One law could be imposed, yet there would still be dissent. — Janus

Sure. There can be a definite act of dissent because there is that one law. You have confirmed what I just said. What would dissent even look like if it wasn't in opposition in this fashion?

There is more than enough money available to keep everyone safe in relative isolation, through no cost of their own until the virus is contained and we are well enough prepared to keep it that way. — creativesoul

The US population could just refuse to go to work, to socially distance, to wear masks and wash their hands. The US "ethic" surely says that in a society based on some collective notion of rugged individualism, folk wouldn't need federal government to be telling them anything. And if the CDC does give rational federal advice, the typical such individual would do the opposite out of @Metaphysician Undercover's spite.

The Swedish population made its own choice that surprised a lot of people expecting a more Volvo-like, public safety first, response to Covid. The Swedish social culture seemed to make that a viable approach to limiting death without tanking the economy. That is an experiment still in progress.

As far as my entropic hypothesis goes, the pandemic is simply too exceptional event to have been built into anyone's social system - apart from those like Korea who have had a few recent scares like SARS, or New Zealand, which has had to eliminate multiple biosecurity threats like Mycoplasma bovis.

There, the consequences have been thought through. So go hard, go early, is a concept that both governments and the population understand.

That is why "ethics" seems such a poor lens for this kind of geopolitical discussion. As @Janus demonstrates, this starts the discussion off as a standard Western philosophical drama of "what should I do?"

If you boil ethical systems down to personal choices then you are simply buying into the fundamental tropes upon which the aggressive and competitive Western way of life became based. You are going with the flow that was precisely the one that set us on the path to colonial expansion, coal burning industry, neoliberalism, climate denial and a general belief in a right to be "spiteful" as the ultimate expression of personal freedom.

So any discussion of the ethical choices has to recognise that we are all individually already grounded in an ethic. We are not the starting point when we make personal choices. We are the end-point. Our world has already been shaped by a succession of increasingly specified constraints that start at the brute physical level, work their way up through biology, sociology and culture, and right on through in terms of our community, our family history, every other aspect of our world that is shaping out habits of thought.

That doesn't mean we can't then make "ethical choices". It just points out that mostly we don't make thinking choices at all. We are already deeply embedded in layers of evolved and cultural habit. What is left is the making of self-interested calculations. We have the "freedom" to weigh the balance of multiple factors and come out with some plan that has a probability of success. A constraint that we impose on the world ourselves.

And that personal choice is the cherry on the cake. It is evolution's way of keeping the learning going and not becoming rigidly bound by habit. It is part of what is natural.

But personal choice only makes sense in the context of a set of habits that reflect much longer timespans of learning. There has to be that established flow first. A way of life has to be some form of success. Then the ability to act sharply "otherwise" can count as a meaningful action - an experiment that will have an outcome that can be judged. Something will be learnt as being either the right or wrong thing to have done.

Like maybe the US should have put health before money. Or perhaps even that the US should have had a leadership that could actually make a simple binary choice if it couldn't manage a more complex weighing of the factors like Sweden.

The problem in the US is not about the ethical choice it made, but about the confused inability to stick to any choice at all.

Some people, when someone tells them what they must do, will go and do the opposite, just to spite. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. That sounds like a “good reason” to resist something.

It's fundamental to the nature of freedom, to prove that your proposed constraints cannot actually constrain. — Metaphysician Undercover

So out of spite, you will spread your arms, step off the cliff, and thus demonstrate your contempt for the constraints of gravity? OK.

So your mistake is that you refuse to recognize that when free minded people are told about constraints (thermodynamics in this case), they will figure out a way to demonstrate that such proposed constraints cannot actually constrain them. — Metaphysician Undercover

That might be my mistake if it wasn’t what I was saying.

All your Wikipedia quote tells me is that if a chemical "system" (whatever that is supposed to be) is reacting with its environment, it is unstable. — Metaphysician Undercover

Stop being an idiot. Why is carbon dioxide stable? Because one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms collectively form a lower energy state than the same three atoms wandering around by themselves. That is why burning charcoal produces so much heat. The formation of CO2 is an exothermic reaction.

This is schoolboy chemistry.

I can't see how thermodynamics comes into it though, except in the very most general sense I which it comes into everything. — Janus

And that is what I have said. It is foundational. It is the ground of the natural world. So whatever else follows, there is already an “ethics” - as in a finality - in play. The choice becomes about whether to go with the flow or - for some reason - oppose it.

And as I’ve also said ‘til I’m blue in the face is that life and mind exist because they can add intelligence to the deal. A selfhood is constructed from building systems of dissipation. Negentropy is the “other” that is also part of the deal as the simple evolves into the complex.

There could be several explanations for this fact; a society that approved these things within their community would not thrive or even be likely to survive long. Or you could say that most people are empathetic enough to motivate their condemnation of such acts. — Janus

Well which one seems more basic? That we do in fact survive and thrive as a collective or that we are empathetic?

Oh wait. Empathy is part of that survive and thrive deal. Indeed human neurobiology is evolved to switch sharply between an empathetic response and a its opposite. In every social setting, some kind of choice is being made as to whether we are in a social cooperative mode, or instead doing the opposite of facing off against the competition.

We love our tribe. We demonise our enemy. Our brains are designed to switch between these too equally valuable social behaviours.

