it. — jorndoe

I agree that this is a critical point, but it may not touch the fundamental point - at least so far as the Hard Problem is framed.

It is really important that colour experience is socially constructed through language use. We all learn to talk about red as "that experience of redness we all share".

That is, the qualia problem is based on red being a primary kind of mental quality. That is the way we learn to talk about it. Yet also, when do we ever just "see red". We are always seeing some shade of red, with some texture, some shape, some actual surface and situation.

To really show what we might mean, we can pull out a red crayon, point to a red post box, flourish a paint sample. We will present the redness as something all of its own - a discrete mental quality - by exhibiting it on a flat and untextured surface in clear white light with no shape or even meaning to distract us from the contemplation of the "pure experience of red".

This carefully stage managed state of mind is what the language of red presumes. And yet a whole philosophical economy gets built on it as the prime example of the mind~body problem.

Shapes and sounds and other sensations can be seen as just straight representation of the world (even though they are not at all). We can imagine a computer doing shape recognition or sound identification because the patterns are in the stimulus.

But the philosophy of mind conversation always circles back to its best possible example - not even the mixed hues like turquoise and brown, but red and green, blue and yellow.

And yet the primary hues are never found in nature except in some kind of embedding context of shape, texture, luminance, etc. (Or as display colours used by animals as explicit signals.)

So a kind of con is always going on here. (Even though I most reluctantly agree this doesn't finally dissolve the Hard Problem entirely. One can't just wish it away. One must continue to work on it. :grin: )

You have an expert understanding of the issues. What are your own thoughts on the prime puzzle of qualia?

Why is red experienced as red?

That is, we can say so much about why red isn’t blue, and red is as un-green like as it gets. All the available neurobiology of opponent channel processing and such like gives us a physicalist explanation of hue difference - an ability to contrast and compare.

But red still winds up having an identifiable quality that seems fixed (disregarding “grue” and other philosophical attacks on that). It is irritating but physicalism finally gives out at the final step when we would want to account for the ineffability of red as the actual qualia that it is for us.

Pragmatically, one can defend physicalism on the basis that we need differences that make a difference to motivate a casual explanation. There has to be a change in state, a contrast, to even get the businesses of an explanation going. The Hard Problem arises at the edge of inquiry where there just is no differences that are available. At which point we must fall silent. And that is better than treating the Hard Problem as a philosophical “gotcha” - the collapse of the entire physicalist project.

But still. The redness of redness must tantalise. Do you have any position on this?

While we might agree to disagree about its colour, that would be more problematic for its mass. — Banno

Even judgements of weight are deeply psychological - secondary qualities - as shown by Weber-Fechner’s Law. We experience the proportionate difference between two weights rather than their absolute difference.

If we experienced weight as it “actually is”, a 2kg difference would always feel like 2kg, whether it was 4kg in one hand and 6kg in the other, or 50kg in one and 52kg in the other.

The more you dig into psychophysics, the more psychological or “subjective” even the primary qualities become.

You will never guess who co-wrote a classic paper on weight judgements.

Peirce made the argument that sensation is all about the perception of difference rather than sameness. It is indirect from the get go as it relies on contrast.

Reasoning involves mediation, and this mediation requires that the object be not given in contemplation. This thesis is exemplified by Peirce through the case of tactile perception, where feeling a piece of cloth actually requires the comparison of different moments of the experience of the piece of cloth and the comparison is achieved by moving one’s hand over it:

17 EP1: 15.
A man can distinguish different textures of cloth by feeling; but not immediately, for he requires to move his fingers over the cloth, which shows that he is obliged to compare the sensations of one instant with those of another.17

For Peirce, cognition, at every level, is always the product of inference, and the basic structure of rational thought is already at work, albeit unconsciously, in sensation. Empirical research in this context is used to illustrate and support a radical philosophical thesis: that all knowledge is mediated and the product of some previous cognition; and that to talk of an absolute start or first cognition is both intellectually and perceptually unintelligible.

https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1006

It seems like shape provides one bit of information while the color provides a different bit. — Harry Hindu

Colour reveals the surface and so helps you see the shape.

Imagine you had a bag of toy animals all in the same green plastic. You have to sort them fast and find the turtle by its shape.

