What? I propose that as a belief and thus it is open to doubt. And you yourself have only provided reasons that would confirm.

If you can show it is not impossible to know after all, then my position might be in trouble.

Huh? Is it not possible to doubt it is true? Is it not possible to believe it is true?

That it is impossible to know it is true is what is accepted. And from there, we move on to a more achievable ambition. Why bang your head on a brick wall?

Like whatever. If you can point to this cop out, explain in what sense it is one, then you might have something to say.

Pragmatic, ok, but you still need a criterion for truth/knowledge — TheMadFool

What are you talking about? That was it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth#Pragmatic

Was I unclear that it was pragmatic?

The classic version of The Problem Of The Criterion claims that before we can answer question 1 we must answer question 2 BUT before we can answer question 2 we must answer question 1, effectively creating an infinite loop with no way out. — TheMadFool

I would simplify it to the pragmatist formula of how to reply to scepticism. It is indeed a loop. Belief can ground doubt because doubt can ground belief.

We have to assert a belief - claim a hypothesis. And then it can be held as true to the degree it survives a countering act of doubt - a search for evidence of exceptions.

We thus need to believe to be able to doubt. We need to start by creating the possibility of having been wrong.

And then we must actually doubt until we are ready to believe. The belief has to pass the test of inductive confirmation.

Knowledge then becomes perfectly possible within that rational-empirical framework. It just carries a proviso of not being infallible knowledge. Instead it is knowledge adequately tested for its fallibility. It passes the actual test of being reasonable.

Unlike contingencies of different outcomes in a life, that life itself could not have been contingently different, without not being you anymore. — schopenhauer1

But still, when are you most truly you? At birth? At death? Somewhere in between even?

If every decision you make along the journey counts towards the final sum, then quite a different conclusion results from this fact of every step involving some counterfactual contingency.

Whether we believe our life has a purpose, or if it is essentially meaningless, doesn’t change the fact that we will develop a selfhood constituted of some collection of ingrained habits. The you-ness of you will be an accumulation of facts that you always had some kind of say in. And whether your choices were generally defeatist or generally entrepreneurial, doesn’t change the fact that “you” is what you are more towards the end than towards the beginning.

Commonsense would then agree with biology that perhaps the most “you” period is during your active maturity. The infant you is too unformed, too much a collection of open possibilities. The senescent you is too fixed, too stereotyped by habit, and so has lost something that was essentially you - a capacity for continuing personal growth.

The goldilocks years are maturity when there is a good balance of wise habits and fruitful learning still occurring. A mix of the determined and the contingent which meets the criteria for being “lively and mindful” from a biologist’s point of view.

whether America is unraveling or not, evolution is always chaotic. Natural or Political. — Voyeur

I take a different route. In fact a Hegelian one.

Nature is driven by an optimisation function - a thermodynamic imperative. Life and mind are then entrained to that function. Evolution isn’t chaotic at all but purposeful in its pursuit of the generic “good” of entropy production.

Human social systems arise within the same natural “ethical” economy. Life is arranged to maximise long run entropy production. Populations increase freely until reaching the Malthusian carrying capacity of their environments. Social mores then reflect what has been learnt about maintaining a stable long run balance.

Of course this natural philosophy perspective cuts across the usual favourite tropes of ethical philosophy. It doesn’t fit nicely into the is-ought distinction for a start. It doesn’t even oppose ethical idealism with ethical realism - “pragmatism” understood as just saying anything goes if it “works for you”.

So my lens here is about uncovering the secret aim at the heart of modern geopolitics and economics. In particular, the great shift that occurred with the collision of the scientific revolution and the discovery of fossil fuels.

If you track human energy consumption and its connection to political history, what you see is not chaos but a smoothly maintained exponential curve - that same story of population increase heading towards the Malthusian limits that the environment may eventually have to impose.

What becomes socially coded as ethical becomes dependent on which bit of that curve is your cultural focus. In the US, for instance, it is mostly a case of “burn baby burn”.

Shale oil is a prime example of something zero people predicted even a decade ago. It was unimaginable how the US could use its reserve currency status to suck overseas cash into its fracking adventure. Every barrel drilled is losing foreign investors money. The world is upside down.

But anyway, I am applying a very different lens here. And the point is that good and bad are social constructs used to encode thermodynamic outcomes. In the short term, growth is what is fetishised in this fossil fuel driven era of history. The US led in the sense of wiring in that exponential growth habit as a cultural fact of life. Anything standing in the way was obviously “bad”.