Is one more “ethical” than the other? That would seem strange in that every culture finds ways to reward the right choice in the right setting. Soldiers must hate their foe. Parents must love their kids.

So it is not hard to see how “ethics” arises as levels of complexity. At a basic level, as social animals, we have to work together in ways that keep us collectively warm, fed and housed. As a species, we have to do that better than other rival species. He who best masters entropy production produces more population.

Then society kicks things up another level by creating a stark instinctive contrast between the cooperative and competitive mindset. It becomes “a choice”, but one that gets made in habitual directions that generally - probabilistically - favours the entropic fortunes of the species.

The several explanations are different levels of the same explanation once we consider the pragmatic evolutionary imperative at work.

They are too easy. — Banno

I never got the impression you found science easy. And yet it does a pretty good job at moving towards an ever more unified model of nature.

What motivates individuals in their ethical choices is diverse; — Janus

So there is nothing you would name as a fundamental good or basic precept?

That’s convenient.

Do you think the American government ought to do everything in it's power in order to prevent as much harm to Americans(by extension non-Americans alike), as is actually possible? — creativesoul

Tough question because maybe there just aren’t no right answers and any view would be context-dependent.

To pick up on the points I raised, if we asked what nature wanted, well nature doesn’t care that much. The thermodynamic argument is merely probabilistic. Nature ensures that if there are ways to maximise entropy production, then those outcomes become so likely as to be inevitable. But if humans upped and did something else less entropic as a conscious choice, what are the consequences? The only ones that could suffer as such are humans trying to live off a lower entropy budget.

But let’s say that the US is being blindly entrained by the entropic imperative. It is not even thinking differently. Then does the Covid response reflect this?

I would argue that the US system is the most engaged in entropification as its project. It has the greatest per capita footprint. (Well Canada just beats it. But Canada has cold winters.) So if the US political-economic is shaped by the imperative, then we would expect it to put GDP maintenance ahead of lives.

In fact it is more complex. Economists put a high price on premature death. Too many deaths could hit public morale and confidence in “the system”. There might be a revolt that beings down the high revving economic engine the US built up. A short and effective lockdown might be the better strategy - from the entropy point of view - if it gets the pain over and the economy can get back to full on growth.

On the other hand, is there a reason to make the priority life at any cost? Well flu kills a fair number of people all the time. Junk processed food shortens the lives of a vast number more. Presidents regularly decide it is vital to the US national interest to invade countries that are major oil producers or have key oil pipelines.

It seems the US has made its ethical choices about where to draw its line. It’s culture certainly reflects some habit of thought. And was this framed in terms of entropy good, defying entropy bad? Of course not. The imperative is invisible to anyone who doesn’t have the imagination to see it. The US just went with the flow and made a trade off between some balance of annual GDP growth and the “friction” of social degradation that might derail that project over the longer run.

So folk may talk about this as the ethical vs the unethical. But back in the real world, the decisions are always pragmatic - and also fiendishly complex as calculations, only probabilistic in their outcomes.

Politicians of course have to sell their actions so they will offer the simple justification, Either it is the economy that is primary - hey more people will suffer if they can’t earn or can’t get an education. Or it is life that is primary - no question. Given an actual free choice about what matters, humans may vote to sacrifice and save their communities.

Well, even if nature’s entropic flow is disrupted by an economic shut down, I would agree that my community matters more to me in the end.

So to the degree we are unthinking, we can expect to be entrained to nature’s entropic flow. We will be shaped as its clever local agents digging ancient hydrocarbon reserves out of the ground and setting them alight inside various kinds of metal machines.

But we can be also thinking. We can accept the choice nature has already made for us. Or chose to do something different - at least within nature’s limits.

I would not presume to speak for Banno, but for me ethics is the inquiry into how best to live. — Janus

So pragmatics or what?

Give your best example of an ethical precept you feel is fundamental. We can then see how it stacks up against the logic of the thermodynamic imperative.

You are the one waddling off in a huff, dignity wounded but nose still in the air.

Your usual cop out. :cheer:

Are you now agreeing with me that thermodynamics does not tell us what we ought do? — Banno

You continue to misrepresent. Thermodynamics constrains what we can do. The ethical question then becomes, is there some good reason to resist the general tug of its flow? What kind of reason would that be?

There is no “telling” here. No ought about it. But we are embedded in the historical flow of nature. We are what we are as natural entities. And so either we find that good enough or there must be some positive reason we can provide for wanting things to be other.

Again, to circle back to the actual argument I made at considerable length, humanity has rather unthinkingly gone with the flow in its political and economic history. And humanity has also made a dangerous step change in shifting from a life lived within the means of the solar flux to a new world based on burning fossil fuel.

It just happened. And ethically-speaking, what of it? Who is judging our behaviour as good or bad? Some big daddy in the sky? Some Platonic notion of the Good? Alternatively, is our behaviour just meaningless. It is what it is because there is no “ought”?

Well pragmatism provides a whole different ballgame. The question becomes is it functional? Is it working for us? Does it meet some goal that we want to define for ourselves, in contrast to whatever goal nature seems to have had in channeling us towards such a path?

Ethical discussions treat life as some great permanent drama. Your OP tried to crank up exactly that. And yet you won’t be explicit in what way US as a winner or loser has some kind of “ethical” point.

From my point of view, pointing at Trump or the US and demanding a judgement - good thing/bad thing - is certainly entertaining, but hardly deep.