Now imagine the same bag but now the turtle is red.

The shape is enough information. But shapes all seem to bleed into each other - because the shape is what’s “real” about the object. We see “shape” in all its infinite variety.

Colour by contrast is much more abstract because the discrimination is based on just three opponent channel processes. For hue, the brain is making a binary judgement of red or not-red. And if it’s not-red, it’s green. The same with blue vs yellow and dark vs bright. Mix the three binaries and you can still get a million discriminable states. But that on-off switch at the heart of perceptual judgements is why different hues leap out in a way that shapes are less able to.

Shapes are 3D. We have to decode that turtle from all sorts of angles. Real shapes are often mobile. We have to recognise our cat even curled in a ball. But surface reflectance is 2D and so simpler to decode from any angle.

So the argument is that we see colour not because that is what is there in the world. Rather that once having evolved an eye that could resolve shape with a lens, then adding binary reflectance judgements on top started to chop the visual world into automatically delineated chunks of surface. Much better than a bag of green toys even if we have the sharpest vision for seeing their shapes.

Red becomes orange at around 480Thz. Wether we use the word “red” or “orange” for a 480Thz light might be a matter for contention. That we are talking about light at 480Thz, less so. — Banno

Might want to check on colour constancy before going too far down that dead end.

They can't see a factor of 100 more colors than trichromic without literally that many more cones. — TiredThinker

You may be right. I'm just going on the literature of the time and my conversations with those doing the research, such as Dr Gabi Jordan and Dr Jay Neitz. It was 20 years ago.

I know you can't "prove" that one person's red is the same as the next person's. But is it conceivable that the brain tries to keep sensory sensations efficient as the collection of wavelength information itself? — TiredThinker

This is in fact an issue of basic philosophical import as it forces us to change our whole thinking about what "minds" are for.

We think of them as being about the brain wanting to know reality as it really is. And so the mind is a mental picture, a representation, of what is "actually out there".

But it is the opposite. The mind is a reduction of a pattern of physical energy into an "umwelt" or system of sign.

Colour as we experience is not real. It is not what specific wavelength frequencies "look like". Colour is a response to the world in terms of a series of discriminatory steps that produce a signal. Evolution is designing us so that we immediately recognise the plum is not an orange. We don't have to taste it, bite it, or squeeze it. A surface reflectance makes it completely distinct as one or the other.

Evolution doesn't care about the actual hue we experience. And so it is not even trying to ensure we all have the same exact experience in the privacy of our heads. That may be the case, but it isn't even necessary.

What evolution needs is that a difference just pops out. We instantly identify shapes and objects because they are a surface of "all the same colour". Or at least have a pattern and texture that reveals itself as a coherent story in terms of hue.

This is the exact opposite of the usual naive realism that people expect - where because colour is something we talk about so much, it is somehow basic to a proper representation of the world.

But the brain is all about understanding the world in terms of its meaning. So we want to see the world as a story of recognisable things. Colour vision is just a step of that larger process. We can decompose complex visual scenes to notice the "redness of red", the "turquoise of turqoise". But that in itself is not something important or evolutionarily meaningful.

Is turquoise blue or green? If you try the same shade of that on a number of people, you can get different answers, suggesting small differences in neurodevelopment can make actual differences.

We might all know blue from green. And then on the border between the two, jump in different directions in terms of which is the primary hue.

People can have different colour perception in each eye. Damage from rubella could put a yellow cast on the sight of one eye for instance.

Tetrachromic people have more distinction in the yellow/green parts of the spectrum. Like I said more color information can maybe lead to more exact information, — TiredThinker

Single cone vision – monochromacy – gives us 200 shades of "gray". Dichromacy – having a long wave and short wave cone – gives us a blue-yellow spectrum that swells our visual experience to about 10,000 distinguishable shades. Trichromacy, adding a red-green opponent channel, multiplies the number of shades to several million.

Several million discriminable shades of reflectance is enough to keep even an interior decorator happy.