The long term outcomes of exponential entropy production have now come into view. What is now “good” will be whatever counts as a shift to a long-run sustainable balance within environmental limits.

The US ain’t really a leader there. But neither is any other nation.

One of the arguments for US exceptionalism is that also has all the natural advantages - unlimited capital, technology leadership, business flexibility, even the prime wind and solar resources - to most easily make the required energy transition.

It’s a bit depressing. US wins on basic advantage. Yet this means it can afford to be culturally fixated on short-termism. And in the end, it will have the most capacity to readjust to the problems it has created.

That may sound a confusing thing. But once you delve into the dynamics, it’s not chaotic. It’s a simple structural story familiar to any ecologist.

You don’t need a big brain when life is easy. You don’t need to pay attention to what can be left as a matter of general indifference.

The stable existence or the decline of any society should not be measured just by its material resources. The decisive factor is social capital. — Number2018

I completely agree in a just world with evenly distributed material resources, then social capital becomes the determining factor. The winning nations would just be those who rank high on the Human Development Index chart. All the countries that are "Scandinavian" social democracies with technocratic "evidence based" policies.

My point here is the perhaps counter-intuitive one that the US just happens to have a ridiculously unfair set of basic material advantages. Even a complete joke like Trump, and all those he surrounds himself with, can't really fuck it up. Only a Trump with actual competence might be able to achieve that.

In the US, there has been the deepening corrosion of trust in political and social institutions. The lack of belief in what constitutes America can undermine its social capital. — Number2018

Others would say that the US has never been famous for its social capital. There was just that brief moment with Roosevelt's New Deal where the 1950s became a golden age for the average working Joe. Top tax rates were approaching 90%. Unions were powerful. Social security was a thing.

And even all that was based on the US coming out of a war with a wartime manufacturing base and no war damage, an abundance of cheap domestic oil, the only big navy, Bretton Woods to make the dollar the official world currency, and a world order controlled by the US's new proxies of the UN, IMF and World Bank.

But could the US now crumble because of a few riots, a bit of woke activism, a lot of redneck moronicism? The US has always been characterised by its freely vitriolic approach to social discourse. That can indeed be a competitive national strength as much as a flaw.

Society ought to be a contest of interest groups. That is how differences eventually get settled and a society stays well adapted to the challenges and goals as it understands them. So is the current level of discord an actual problem or evidence of stuff being sorted?

The fact that it all so ugly and in your face might be a sign of something historical if it were Denmark or Singapore. But it feels more like business as usual for the US.

I don't think Trump can be explained as evidence for some real system collapse. My argument is that the system can tolerate a Trump because it is basically uncollapsable.

The US can do many dumb things. Bush and his Middle East crusades. Bush/Clinton and the various financial asset bubbles. Obama and his abject failure to achieve any sensible reforms. But it rolls on due to its inherent deep material advantages.

Most other nations actually have to make their countries work. There is an immediate cost attached to being dumb.

Similar processes had led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. — Number2018

Communism collapsed because it is brittle. It isn't a system in which interest groups can contest and sort out their differences to arrive at a mutual accomodation. It lacked a marketplace of ideas.

What actually happened was Gorbachev - in a moment of desperation - made a fateful decision to allow free speech. His hope and expectation was that this would allow some kind of graceful transition. The people would be so grateful that the Communist Party would win in open elections. The voters would ignore the economic stagnation.

But unmuzzled, the population took its opportunity. Every republic wanted to assert its own identity. The grip on the entire Eastern Bloc was lost. Gorbachev disappeared in a coup. Wall St arrived to pick at the carcass.

So the situations aren't comparable. The US is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of being plastic rather than brittle. It is designed to fly on even despite its excessive amount of in-your-face, free speech attitude. It can afford to crush jobs and lives in an economic crisis because it has all the material advantages needed to rebuild and kick on.

I am very much not an admirer of the US as a social system. But the question here is about hegemonic status. Is the US still our "leader" or has it been dethroned?

The answer is more complex in that it can't really be dethroned, but it does look like it will become far more isolationist. That leaves space for Europe and Asia to continue to evolve their regional identities along Scandinavian and Singaporean lines.

There is opportunity in that as we will have moved beyond the Cold War geopolitical contest, and even the current hegemonic debate of "If not the US, then well who?".

It is the US that frames it as us or China, which would you rather have? But that is transparent self-serving propaganda. That isn't what is really happening. It is a Trump re-election tactic built of out-of-date, failed Neocon, political thinking.