My analysis focuses on the pragmatic realities of the current moment. If we want to make choices, we need to understand how the “unseen” forces of thermodynamic order have got us to where we are.

We are in one kind of thermodynamic regime - powerlaw - and not in another - Gaussian. As an example that makes one of the things we view as a big problem - gaping inequality - just a natural part of what is going on. Therefore eliminating that inequality is going to be hard as it is basically swimming against the tide.

So contra your pigheadedness, my point is that understanding the actual thermodynamical flow that entrains humanity is the only thing that actually could create a “choice” - ethical or pragmatic.

If we want to resist the “is”, and construct out own “ought”, one needs an understanding of history a lot more sophisticated than thinking it is one damn thing after another.

History has a Hegelian structure. It is a dissipative flow. We now have a science of all that. Time to leave your metaphysical nonsense questions in the past where they belong.

I mean that kind of ethical thinking is a great, if not the greatest, part of human life. — Janus

And so how do you define “ethics”? How does Banno define “ethics”?

If one is troubled by the old is-ought chestnut, this must be because one is already caught up in a certain binary presumption.

As I say, as a pragmatist - of the Peircean systems thinking kind - I start with a different model of causality. And so is-ought is a use of words with a metaphysical emptiness. It sounds like a question but becomes a form of nonsense.

You sound like you want to adopt an idealist metaphysics which treats the human mind as something special in the sense that its central drama is “what is the right thing to do?”. That existential dilemma is everything.

That romantic metaphysics then finds its sharpest opposition in the “science” view that existence is essentially meaningless. You can act anyway you want. Morality is relative and godless.

Well, to me, that’s two complementary brands of bullshit. I wouldn’t bother starting any serious discussion from that Cartesian foundation.

But Apo will not entertain such a discussion. — Banno

Rather than complaining, make your case. What are you waiting for?

Your requests for clarification are a familiar tactic. I gave you an answer. Why should I have to repeat it?

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

Big sook. :joke:

No. You have no interest in venturing out of your lair to explore another point of view. You accuse me of ambiguity. I have told you your Procrustean bed has no appeal. Get over it.

I don't agree that the Greek philosophers 'broke with mysticism'. — Wayfarer

That is why I said they were the origin. The breaking is still an ongoing progress.

It was the attempt to ground philosophy in science in the Enlightenment which is at the basis of the hostility towards metaphysics. — Wayfarer

Yep. And it was a useful division. Atomism and reductionism produced rapid advance in a particular direction.

Holism went on the back burner. Idealism emerged in more defined terms as the “other” of scientific “commonsensicalism”.

It’s all labels. Social boundary marking. The best thinkers don’t let themselves be limited by the name calling.

You begin to see the problem here? Earlier, metaphysics just was an overarching discipline that comprises epistemology and ontology. Now it's an attitude of mind that seeks an overarching principle.

Let's suppose I want to be a metaphysician and come to you for advice on exactly what I must do to be a metaphysician. What, exactly, do you say? — tim wood

I don’t see a problem at all. But maybe that’s just because I don’t take a rigid approach to classificatory systems. My constraints based thinking is as happy with looser as it is with tighter definitions. That is simply pragmatism in action.

So you tell me you want to be a metaphysician? I would have to start asking some practical question to discover what you might mean. Do you want a paid career? Did you hope to be a philosophy professor? Did you mean as in what gets taught in an academic class, or found in that section of an academic book shelf?

Maybe then I discover you are a scientist wanting to know what all the fuss is about. Or an amateur wanting to “join the gang”.

You would expect to get an answer that was more general or more specific, more loose or more tight, according to your own needs - that may themselves be either vaguer or more certain.

So my point was that - in an academic setting - metaphysics is understood to be that general thing of a philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality. It is then normal to divide that into epistemology and ontology as the sub disciplines.

Then stepping back to talk about metaphysics and its relation to science - science being a separate academic department these days - and I would want to emphasise how the “real metaphysics” now takes place in the theoretical arms of the sciences.

If you want to study the history of the field, join the philosophy department. If you want to engage with cutting edge ontology, you have to have a high level science training to be in the game. (Or sign up for continental philosophy where you can noodle away opaquely and earn a crust perhaps)

Just read and digest what I wrote. Stop trying to dumb it back down to fit your tired rhetorical template.

If you can point out a flaw in my constraints-based argument, get back to me. :yawn:

:up:

You’re right about the grandmother hypothesis. My use of “senescent” is more technical here as it is a term that can be applied to biological systems in general - even ecosystems. And humans are different precisely because their developmental life cycle has been stretched right out so that they can be socially constructed as much as genetically preformed.

Homo erectus looks to have had no teenage stage, for instance. And it is very different that humans survive long past menopause - as if passing on social knowledge might be helpful.

The OP wants to fix the moment of birth as “everything” to make an antinatalist point. But the facts speak different.

Or at least we might say we had no choice to be born, and yet also, birth is itself the birth of a lifetime of choices that actually construct this “you”.

Unless I missed it, no one here has called either ontology or metaphysics a science. — tim wood

I don’t see how science is even possible without metaphysics.

Metaphysics is simply that attitude of mind that is willing to seek for an overarching rational principle which could unify reality. It is the start of the search for the general causes of being. And so the origins of the break with animism, mysticism, and other unscientific “explanations” for what the world is, and why it is that way.