Tetrachromacy should have hundreds of millions. More than we would need surely. Evolution would favour the more efficient approach. Birds and bees have a use for extra photopigments up at the UV range. There was an evolutionary demand it would seem

It is also said the color blind people (2 fully functional cones) can see camouflage better than normal visioned people. But that is likely a matter of needing less brain power to identify with less vision. — TiredThinker

Or the fact that camouflage was designed to confuse their three-pigment system.

As far as how the brain and eye works your best bet is to use a visual aid like youtube. — turkeyMan

I spent a lot of time studying it as science, thanks.

Our eyes and brains interpret frequencies. — turkeyMan

But our eyes and brains interpret a world of objects. If representing actual frequency were so important, why would the eye sample the world at just three wavelength peaks?

Evolution could produce a vast array of photopigments. But it seems to want to use as few as possible. Explain that.

Cameras see your red as my red however i suppose its possible i see red as blue and you and a friend of yours sees red possibly as someone elses yellow. — turkeyMan

But cameras see those colours because they are also designed to capture light using three "pigments" with the same very narrow response curve. We designed that wavelength selectivity into them so we would get a result that was tailored to our neurobiology.

Get real close to any TV screen. The only colours you can see are the three different LEDs.

Where did all the pinks, yellows, turquoise and a million other discriminable hues go? They aren't in the actual light being emitted by the screen. What now?

And to the degree we all share the same neurobiology, it is at least more plausible than not that our inner experience is going to be the same. We have that weak argument.

Then we can make a stronger argument in terms of our ability to discriminate hues - to be able to say the same thing in picking out the reflectance properties that make one surface vividly unlike another.

I often see physicists say things like "we discovered some math that helps with problem so and so" and stuff like that. — Gregory

It is a particular branch of maths these days. Symmetry theory.

Although of course it used to be mostly geometry as you might expect. The maths of spatial relations.

Then geometry was found to have algebraic description too. Calculus helped to capture actions in time.

Symmetry groups finally emerged because symmetry breaking is what happens to reveal a world of particles once you have some kind of geometric description of nature that unfolds as a cooling~spreading manifold.

So it is not really a big surprise. Maths grew out of the everyday utility of modelling the everyday world in terms of "form". Spatial form, or geometric relations in Euclidean space, was the everyday starting point.

And the fact that maths has turned out to stay useful no matter how many different avenues it explores should tell us that the universe is itself in some sense a "mathematical operation". A process of mathematically-structured evolution.

Higher level of maths are created by relaxing constraints. Non-Euclidean geometry arose out of geometry by relaxing the constraint that parallel lines can never meet (because the world is perfectly flat). If you permit space to be curved (making flatness a special case), then you can see reality with greater generality.

In my opinion absolutely everything can quantified. — turkeyMan

That's key too. No point having a theory if it doesn't have measurements.

To speak loosely at an intuitive level (invoking a pseudo-teolology), it's a misnomer that the color visual system is attempting to reconstruct wavelengths, or model the wavelengths of light. Our color visual system apparently does not care one iota what the wavelengths really are, and why should it? What our visual system seems to focus on, instead, is recognizing and distinguishing objects. — InPitzotl

Here is someone who knows what he is talking about! :strong:

This is bang on. It is not about seeing "colour" as it is in the world. Reflectance is simply a valuable property to make things in the world "pop out".

The appealing idea is that primates re-evolved red-green hue discrimination after shifting back from a nocturnal to diurnal lifestyle. If you want to see ripe fruit in distant trees, the three pigment visual system looks well designed to make that kind of discrimination as effortless as it could be.

So colour is primarily about making quick sense of shapes - discriminating the reflectance properties of surfaces and so being able to see through to the objects that might have that particular kind of surface.

Those have been around for a long time as well. — creativesoul

You’re doing a lot of shoulder shrugging here. Sure I characterise the divide in caricature terms - woke vs redneck. But then people are caricaturing themselves in that regard. That is how you know it is identity politics rather than the real political discussion that needs to be had.

From my distanced view, that particular stand-off is just a symptom. Even a diversion.

Occupy Wall Street and Extinction Rebellion at least feel like attacks on "the system". BLM had its specific target before it all blew up into confused general posturing - the concrete aim of "defund the police" as the other way of saying "fund the social system".

The US problems of a pandemic, historic racism and economic inequality are three different things. Yet they have all be stirred into the same confused stew, at least from what Fox and CNN tell me. And then there is another problem in a president being allowed to trample over every political norm.