The US and China got locked into each other as two sides of the same neoliberal/dollarised system. It was a paradoxical phase of geopolitics that was a solution for a time. But the world is moving on.

The US has already forced through CUSMA as its replacement of NAFTA. The ground is laid to bring the supply chains home and become isolationist and regionally focused. The question only is about whether the US establishment can actually let go of the levers of international power. If the US has an old fossil like Biden in charge, you can see that the psychological break won't be clean.

The bigger existential challenge is whether the world has the gumption to do something about the dollar. The IMF could come out with a replacement bitcoin as the world currency. The dollar might then go into freefall, reflecting the mountain of debt the US has run up on the tab.

But the US has veto on anything the IMF does. That threat isn't credible quite yet. And even if it does happen, that just makes a fall back on an isolationist North American economy all the more sane.

If you listen to Fox and CNN, it is truly the end times for the US. But from my comfortable distance, it is an engaging soap opera.

A big shift in geopolitics has to happen. Neoliberal globalism has run its 30 year cycle. Covid rather puts a fullstop on the old. Climate change and renewables demand a proper response. Technology is on an exponential curve that will rewrite various economic fundamentals.

So a bunfight between woke activists and posturing rednecks is not the hinge-point of modern history - not anywhere near some kind of actual leadership question - even if for those involved it might feel that way.

Whether that state of affairs carries ethical consequences/connotations... that seems less clear to me. — Voyeur

I'm a pragmatist rather than an idealist so ethics becomes just another way of talking about an optimisation function.

Nature isn't about right and wrong. It's about systems with the balances to achieve purposes. And the ethical consequence of that is that we have our futures entirely in our own hands. We have to figure out what we actually want ... and thus who this "we" actually is. :razz:

. Most aircraft carriers will be totally destroyed during the first hours of any major new confrontation — Frank Apisa

Full on nuclear war is different issue. The question here is about the global projection of power to run a world system.

And the US wouldn’t have continued to invest in supercarriers if they were as vulnerable as all that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2019/05/21/ten-reasons-a-u-s-navy-aircraft-carrier-is-one-of-the-safest-places-to-be-in-a-war/#61fe60d82f7a

War is about logistics. And that is what the US has in place on a global basis. A network of bases and carriers that put firepower a short distance from any potential trouble spot.

There many reasons this network doesn’t function so well in the modern context. The US military is hardly a spartan operation in the field. It is still largely equiped to fight the Cold War. Etc.

But with everyone talking up China, the truth is it hardly has a navy yet. China is only now about matching Japan. China naturally wants to build up, but exists in a rather constrained environment.

The US has a base within spitting distance of every possible enemy. And none of its enemies can claim the reverse applies. That is what empire looks like.

The US through dumb leadership can misuse that investment. But it doesn’t face a serious rival for its dominance on that score.

China will be lucky to gain control over its own coastal shipping lanes. And it is the one that depends most on international trade. The US patrols all the world’s shipping lanes and needs international trade the least.

So the US starts off doubly advantaged in that particular situation. Even the gross incompetence of a Trump administration will struggle to make much of a dent in terms of US hard power.

Do you mean you have a solution in today's age to live with self-made foodstuff/produce? — Saurabh Bondarde

Is this a language issue? Processed means that it is packaged food off some kind of factory production line as opposed to you buying the raw ingredients and making the meal. It if comes in a packet or jar, it’s processed.

So you don’t need to own your own cows. But you do want to avoid cheese that sprays out of a can.

This would likely increase the cost to the end customer slightly but would this not be a better option for the overall community? — Saurabh Bondarde

Sure. My point is only that the problem goes deeper. The food industry peddles junk designed to be bliss point addictive. And society pays the cost in terms of massive chronic illness.

So definitely the food industry ought to be better regulated. Or hit with a tobacco like class action sooner rather than later.

Seems to fall apart pretty easily. The problem is that "fate" is an ambiguous term here if we prefer to think about life in terms of causal chance vs causal determinism.

A tossed coin could land heads or tails. By design of the coin and the toss, chance rather than determination rules the outcome. It is "fated" that whichever happens, the path to get there is properly treated as a matter of indifference.

Alternatively, if we are talking about deterministic causal processes, then the opposite applies. Now the path matters as two counterfactually opposed outcomes can’t be arrived at by the very same route. Fate is an active choice. Or at least our best attempt at placing constraints on a chance outcome.

Recovery from an illness is a mixed situation as there is both the "chance" factors we can't control and the "determined" factors that we can aspire to manage. There are elements of both that allow the lazy argument to get its traction.