Science is applied metaphysics in my book. The underlying assumption - that reality has a logically comprehensible structure - is the same. What has developed over time is an epistemology to fit. And that is pragmatism.

The theory side of science is free to be even more speculative as it is accepted “everything is just a model”. And that open mindedness is justified by the rigour then applied to the business of inductive confirmation or empirical test.

I can see that “metaphysics” became a term adopted by many crackpots as academic cover for their fringe work. But equally, science is also overtaken by a Scientism that rather forgets that science only does offer models of reality. There is bad on both sides.

However it is a simple fact of human history that science is an expression of the metaphysical quest for a rational unifying understanding of reality.

I think my main issue with this line of reasoning is that "purpose" is a construct of rational minds, — Voyeur

That’s fine. The natural philosophy view does seek to include all four Aristotlean causes including finality. But it also isn’t claiming anything mystical. It is usual to recognise ascending grades of finality.

So we would have the three steps of {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}} to cover the physical, the biological, and themindful. Or in more everyday language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.

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

The is of thermodynamics will be unable to tell us what we ought do. — Banno

Yeah, nah. The whole is-ought issue is what I seek to bypass.

Thermodynamics enshrines a probabilistic approach to ontology. So all one can say about reality is that there are constraints on the freedom to act. It is not a prescriptive approach where outcomes are either determined or - as the alternative - fundamentally free. Neither necessity nor chance apply in some absolute fashion.

Hence that tension between is and ought is bypassed for a more constructive view. We get to make choices insofar the possibilities haven’t been constrained.

Suppose we do the calculations, and they show that we will indeed vote for Trump. Now that we have this analysis, what is it that rules out our going against it? Can't we take that into consideration, and then vote for against Trump — Banno

Yes of course. To the degree the universe is indifferent about what we do, we are free to choose otherwise. If we are unconstrained. We could toss a coin if we like.

What I have argued is that humanity is in fact entrained to thermodynamics as an imperative. And blindly entrained. If we don’t make different choices, it is because we haven’t realised how much we have become caught up in nature’s own entropic flow.

The calculation only arises to the degree that one might think to resist that historically embedded imperative.

Should one suddenly decide to return oneself - and why not one’s whole community - to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? “Hah! Take that, Second Law, you ugly meaningless bastard!”

So the ethics derivable here are rather permissive. All I am saying is that certain collective flows emerge naturally to organise reality. That is the character of nature. It is what it is. And also what ought to be in the sense blind nature has no other choice.

Then humans emerged as fully natural phenomena. We reflect the embedded flow principles. Human history is explained as steps of increasingly more powerful entropy production.

Constraint did its work. Our response has been to blindly go along with the flow. And why not? Was there ever a good reason to resist?

The burden of argument is thus flipped. We don’t need to give a positive reason to support every action. Our behaviour only has to be on average aligned with the entropic flow - so that we can continue to exist as part of nature. And if we choose otherwise, then we suffer the full indifference of nature.

To the extent that I find “metaphysics“ a useful term at all, it’s in this way. — Pfhorrest

:up:

Well, that's true about particular individuals but surely you won't deny that knowing The Problem Of The Criterion involves, in terms of justified true belief theory of knowledge, the justification, the truth, and belief in re the propositions in The Problem Of The Criterion and the propositions that can be inferred from it. — TheMadFool

Again, if I don’t accept that criterion, the problem as stated doesn’t exist for me. Just because a paradox can be proposed and accepted as such doesn’t mean one is trapped. It means one is demonstrably better off considering the alternatives.

Well that leads to, what is ontology? Is it a one or a many? If a many, what the similarities and differences? — tim wood

Such questions provide their own answers. The one can only be in contrast to the many. And vice versa. At the very first step you are caught in the necessity of the dialectic as the unifying principle. And from there unity can only be recovered by the triadicity of a synthesis.

But ontologically, it seems all I can say is "X is," and then I must stop. If ontology is about being, then it is not about being-this, being-that, but just abut being. — tim wood

I don’t see this is an issue if ontology is allowed to come to the Aristotelean conclusion that substantial being is complex. The answer to the question does not need to be monistic - even if, as you say, a monistic answer appears to be that which is being demanded of one.

So the right way to start is seek the simplest possible answer on “what is”. Like Aristotle, the question is what counts as “substantial” - the principle of being.

From there, dialectical argument lead us to an underlying dualism such as material and formal cause. That still has problems. This can be fixed by going the next step of a triadic systems ontology.

A triadic system can be shown to be basic as all other p-adic accounts must mathematically reduce to a three-way knot. It also maps to the irreducible triadism of an epistemological relation of course.

But anyway, ontology was a tremendously productive question to have asked. It got philosophy going as an exercise in presuming nature had actual rational structure. It made sense to ask what its unifying principle could be?

Where would we be if no one had ever been willing to venture an opinion on the primary question about existence?

Really, I have never understood the anti-metaphysics bent of those who in fact owe everything about their comfy lives to the birth of the scientific attitude.

Looking over my life, it seems that choice is like driving a car. As you are doing it, you know you are the one in control. Nonetheless, maybe as a decision is in the process of unfolding, the will is really going to fast for the agent to be in control. The agent, so to speak, is swept away with his will but believes he is in control. Wouldn't that mean we live under a huge illusion all the time though? — Gregory

The psychological machinery at work here is the difference between habitual and attentional processing.