To me, that is what a confused nation looks like. It is why I would take a measured approach that tries instead to understand what is "really going on" as historical trends.

If we understand the logic of the thermodynamic imperative, we can see what kind of world fossil fuels needed us to create. One willing to remove all the internal constraints on maximising entropy production. Hence eventually, neoliberalism.

I offered up fracking as a concrete example. It makes no sense to burn so much investment capital to squeeze that tight oil out of the ground. So why is it happening? Well it makes perfect entropic sense. And it makes perfect geopolitical sense in a world economic system so distorted that the US can suddenly cherish an "energy independence" that isn't now renewables based. And so distorted that foreign wealth feels it has little better option than to double down on dollarisation. Any US dollar-denominated investment can lose money, but not as much money as investments in every other currency if world economy tanks.

So the US could be fixed at every level of the problems I outlined. But that is the kind of systematic political project where people are gathered around the same table as interest groups fighting their own corner, yet also bound to arrive at some mutual arrangement by the end – a new balance that could stick.

All the huffing and puffing about ethics and morality is quite pointless unless it is anchored to the reality of life as it happens.

the repetition is tedious. — Banno

But you keep avoiding direct questions.

What kind of answer did you think the OP wanted? Were not its language and concerns explicitly neurobiological? — apokrisis

As well as those of others.

Does the same go for Locke's primary properties?
— Forgottenticket

What kind of answer did you think the OP wanted? Were not its language and concerns explicitly neurobiological?

But I guess you have your Procrustean metaphysics and every conversation must be cut to fit. :hearts:

Woke people are emerging. Rednecks have been with us for a very long time. — creativesoul

Armed militia would worry me. Cancel culture is being matched by online extremism.

If there is unravelling, it is happening in both its directions.

"Red" is part of a language game played by a community. — Banno

Sure. There is a distinction to be made. But is it due to a "language game" or is it due to neurobiology?

One starts to sound awfully Whorfian about colour perception otherwise.

I thought you were honestly saying you would be happy with whatever the law prescribed. — Janus

:chin:

Sure. In the context of a neurobiological discussion, that certainly does become a meaningful use of words.

odd that folk seem to thing that philosophy of language explains away the question ... as if there were no experience, just its notion.

To the second point, you've summarized the general idea underwriting the laws(now defunct) that forbade black people from buying property in some community or another because they wanted to exercise their freedom to choose their own community members. — creativesoul

You are being terribly literal. But yes. Liberal democracy would mean being free to fight for such arrangements and free to contest such arrangements. If the political system actually works, the right balance results. And the outcome isn't determined by some Platonic moral abstraction, or even "a feeling". It is based on some rational and evidence-driven grounds. An optimisation principle.

To quite the contrary, I think that that is the opposite of unraveling. — creativesoul

It would help if you actually read what I say. What I said was that two cohesive interest groups are emerging via a dialectical confrontation. And that could be a crisis which produces its resolution in some mutually agreed new social balance. Or not. Depending on the US capacity for political change these days.

That's the mindset that is common, as you've hinted at, that is a part of the unraveling. The overvalued notions of individual freedom and liberty at the expense of the community. — creativesoul

That’s the bind. If you aren’t free to be unaffected by things then you aren’t really free. But there is no point to freedom unless it is so as to be able make choices in forming your communities - your social interest groups.

Isn’t the US unravelling in the sense that two opposed interest groups are forming more strongly - the woke against the rednecks? And aren’t both of these something like coercive tyrannies if you don’t particularly care to get involved with them?

What is natural is for human affairs to be in a flexible state of ravelling and unravelling in ways that optimise a general state of adaptedness to the world. When it comes to the pandemic response, what strikes the outsider about the US is its social confusion.

But as I have also argued, many think it is clear that folk are ready for a shift from the neoliberal order that has prevailed for the last 30 years - the era of peak resource extraction with no care for the environmental consequences. So great social confusion in the “world leader” is to be expected.

And the US may still be the most likely to lead the way into whatever follows as the next stage in world history. Even just by turning inwards, becoming a regional empire, that could be a key change. The US is also well positioned if it suddenly decided to go green in serious fashion. It has the tech creative advantage as well.