So "fate" is a good enough causal explanation when you are saying leave it all in the lap of the Gods. Any by that, you mean you don't really have any idea whether natural outcomes are a matter of divine indifference or divine intent, or some whimsical combination of the two.

But once we come to prefer a world modelled in terms of chance causes and deterministic causes, then either the path to an outcome matters completely, or not at all. And from those two bounding extremes, we can formulate some more accurate balance that applies to actual mixed situations we might encounter, like recovery from illness. We can count up the chance factors and the deterministic factors, do a sum, decide overall how things lie and what we can expect from action vs inaction.

Why assume an ethical dimension? — Voyeur

It's a practical political question for many nations when the US and China are demanding you pick a side and yet you depend on a healthy economic/security relation with both.

Is it Huawei or the highway? Is it the Uyghurs or BLM? :wink:

Ethics only comes into it as a backfill of decisions taken for other reasons - unfortunately perhaps.

Navies and bases spell empires. A big army is good for beating up a geographic neighbour. Projecting power globally is about bases and carriers.

Until the UK started getting back into the game, only the US had a fleet of Nimitz and Ford class super-carriers. And the US has its global network of bases to match.

China and India are an order of magnitude behind in these terms.

The US could downsize drastically and still be a huge regional power. The real question is why would it even care about being the world policeman these days?

And the problem is also that power has shifted in ways that no-one could take its place. The thought of stepping into America’s shoes as the global cop also makes no sense if you are a China or an India.

The US experience shows that bases and carriers topple regimes but don’t build stable allies, or even reliable dictatorships. Warfare has adapted to the times and become asymmetric. Most of the world has also moved from developing to developed. Old school colonial empires can’t function anymore.

So the US certainly has the big stick military power. The flip side of this is that no one is going to rule the world - turn it into its well run colonial empire again - just by owning a big stick.

So the measures of might have changed along with the state of the world. Military power still counts. Yet forging regional communities of interest is what matters for successful statesmanship in a post-colonial, post-cold war, setting.

Matter is secondary because it is contingent or caused. The cause of matter is beyond matter. — EnPassant

Sorry. I missed your post.

But replying now, when I spoke of material cause, it was indeed to dispute the usual view that matter is a primary substance. I agree it is emergent. It is a state of being already formed.

So material cause thus becomes some bare notion of contingency or accident or fluctuation. It is whatever is logically complementary to formal cause. That leads to a Peircean ontology of constraints on contingency. Matter arises from action being given a direction.

Physics points the same way now. Matter became a more highly constrained form of the notion of energy. And energy in turn became a more highly constrained form of the notion of entropy. As we drill down into nature, we get down to some story of pure contingency - a quantum indeterminism - as the ultimate “material cause”.

I don't see entropy as a definition of time. It may be - in most cases - parallel to the arrow of time but it does not define time. Physical time is a physical object in the same way that chairs or tables are, except it has an extra dimension which is why it is called spacetime. I think it is a mistake to equate time with entropy simply because they are moving is the same direction. — EnPassant

Spatial dimensions let you go in both directions. Time has a broken symmety.

That has basic consequences under Noether’s theorem. Movement in space is governed by energy conservation laws. Time, not so much. So we need entropy concepts to account for why there just isn’t a strict energy conservation relation if time is regarded as a fourth space-like dimension.

Yet, the void, or 'chaos' contained within itself, the potential for order, which may mean it is not true chaos. — EnPassant

I agree. Even the chaos has a standard statistical pattern. It isn’t truely chaos as such. That’s how we could have a whole flourishing field of chaos theory.

So vagueness becomes an attempt to talk of the chaos that exists even beyond chaos. Some kind of radical contingency that “exists” prior to form or constraint.

Randomness used to be understood as Gaussian level chaos. Then it became understood as powerlaw, fractal or scalefree level chaos. And vagueness becomes some impossible state of fluctuation even beyond that. Maths hasn’t got the tools to say much about it yet.

Yet there is something that is the same in all possible worlds. Perhaps it is something like the DNA. — schopenhauer1

You are trapping yourself into paradox by a logic which insists that identity is about a definable essence or atomic set of facts. Identity is understood in a positive sense as an irreducible "something".

But that is a good argument for instead understanding the issue of identity from a process or probabilistic point of view. That is, identity is defined in an open-ended fashion as a constraint on difference rather than a constitution of similarity.

If you pin your categorisation of "Schop" on a notion of absolute similarity - some unchanging essence - then there is no way to handle exceptions to the rule. Differences will always matter. And so you wind up with the usual paradoxes of thought.