If you operate at the level of habit, you have well-drilled routines for handling life on a learnt and pre-aquainted basis. This is a brain shortcut that ends up doing most of the job. It can "do the right thing" in a fifth of a second. And it can do it subconsciously in the sense we don't even need to notice or remember it.

I often drive long stretches with no awareness of my surroundings. And quite safely as the brain is designed to handle the familiar so long as you are not distracting it with some competing action. Driving while trying to read or talk on the phone become dangerous as other habit structures are getting called upon. But day dreaming idly while driving is just leaving your attentional parts of the brain actually idle and so not producing distractions.

Then the attentional part of the brain is reserved for everything that well-drilled habit can't handle. It is novel, risky, surprising, or in some other way demanding an active hand. That feeling of actually concentrating and being in charge.

It takes about half a second to develop a state of focused attention in a way that might connect sensation to action. So it is much slower. More work has to get done. But it is about an actual choice in which alternatives get eliminated.

So the question of "who is in charge making my decisions" is already complicated at a basic brain architecture level. There are two systems - one driven by routine habit, the other reserved for deliberative choice. And normally they work together so seamlessly we don't notice how they combine to take the credit for everything we wind up doing.

When it comes to children, the West through the Christian religion traditionally said that the faculty of free will comes about at age 7. — Gregory

This makes some kind of sense in that brains have to mature. The parts involved in being able to make sharp attentive choices - block quick acting habit and hold attention long enough to think actions through - are the late bloomers. The ability to self-regulate the emotions is something that doesn't become fully adult into the late teens.

It is also strongly tied to language learning. So even toddlers show a big step up in self regulation as they get used to speaking and thus talking their actions through.

Seven isn't any special age. But the Jesuits knew that you need to grab a child young, indoctrinate the desired thought habits, the automatisms, before they become too capable of instead thinking for themselves.

On this thread I thought people talk about their experiences with freedoms and why they do or do not believe it is an illusion. — Gregory

Freewill is an "illusion" in that it arises from the old Cartesian dilemma about whether we can be Newtonian-determined flesh robots or spiritually free-chosers as Christian theology demands. So freewill is a specific cultural construct. Other religions/other cultures don't demand this kind of stark division between "animal desire" and "divine reason".

The socio-biological reality is that we are neither flesh robots nor souls trapped in bodies. We are organisms that have evolved to make smart choices about environmental challenges. And once you are an animal with a brain, you already have that division between reacting by learnt habit vs acting by voluntary deliberation.

Humans just have much bigger brains and thus a greater capacity for both habit formation and attentional planning.

Two words, then: metaphysics and ontology. — tim wood

I would say the distinction is simple. The actual opposition here is between ontology and epistemology. Metaphysics is the overarching discipline broken into these two complementary wings.

Epistemology concerns "how we can know". Ontology concerns then "what is".

The two are connected in the end as is demonstrated by the way that everyone ends up in metaphysical debates about realism vs idealism, mind vs world, etc.

Reality is either basically an epistemic construct or an ontic fact. Pick your metaphysics.

(And I of course argue for a Peircean metaphysics where epistemology is ontology - the Cosmos is rationality expressed in a "material" fashion.)

Why would you call this act which prepared the atmosphere for evolution to proceed, an act of poisoning the atmosphere? — Metaphysician Undercover

Erm. That's why I put poison in quotes. What was poison - a toxic byproduct - for primitive anaerobic life then became the basis of a photosynthetic world with a supercharged entropy production based on oxidative respiration.

Natural evolution must keep moving to greater rates of entropification if it can. And photosynthesis proved it indeed could.

A moment ago you said oxygen in the atmosphere is poison, now it's CO2 which is "waste"? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. That is waste for us in the current era.

Higher CO2 is in fact good as plant fertiliser. Growth rates are increased in times of higher concentrations. But as you know, global temperature is another factor to worry about. Disrupt rainfall, kill ecosystems, and you are back to bare dirt as the Earth's primary entropification system. And bare dirt does a poor job of scattering bright sunlight into cool infrared radiation. There can be a 30 degree K difference between the same bit of ground as exposed earth vs mature ecology.

But entropy is just an arbitrary designation, dependent entirely on one's perspective. Is O2 more entropified than CO2? What about O3? "Entropy" is completely perspective dependent. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are making shit up because you don't even seem to have even a schoolboy grounding in molecular chemistry.

The first thing they teach you is why atoms form molecular arrangements that minimise their collective entropy budget. It literally explains everything.

Couple of points to expand upon.

Isn't it interesting how religion is a racket? In European history, it was a state-owned racket and even a state-owing racket. And in the US - which aimed to be modern in its separation of state and church - it became instead a free market capitalist racket. Churches literally went into business as that is what the new system wound up endorsing.

The woke vs the conservative dynamic reflects the two forms of power - the power to constrain and the power to act freely. This is a completely functional dynamic if it results in democratic self-organisation - the interest groups story of society. But not so much if one or other side of the dynamic starts to dominate.

A less religious society would be good in the sense that organised religions tend to be scriptural rather than evidence-based on their positions. But then in Europe, the state religions have become so liberal that this is hardly a thing anymore. African anglicans can't believe the wokeness of the Church of England. And in the US, any irrationalist cult can set itself up in business, even a free love one. It is actually an open market for customers. So religion is not such a factor - an imbalance to address - in that its variety is a fair reflection of society anyway.