What could hold it back is that while it is a highly creative nation in terms tech and economics, it seems very poor at rewriting its political institutions to fit the times. The constitution and federation of states locks it into the past. The political sphere has long been captured by billionaires, industry lobbies and elite interest groups.

A modern state is constantly updating its political framework to better meet the needs of tomorrow. The US is strangely sclerotic on that score.

What do you mean — TiredThinker

Heh, heh. Ask a neurobiological question and get some rando pushing philosophy of language.

Sorry about your retinal disease. I’m sure it is more than a linguistic notion.

I was wondering if the perception of color is as defined as the wavelengths that produce — TiredThinker

You are asking what is in the end an impossible question because no one else can see inside your head to check. But we can say enough about how the eye and brain process colour experience to at least limit the scope for a difference.

There are for example tetrachromates who have a fourth pigment. The prediction from neurobiology, from how the peak sensitivies of the four cone pigments were arranged, was that they ought to be able to discriminate an awful lot of extra shades of orange that regular folk can’t see. And light mixtures were devised to find subjects for whom this was so.

The tetrachromates said things like that was why they must have struggled in the shop to get the right thread to colour match a garment. The shop assistant thought the orange was a perfect match and couldn’t see how far off it was.

So we can’t get inside heads to say experiences are the same. But we can use discrimination tasks to see if people experience the same distinctions.

So, for you the legal answer just is the ethical answer. Incredibly subtle of you! — Janus

I see you are pretending to take seriously the ironic answer so as to run away from the actual answer which followed.

Not so subtle. Quite transparent in fact.

The problem with utopia, Fukuyma says, — csalisbury

Do you have the page number where he said this? Not ringing any bells yet.

those who do have the right view can't get the kick of explaining, scolding and berating those who don't. — csalisbury

Don’t be so hard on yourself. I don’t take your anti-totalising rants to heart. My only complaint is your failure to make a case to match your scolding and berating. Explaining would in fact be good.

Instantly? Gee, I’m impressed by your memory for books you might have read 30 years ago that failed to capture your imagination.

Well, clearly you are itching to explain your point?

Oh I see. I didn’t think much of his first book and so I should have read his latest?

Here is a previous discussion anyway....
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/226840

The job application just went in. Thanks. That was the article I was looking at too.

This is the probable meaning of the title because Metaphysics is about things that do not change.

This does feel the key - the search for invariance, the search for the unity that lies behind all the variety.

but usually the distinction is between cosmology and ontology, under the umbrella of metaphysics. — Banno

References?

How is it the bone in the throat? Do you mean that if everyone self-actualises as the highest personal good, then no one is left to give them respect. Everyone is Superman, no one the crowd?

I think what that says is respect is a two way street - given and earned. If we are to biologise thymos, then I would point to the fact that social animals are adapted to make smart choices in terms of social dominance and submission. Our neurobiology is designed to promote hierarchical social order. That was the “ethics” that proved entropically functional.

So self esteem has to be situated within a hierarchical social order to be meaningful. And it has to be essentially permissive in that constraints based fashion.

Of course we can deny our biological heritage. Just as folk like to deny geopolitical national advantage - Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis where the world could be viewed as a single flat market of opportunity.

Denying the constraints that in fact historically shape our freedoms “for a reason” always works out well, doesn’t it?

This pandemic and it's effects/affects, are symptoms of much deeper problems with the US... as is Trump. Symptoms of the unraveling... — creativesoul

Maybe you missed the point at which I entered this conversation. My geopolitically informed view is that even a buffoon can’t damage the US in an end times way. The US starts with so much advantage that talk of its unravelling are premature.

I’m indifferent to the degree it doesn’t impact on my freedoms. That is the “personal” answer anyone would give who is unable to talk about a wider view.

Why so much resistance? — creativesoul

Because I really have no idea who you want to be answering.

I had assumed you wanted the answer from "entropy's point of view", so that is what I gave.

I asked if the American government should do everything it possibly can to minimize the harm caused to Americans. — creativesoul

And who are you asking that question of now?

God? Some Platonic abstraction? Some random dude on the internet?