But if instead you take a constraints based approach - a family resemblance, fuzzy set, Bayesian, or a 100 other such implementations of a probabilistic ontology - then the assumption is that there are always differences. Similarity doesn't truly exist. However constraint does exist to distinguish between the differences that make a difference vs the differences that don't make a difference.

Identity then becomes a thread of being defined by a general persistence rather than a specific existence. "Schop" becomes a historically-constrained process that gathers specificity by memory and habit. The identity becomes sharp as the Schop process becomes more and more discriminating about the differences that make a difference to it, versus the differences that don't make a difference to it.

In an "all possible worlds" setting, Schop cuts his nails this morning in one, and Schop cut his nails tomorrow in another. That's a difference. But it doesn't make any particular difference.

And then will be an infinity of worlds in which Schop is cutting his nails at 10.08am precisely this morning, yet every act of clipping is fractionally dissimilar. Differences can't be eliminated as nothing can ever be exactly similar in this life. (Quantum mechanics tells us this is true on the microscale. LaPlacean determinism is ruled out by quantum indeterminism.) Yet also we can see that these infinite fractional differences concerning the historically-constrained identity of "10.08am nail clipping Schop" are differences that really fail to make an essential difference.

So that leaves the question of the differences that do make a difference to Schop as an ongoing process - a developing story of increasingly specified constraint on possibility. A sense of identity is what grows by an accumulation of experiences. Or in other words, an accumulation of habits of discrimination.

Schop starts as a mindless blob - a fertilised ovum. Schop is born - some world of events begins to interact with some set of genetically-coded constraints. Schop becomes a boy and then a man - a history accumulates, habits are formed, memories are made - that increasingly reduce the space of "could have beens" which might count as differences that would have made a difference.

I also want to add, that the implication is that there is no being born "as something else". You could only have been born as you. — schopenhauer1

So you are trapping yourself into a false binary here. Even at the moment of birth, there are all the differences that wouldn't have made a difference as well as all the differences that would have.

The definition of "you" - that assertion of identity - has to be a logically fault-tolerant to apply to the real world. Otherwise you have a logic that only generates paradox.

Identity boils down similarity defined as a limit on difference. Something is essentially the same if it fails to be meaningfully different. That is why exceptions can prove the rule - they demonstrate that there is a constraint in play which is the bit that is unmoved by the accidental.

But the constraints are nothing mystical. They simply are the fact of a developmental history, a process of habit and memory accumulation. They are the information - the capacity for making discriminations - encoded in your genes, your neurons, your habits of thought.

Identity is usually taken in logic to mean absolute similarity. But in reality, identity is only constituted by a relative absence of significant difference. In nature, there is always difference. But also, by the same token, indifference.

It is like they say about the river. You never step into the same river twice. Yet it is also always the same river ... for all practical purposes. Every H2O molecule is a different one today from the ones yesterday. No ripple of turbulence is a mirror of the day before. But the differences don't matter a damn. They blur away into the enduring generality that is the probabilistic or macro view of that river.

The SI unit of Power is the watt which in SI base units is equal to a (kg x m^2) / s^3. Wouldn't this indicate that the mind has mass? — Daniel

Minds certainly seem to have considerable inertia. They are very resistance to changes in their line of travel.

A summary position is that -

1) The US created the post-WW2 world order - the global free trade system - as a bulwark against communism. It was left the only superpower standing and did the smart self-interested thing of preventing communist takeover of a war broken world.

But then Eastern Bloc cracked and crumbled with surprising suddenness in 1991. The US had won the Cold War but then failed to figure out how to cope with the peace. It was again the hegemon by default. Much more so even than after WW2 where it still had to dismantle Britain and other still colonial empires.

A succession of weak presidents meant the US was a world leader without any particular world vision. The situation became divided into a "Davos elite" hoping to continue onwards with the "globalisation project" towards some kind of planetary governance based on the kind of techocracy that is at the heart of all actually successful modern democracies, and then the US blundering on with an increasingly domestic focus on its interests.

It didn't actually want to lead the free world. It just wanted to be free to do its own thing. Burn oil, eat junk food, gamble on markets. Party it up.

(Of course, the technocratic part of US society wanted the opposite. But their moment had passed with the Cold War challenge too).

2) The world has moved on towards some kind of next step. But China can be discounted as a major player. It is a bubble enterprise tied to the free market world order that the US created and continued to underwrite even after it had lost its main security purpose. China matters as part of the much more important story of a technocratic/democratic Asia. South East Asia’s 2.5b people beats China for population and its GDP should match China by the end of the decade.