And on the very notion of society as a democratic plurality of interest groups, that goes back to Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures, 1908.

Bentley was an interesting chap, not least because he was influenced by Dewey and hence Peircean pragmatism. He had a belated heyday in the 1950s when the US was going through its New Deal social democracy phase. And was just as quickly buried by the capitalist rebound which followed.

And on the social media dynamics of woke vs redneck culture wars, I would note the scalefree story that social media as a platform for discourse enables.

The signature of what is happening is the endless possibility for micro-grievances as the "right" response to the matchingly endless capacity for micro-aggressions.

Quick! On the internet, someone said something that was wrong! Pile on! :lol:

Social media is the new attention economy. It pays its influencers surprisingly well in hard cash, especially if there is product to be sold. And if not that, then there is at least the comforting illusion of power - the informational capacity to redirect the world's entropic flows. Which, after all, is the kind of power that money - as a store of capital - is supposed to bestow anyway.

So social media is a game. But also one evolving into an actual platform for political/economic life. It matters to the extent it becomes the place where capital - in its purest sense of the ability to co-ordinate human choice - starts to regulate the physical entropic flows upon which the anthropocene is being constructed on.

The old real world was rather linear and clunky. Social connections were deep (thus conservative) and short-ranged. The information flow coordinating a nation or a culture was restricted to a choice of a few broadcasters and the paper of whichever city you lived in.

The internet is designed instead to be exponentially scalable. And that puts it in a different equilibrium class.

The old social dynamic - the one that had to balance the complementary organising forces of competition and co-operation, differentiation and integration - could be reborn as a fractal story. Society could develop more of the macro and more of the micro.

The old middle ground - the Gaussian norm with a mean - became replaced (or "disintermediated") by the new thing of a "chaotic" distribution. That is, a powerlaw or fractal or scalefree distribution, which is defined by the fact it is a system that no longer actually has a mean, some average scale of its fluctuations or exceptions that centres everything around it.

So the point here is that thermodynamics provides us with our fundamental metaphysics - a grounding that views reality in terms of probabilistic processes. And then the modern maths of such systems - which itself is theory only about 30 years old - gives us x-ray vision to see inside nature as a Hegelian system.

We have a mathematical strength account of the two possible states of an equlibrium system - the closed or steady-state story of a Gaussian distribution versus the openly growing and scalefree story of a Powerlaw distribution.

What seems right and ethical in terms of human social structure then reflects directly which kind of statistics is more in play. Steady-state entropification or scalefree growth.

Putting this lens on history is a way of measuring what ought to be happening and not just describing what seems to be happening. It does ground the ethics that must be part of the collective social discussion as the "ethics" are granted this natural logic - the choices appropriate to two different states of being.

Again, the big question to be answered right now is what next? The human system really took off in a new direction with the Scientific Revolution and fossil fuel. There was the intellectual capital to unlock the new source of "labour". But fossil fuel is peaking. The failure to cost in an environmental sink has become a dangerous problem.

Is it game over? Or is the game about to kick on because we are in the middle of creating a society actually equipped to think in scalefree terms?

That is the spin here on woke culture (and its "other" of redneck truculence).

The current perceived problem is the micro-grievance industry being born of the new social media capacity for the unlimited recording of micro-aggressions. To anyone used to normalised social discourse - the old middle ground that built consensus - the online bickering and othering is pointless if not disastrous.

On the other hand, reflecting intellectual capital going scalefree, the online dynamic could be the new order testing its wings. The uninformed din could settle down into more structured flows. We could get back to what millennials were promoting 10 years ago - individual social entrepreneurship as the way to change the world one TED-x talk or B-corp at a time.

There is good reason this OP is about the US. With Trump and CNN, BLM and the NRA, you can easily paint it as a society in its end times. Schadenfreude is the warm fuzzy feeling that will give a lot of us too - especially having had to live so long with the US's rude noises about social democracy and the necessity of joining its neoliberal conceit.

But - to continue the story of the US's embedded advantages - it owns the tech/social media industry too. It already has its foot in that future.

And if there is a next step in terms of an end to fossil fuel entropification, a shift to greentech or even fusion power that can sustain the current thermodynamic "burn rate" with the cost of environmental sinks included, then things can move on maybe quite happily.

The promise there is that we spent 150 years getting into powerlaw entropification mode as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Now we are catching up in terms of scalefree social organisation. And that more effective organisation of the human capital side of the equation will be what releases a greentech future. The upward soaring curve of the anthropocene doesn't need to be cut short in 2050 after all.

So growing pains or death rattles. It could be either being heard stateside. But the brutal geopolitical truth is that we may be at a true planetary cross-roads, yet the US has so much accumulated advantage that it can afford to head into crisis with any old fool in charge.

The US becomes neither here nor there as a "leader" until it is again feeling the hot breath of crisis on its neck. The sleeper has to awake. Then we get to see what it is made of.

Meanwhile the real story in play is the peaking of the fossil fuel economic formula, the question of whether galloping tech is coming over the horizon to the rescue. Can we make micro-decisions about micro-energy generation and resource consumption that become the collective, emergent, macro-scale solution?