As far as I can tell, you’re using ‘hegelian’ simply to mean that history has a direction -& while I think it’s a confusing word-choice (‘Hegelian’ carries a lot of meaning) I agree that history has a direction. — csalisbury

In history circles, it is well understood as a term. And the idea that history could have a direction, a trajectory, is also highly disputed.

Hegel's actual finality was the arrival at a rationally organised society - an optimisation function that would deliver Maslow's hierarchy of needs, pretty much.

I say that is what is happening, but for another deeper underlying reason. The negentropic dividend is being paid for by the greater entropy that it manages to produce.

But I can’t understand your above post without some wedge between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ - if, as you say, It is by understanding how things are that we become able to make a choice and ‘resist’, then there is a space in which to choose that isn’t inevitable. There’s a ‘gap’ in the ‘is.’ — csalisbury

You will never understand my position until you manage to let go of the position from which you are trying to understand it. Give up on this is-ought nonsense - a metaphysics that opposes determinism and freedom as irreconcilable opposites.

My approach is based on dialectics - the unity of opposites. Your language has to start reflecting that logic to get a purchase on the argument.

Constraints are not laws. They don't dictate. They just limit. And thus that which is not limited is free. Or at least, a matter of deep indifference. :smile:

In practice, that is how human law works. And even natural law.

For a while I’ve felt that if ‘free will’ means anything, it involves learning to observe patterns and cycles, including the weak/unstable points that would allow for the disruption of the whole, thereby allowing actual change. and then to ‘wait’ for that moment or part of the cycle to come around again, and act (with and against the pattern.) — csalisbury

You mean tipping points? Bistability? Butterfly wings and chaotic attractors? All the good things provided to us as mental models by the modern science of non-linear dynamics?

This is exactly the physics that employs a probabalistic and constraints-based view of reality.

How does one ever jump off the high diving board? Or even find the will to get out of a warm bed?

Do we just command ourselves, now is the moment? Or do we get tipped into the act at the very moment we finally forget our fears for an instant?

(The ‘ought’ that leads to nudging in this direction organically bubbles up as discontent before finding this means of finding a way forward.) — csalisbury

Yes. You are describing what I've been saying. Change often happens because some random event is the straw that breaks the camel's back. You can then either blame the straw or recognise that there was some deeper constraint coming under such tension that "anything" was going to release it to do its equilibrium rebalancing thing.

I asked if the American government should do everything it possibly can to minimize the harm caused to Americans. — creativesoul

I replied that the US likes to say the government should keep its nose out of people's business. That is the social context that in fact constrains US choices.

I could say the US should be more like New Zealand, Korea or Sweden. Or I could dig even deeper into the contextual constraints to give you an answer in terms of the recent Western fossil fuel story, or the longer run agrarian revolution, or the perspective of the past million years of hominid hunter-gatherer evolutionary biology.

In fact I did.

I don't have to come up with an answer to that, because I am not in a position of power. — Janus

That reply is as lame as it gets. You say it is an interesting question until the moment it gets asked. Then run away.

It's a genuinely tough question, and I can't see how any thinking about thermodynamics would throw any light on it. — Janus

It's an incredibly easy question. Laws tell you what the penalties are for dissent.

If you want a more interesting answer, that is why you have to step out of the whole is-ought schtick where nature is presumed to operate by deterministic law and that then makes human choice an existential drama.

As I have already said, constraints are inherently permissive. You can do anything that isn't in fact limited, because the system is merely indifferent to your choices beyond that.

And being a systems deal, constraints evolve. They are learnings made habits. Peirce 101. So "dissent" becomes part of the learning side of the equation - the experiments that keep the system open and developing.

Modern western society was all about institutionalising a rational framework of laws and penalties. But the natural sense of such a philosophy can be seen in the way learning is still built into an apparently deterministic system. Law is implemented in hierarchical fashion. In the US, Congress makes law, the President can write regulations. A judiciary exists to interpret as well as enforce. Voters get to change those making the laws if they seem incompetent. There are are multiple recognised channels for dissenting and achieving change.

All this is the bleeding obvious again.

but to me the more interesting question then would be as to what should be done with dissenters. — Janus

Well what should be done with dissenters then?