The logic of the situation is that the US is going to turn inwards on itself finally. It has so many geopolitical advantages, it simply doesn't need the hassle of trying to run the world.

The US has the world’s best chunk of geography. It has the best chunk of food growing land and an ideal range of growing climates. It has an isolated position that means it never has to fear rowdy neighbours or physical invasion.

It has demographic power too in a population of 330 million that isn’t greying dramatically like all its rivals. It has energy abundance with its shale oil and gas, plus the easiest transition to a practical renewables infrastructure.

It has - as @ssu underlines - the dollar embedded as the world reserve currency. That is an incredible economic advantage that will be tough to unwind. It also has now tied in Canada and Mexico as its North American alliance - Mexico as the replacement China manufacturing hub, and Canada as yet more resources and growing land.

So nothing stops the US curling up within the comfort of its own North American empire and saying the world can go f*** itself. The inbuilt advantages are so many that even really bad political leaders can't actually sink the ship.

In this scenario, the US is no longer the world leader - except in the various ways it might still want to get involved in running other people's affairs.

The desirable outcome is a world that continues to globalise - but only via a more intense phase of regionalisation (the view being pushed by Parag Khanna for instance).

So Khanna talks of an age where we move on from hegemonic states - single nations running their respective empires - to regional power networks. You already have Europe as a reasonably integrated system - organised in its own "typically European" way.

Likewise Asia will emerge as a geographically organised community of interest. Belt and Road could be an important part of that integration, but China will not then "own" the region as a result. It becomes a large component of a more general workable identity - depending on which way the CCP go.

Then the US as North America is another regional bloc with its own political flavour.

Out of this rationalisation of world geopolitics might come a regionalisation that makes a better foundation for globalisation. Instead of the rather Western model that the US sought to impose on the world - for security reasons - there would be the opportunity for something more inclusive of the way the world actually is.

Of course, the problems of the world may fast overtake the political opportunity to grow that world-level of governance. But there you go.

No, rotation is just the result of the motor running, a property of the engine. If rotation was physical and taking up the same space as the engine there would be a big bang. — Sir2u

the disk rotating is, the actual process of rotating isn't necessarily. — Augustusea

It is the fuel that goes bang freely in all directions. The engine is a machine that constrains that entropic detonation so it produces rotational work that can be entrained to a purpose.

And that rather neatly gets to the heart of the mind~world relation. The "mind" is a neural model that an organism uses to regulate the physics of its environment.

Information processing is always physical. But it is physical in a very particular way. It is a modelling process that reduces its contact with the entropic reality to an interaction via symbols - logical switches that cost the same effort to flick up and down, on and off.

So nature becomes something that can be controlled by the push of a button. It can turn off a light. It can start an engine. It can blow up the world.

The model is able to regulate any kind of physical situation with the same amount of actual physical effort. Just point your finger and push on the button.

So rather than treating "rotation" as another example of epiphenomalism or abstraction - the usual slip-shod arguments for talking past mind~world problems - check out what neuroscience and biology actually say about the "mind as a process".

The mind is a neural model for regulating an organism's environment. That relationship is physical - entropic - as brains are hungry organs that must get fed.

So talking about how much time and space the mind (or even the neural model) occupies is barking up the wrong tree. The correct measure of the mind's physicality is its energy consumption. Or even better, the localised density of negentropy it represents. That would be its raw physical measure.

And then the only way the deal works is because a model has a semiotic or symbolic interface with the world. It interacts with reality through a set of switches that physically zero the effort of turning something on or off.

So the physicality of the world is something that the information processing by the brain is designed to filter out - reduce to a standard constant costs. And that then creates the platform for unlimited regulatory independence. The finger can stab a light switch, a car starter button, the big red button in the White House.

Again, it is about negentropic density. How much physical energy can the thinking mind unleash? That is the proper measure of its physicality. The ability to harness nature with machinery such as engines that can be flicked "on" or "off" at the merest whim.

Maybe what I'm saying is that hylomorphism does make more sense once you do arrive at a proper understanding of contingency as the "material" half of the equation?

Actuality arises as the interaction of pure contingency and pure necessity.

Figure emerges by constraints imposed on the accidental. And what makes this a pan- approach, an internalist ontology, is that it is the accidents that begin the constraining. If there is no limit on the accidents, they are already starting to cancel each other out in the fashion of a skip to the left being zeroed by a leap to the right.