Just listen to any social entrepreneur and their search for individual solutions that can scale to be world solutions. Silicon Valley types understand non-linear dynamics. They get the scalefree equilibrium growth story. It just hasn't really reached the popular imagination I guess.

My question is still whether there is anything real being debated as opposed to a lot of suddenly frightened and anxious people dividing into interest groups by inventing the “other” which produces the necessary social solidarity.

An actual civil war needs a geography. A north-south divide that also reflects different economies - slavers vs farmers perhaps - is a good starting point.

But if the current US split is read as inner city woke vs rural redneck, then how do they actually collectivise geographically to stage their big fight to the death? The urban and the rural have less of a clear division in the US than most other places on earth.

Maybe that explains why it is largely a social media world thing. That offers a virtual stage for the battle. Cancel culture vs dumb as a rock Fox News. Irresistible force against immovable object.

It looks like something spectacular and furious is going on. Meanwhile, in real life, America trundles on.

Is anything going to come out of the work wars? Ten years ago, the complaint was how tame the youth of today seem to be. The millennials weren’t rebelling but pushing optimistic social entrepreneurship as their tech-powered neoliberal alternative. As a generation, they seemed surprisingly mild.

Now we are back to the kind of frothing hysteria of the hippies, the punks, the counter cultures. Kids have rediscovered how to annoy and scare the heck out of their elders.

But neither the quiet periods, nor the noisy periods, are the story. They are just the oscillations created by the underlying driving flow. A river snakes in wide loops across the country. But it was always tracking the same entropic gradient.

Modern history has been about removing the internal constraints on entropification. So the youth of every generation jump aboard that bandwagon of calling for ever greater freedom. And the lives that get invented as a result oddly have become only increasingly entrained to a world focused on GDP productivity.

Woke culture reflects the needs of globalisation - the project meant to continue the powerlaw expansion of fossil fuel entropification until it includes every last citizen on earth.

So work culture is no kind of long run answer - unless it’s underpinning of techno optimism is right.

Meanwhile the rural rednecks are either dumb or playing dumb. If reckless capitalism does destroy civilisation, a rural community with conservative closed ranks becomes the sensible long term bet. You can see a quiet calculation going on there.

So mostly what is going on is a social media civil war. A reaction to a moment of pending system change rather than a driver of it. You can see it is essentially meaningless as neither side presents an economic and political solution - alternatives spelt out as a rewrite of the underlying entropic imperative.

It becomes another fashion statement, like punk or hippy, if it doesn’t actually interrupt consumption as the deep locked in imperative.

For an interesting perspective, check Roger Hallam and his extinction rebellion approach to achieving actual social revolution.

One of the great secrets of politics is that the establishment is in fact far more scared and anxious about popular opinion shifting than anyone realises. It can spot real trouble.

And so woke culture is the kind of civil war that the establishment will be reassured by. It ain’t getting in the way of business. It becomes a useful distraction to avoid the difficult job of actual reform.

Even thermodynamic outcomes are probabilistic, which gives rise to the possibility of chaos. — Voyeur

Sure. But probabilty itself is a measure of the predictable. Chaos has an equilibrium structure and isn’t actually “chaotic”. It is only our description of an equilibrium system with the least possible structure.

Of course, we know that entropy rises in the long term, but it's important to remember the reason for this is an atomistic probability (a probability which allows for temporary decreases in entropy as well), and not a Hegelian Zeitgeist leading us by the hand. — Voyeur

Entropy can only rise if there is a dissipative process to pave the way. So while you can imagine entropification as a merely atomistic and local process - the spreading of an escaped gas - in reality, the world is organised into dissipative flows. Collective phenomena like the climate, plate tectonics, ocean currents.

Life and mind arose as systems with purpose. They can actually construct entropy gradients. They can harness the available flows to extract work. So we are now a long way from any simplistic atomistic notion of entropification.

That is why I speak of it as a Hegelian project. History is driven by the entropic imperative to build the order, build the structure, that maximises dissipation.

Cosmology says this imperative rules the physical universe. Biology says it rules life. So why not expect it to continue as nature’s fundamental driver when it comes to human history?

On a side note, I wonder whether a multi-polar or uni-polar world is a higher entropy state of affairs? Could this be calculated? — Voyeur

Good point. The key measure of a dissipative system in “full flow” is that it has a scalefree or fractal structure. It’s equilbrium balance is expanding at a log/log or powerlaw rate.

So complexity science does offer an exact yardstick here. Human society ought to be scalefree in its political and economic organisation if it is indeed maximising its energy throughput and hence entropy production.

If we judge the world on economic inequality for example, the system seems to be doing pretty well. The distribution of wealth is looking powerlaw. The top 1% have almost half the total. A dozen billionaires then own most of that.

So in the current unconstrained phase of human growth - the one based on fossil fuel and engineering - we are seeing the kind of powerlaw distributions that are associated with “chaotic” systems. That tells us globalisation and neoliberalism have indeed removed any internal constraints on maximising the burn rate and sharing the proceeds around with maximal unevenness.

So it is chaotic in achieving the most with the least internal restraint. But then that is why history reduces to the Hegelian imperative of burn baby burn. The human system is nakedly defined by its most global and simple goal of entropifying a glut of hydrocarbons.

The wise long run behaviour would be to price in the cost of the environmental sink needed to dispose of the resulting waste. Plus the issue of what replaces the coal and oil as the supply peaks.