I'm not sure why you view your ontology as "modern". Fundamental physics is all about emergence these days.

This for example is a lecture I had lined up to watch later. It gives you an idea of where the metaphysics of physics is actually at in this regard.

Prior to the moment of the singularity, there are no relationships, ratios, forces, or anything else in existence. One might say that these relationships and ratios 'emerge' in the subsequent period, but again, nothing could have emerged had not these fundamental constraints in some sense pre-existed. — Wayfarer

You raise good issues.

First I would say that there are two ontologies in play here. The conventional physicalist story would be that the Universe is a product of laws of nature and fundamental constants.

So this would be the externalist account - where the laws and the constants are "outside" or "prior to" the Universe that then "emerges from them".

The second more truly emergent account is then an internalism where the laws are simply the global constraints that develop as the inevitable regularities of chaos trying to do its thing. Even disorder gets tamed by the patterns it generates.

And the constants, as the other part of the equation - the material aspect to match the formal aspect of the laws/constraints - are then actually just emergent ratios. They are local balances of opposing tendencies - numbers given to equilibrium states, rather than numbers given to concrete things.

So in some sense, what emerges has to "pre-exist" as what turns out to be possible. And indeed, inevitable.

If symmetry maths shows that what emerges from "randomness" has to be some kind of invariance-impervious final state, then that outcome was pre-destined. It was locked in before it was arrived at.

But it still only exists once arrived at.

We can talk about the Universe as being ruled by its laws of gravity or relativity. But in what sense did gravity or G exist, or relativity and c exist, before the electroweak symmetry breaking that gave rise to massive particles able to travel at "less than the speed of light"?

We can claim mass was always inherent in the Big Bang - the Higgs mechanism was a symmetry breaking that would have to get expressed once the Universe had expanded and cooled enough. But stiil, all the extra complexity this caused in terms of "laws and constants" had to emerge as a result of yet another phase transition in the cosmic journey towards a Heat Death.

You say above that formal causes 'are physical' but if indeed these constants amount to aspects of formal causation, they must precede the physical, they must be real in order for physical matter to form. But they're not prior temporally, but logically, if you can see what I mean. — Wayfarer

Again, I agree in a general way. But given that I am talking "full fledged emergence", then what matters is not whether the laws and constants exist "beforehand" in either a temporal or logical sense. Neither kind of transcendence applies.

Instead, the question becomes whether the final outcome - this trail of symmetry-breaking that eventually arrives at some effective balance in terms or global constraints and local ratios - was always "mathematically" inherent in the very notion of a "chaotic everythingness" (or a vagueness, an Apeiron), as a least formed, least materialised, starting point to what occurs.

If everything were possible, then already it was on its way to cancelling itself in every direction it could, and so winding up with only that something which cancelling couldn't cancel away.

In hindsight, there was only ever that one destination. But it was still a destination that had to emerge as a concrete expression of an outcome with a final equilibrium balance.

This is because you can't prove a division in objects between "structure, purpose, organisation" and "fluctuation, accident, possibility". — Gregory

Yes, the object is all "one thing" - the substantial actuality. My (Aristotelean) point was about the causes of this "one thing".

Concrete actuality is the product of top-down formal cause in interaction with bottom-up material cause. That is the standard systems or structuralist ontology.

If you want to argue something else, be my guest.

My question is, why only one form? Why only one matter? — Gregory

You could have an infinite variety of particular forms. But then they would all be varieties of ... form. We are talking about form as a general principal here.

Why only two principles? Why not five? — Gregory

When we talk about generalities, then two arise due to dialectical argument. That is the goal. We want to reduce the alternatives to as few as possible if we are indeed generalising.

Now reducing everything to a single generality might seem the ideal. But it doesn't work. Instead dialectical argument discovers the complementary limits on being - the yin and yang - that are mutually exclusive, and jointly exhaustive, in describing what could even be the case.

So form and matter was the dyad that worked for metaphysics. Together they account for substantial being.

Formal cause covers structure, purpose, organisation, etc. Material cause covers fluctuation, accident, possibility, etc

Materialism says there is one principle per object. It's simpler and doesn't waste people's time — Gregory

LOL.

No, the problem you mention is too generic — Saurabh Bondarde

Nonsense. If you are concerned about health at the personal level, stop consuming any processed/industrial food. And if you are concerned about health as a social policy issue, then taking processed meat out of the food chain is about 5% of the problem.

doesn't the ground level data of prevalence of (in this case) processed meat which is already identified and confirmed carcinogen, seem problematic? — Saurabh Bondarde

Obesity is a worse actual cause of cancer.