So clearly, the current political/economic system is half-arsed. The inputs are free, but the outputs have an unrecognised cost.

Getting back to your question, a unipolar world is not such a surprise given a powerlaw extreme. The world could be in a balanced equilibrium state even as it expands and grows wildly. Inequality of outcome is not a bug but a feature of “chaotic” free growth.

But a multipolar world would also seem a tamer kind of equilibrium balance - more what we would expect from a steady state dissipative system that is not growing but now globally constrained in the fashion of a mature rain forest or other long run ecosystem operating under a solar budget.

It is the main point! If we answer this, it could help us to understand where is the US right now. Is there a contest of interest groups? What are the group's goals? What are the current riots about — Number2018

I agree that what is truly at stake has become hard to discern. What we are presented with in the media are two caricature extremes - woke cancel culture against meathead rednecks. And yet we know that if we met these folk in everyday real life, they would mostly be good community people. The vast gulf would suddenly seem much less real.

Many feel it is just that kind of moment in history - an interregnum - where the old order is on the way out and the new order has yet to come into focus. Globalisation, neoliberalism, US hegemony, climate denial, and the other aspects of the dominant political consensus feel like old hat. Yet a new general formula is still to be articulated. We can see its elements, but you need - in the US, on the world stage - a unifying leader and movement to crystallise things.

What about China? This communist country has not collapsed so far — Number2018

The CCP didn’t loosen its grip on public speech. And it did turn its attention to delivering economic performance under authoritarian rule. It took advantage of Western free trade as a statist enterprise.

So Russia let it all go. It got picked apart by Wall St. Putin eventually emerged to salvage what remained.

China never let go. It pivoted to the new opportunity that the end of the Cold War created. It manufactured dirt cheap goods and the US held its nose and vaguely hoped that China would become transformed into another friendly liberal democracy like Taiwan or Japan.

China is brittle. But the CCP is competent. It has had to be.

When the population stopped to rely on a set of existential social presuppositions, the Soviet Union collapsed. — Number2018

That is another way of saying what I said. Communism was bound by its belief in an internationalist proletariat revolution. The USSR and Eastern Bloc were constructs imposed on a whole variety of interest groups - ethnic minorities, religious groups, nation states, etc. Lifting the constraints releases all those suppressed forces. People could look around and aspire to something different.

Your argument could be understood as a piece of evidence that there is indeed a deep fundamental belief in America as an a-historical, eternal entity. What can happen if the waste majority of the population would challenge this existential value? — Number2018

Boiled down, my argument is that North America is eternally exceptional as a geography. It is a bonus that the US then was forged as a nation based on an advanced political theory.

The constitution is showing its age. There are all kinds of out of date beliefs like US gun laws which have been made part of US identity. The place is way too religious for a properly modern society. One could go on.

But how much scope is there for a real change in the fundamental mindset? The geographic advantage is one major thing that - even subconsciously - breeds a certain shared attitude. The shared political history likewise is simply a fact of life.

Could real change be imagined? Maybe if there is world climate collapse and the US tuned into a Mad Max survivalist situation. What kind of society would result once it is well armed gangs against federal internment camps and military rule?

But folk suddenly voting for a kinder, greener, society? The US suddenly discovering leaders under the age of 70? The US halving its military spending and investing that instead on green tech and social needs?

The chances are remote, but within the realm of possiblity. :grin:

There appears to be inconsistency between these two. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are right. But the reason is that life evolved as a long run answer because life lives within the means of the daily solar flux. Once photosynthesis had evolved, and bacteria had “poisoned” the atmosphere with sufficient oxygen, and so long as the climate generally favoured liquid water, then the conditions for life were very steady state. Ecosystems would be established that could persist within these bounds.

But fossil fuels are an entirely new game. Coal and oil are the concentrated hydrocarbons of millennia of dead swamps and ocean plankton trapped, cooked and concentrate in geological strata. There is a one time bonanza of energy to drill and burn.

So the sun rises every morning. It is a long run cycle. Hydrocarbons are a once in 100 million years single shot. The rate of usage then becomes a human choice. And we are making no choice but blindly burning them at the maximum possible rate - an exponential increase.

Of course, we have burnt about half of the readily available now. That is putting the world political system under strain. Not to mention we are stuck with the trapped waste in terms of CO2.

So the story is that life will entropify as fast as it can. Populations will grow exponentially until they hit their limits. After that, the limits force a long-run ecological way of life.

The virtuous activity of living, is to seek neither of the two extremes, death nor survival, as the good, but something completely different — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, no. Life is indeed about living. It is the living organism that captures high frequency sunlight and recycles it to low frequency waste heat. Dead organisms don’t do that.

. To know The Problem Of The Criterion is to know the truth of the propositions that constitute it or are entailed by it. — TheMadFool

You might be well acquainted with the problem without knowing the truth of it. A logical argument can be deemed valid and yet not validated.

Don’t you realise that you are conflating two usages of “know”. To know what the problem is said to be, and to accept the problem as a true one, are different things.

Well try this. Every time you are tempted to put the word “know” in my mouth, instead replace it with “I believe I have no reason to doubt it”. Should work a charm.

Do you know that "...it is impossible to know it is true"? — TheMadFool

The Problem Of The Criterion does the exact opposite I'm afraid - show you that it's impossible to know. — TheMadFool

Time for you to decide which of these two statements you believe.