I'm not here to champion the cause of processed meat but being a "class 1 carcinogen" only means it definitely does cause cancer. It doesn't say whether that is a lot of cancer or just a little cancer.

And when it comes to food industry lobbying - which is a very serious issue - consider what they actually spend all their money on.

This source says the processed food guys spent $4.5m to the soda makers $24m in the US over a similar period.

Check out Robert Lustig if you are interested in the bigger story.

My point is that it is processed food, not just processed meat, that is the problem. Too much soybean oil, corn syrup and refined starch. And the supermarket aisles are as bad as the takeaways for peddling the junk.

And to use your analogy, it is a set of tools for dispassionately figuring out where you are — tim wood

So a disembedding? That move from the "taken for granted" - the concrete and particular - towards an understanding in terms of the most abstract or general view. And the principal tool involved is dialectical argument.The discovery of the opposing limits of what could even be.

What we do know is there was you after birth. — schopenhauer1

Again, your phrasing would suggest that you want to claim there was no you before birth. Yet nothing happened to you at birth except that you moved from one place to another place.

The point is, that there is no "could have been born a..". That would not be you then. It invalidates that kind of counterfactual line of thinking. — schopenhauer1

Every point of your life contains counterfactual “could have beens”. Including all the moments before birth.

And any definition of “you” has to be tied to some process of neurobiological and sociocultural development. Unless you are making some claim about a spirit or soul?

Once you are conceived, you could not have been conceived as something else, — schopenhauer1

So in what sense is this fertilised ovum “you” rather than an undeveloped scrap of protoplasm?

Why not instead accept “you” are the process of becoming - the process of development itself - rather than something that wasn’t one moment, and suddenly was the next.

Sperm meets egg and, sure, that is a discrete counterfactual event. But is that what we could mean by “you” as an assignment of an identity. Isn’t it more convincing to consider you as an unfinished project, a story still being written?

The fact is, you are you, and not someone else. — schopenhauer1

That was the sweeping statement i was challenging. When exactly does this happen? Why birth and not inception? And what does it say there was the one ovum yet 100m other unlucky sperm? Is the sperm or the ovum the more special one in this story of irreversible biological fate?

In some sense, the person you are is whoever that is after having lived life to that point and suffered some particular mix of life experience. History can’t be changed.

And yet a process of development has been taking place ever since the moment of fertilisation. That leaves vast room for making choices and reacting to accidents. At every moment in life, we could be doing otherwise. We could have been different as a result.

"He's a different person" is a turn of phrase, but not literally a different person. — schopenhauer1

Every person is literally a different set of atoms than they were a few years ago. At a molecular level, the body is continually falling apart and being repaired. So I wouldn’t bank too much on physical continuity.

And in terms of informational continuity, that too is a constant story of dynamical change for our brain circuits.

So to take a strong stance on continuity over malleability doesn’t fit the facts of human development. It is an odd start to an argument.

There is no you prior to your birth that could have been something else. — schopenhauer1

Why privilege birth rather than inception?

:yawn:

'set forth in such a way that it is already anticipated and comprehended by my approach'; — csalisbury

Yep. Something that might be comprehensible as philosophy. So not a poem.

Your approach appears to be alienating, and so is worth avoiding (or disentangling oneself from). — csalisbury

So your argument is that it IS alienating? Don't you have to show that? It could be instead enlightening - the construction of the distance that creates the very thing of a self (in relation to "a world").

You are dishing up a bunch of your prejudices in emotionally charged language. You hope the dog whistling obviates the need to provide an actual argument.

I observe that you seem decidedly insensitive and unaware, especially when you're at your most totalizing. — csalisbury

Poor you.

I'm pretty sure that a big part of poking at you was to try to get a well-landed poke back at me, but unfortunately you keep poking the subjectivist. — csalisbury

Jesus. This level of psychodrama just ain't necessary. Stick to discussing actual ideas and stop trying to decide if I'm your best friend or worst enemy.

It's like a game of tennis. On the court, you do everything within the rules to win. Afterwards you shake hands. Leave it at that.

A definition of nothingness cannot accept the existence of possibility. — Daniel

Not with nothingness as the input, but it can with nothingness as the output.

Nothingness is the absence of existence and as such it cannot be an emergent property, either. — Daniel

Nothingness is what is left after possibility self-cancels. If it is possible for there to be both a zig to the left and a zag to the right, then those two possibilities add up to zero. If both happen, nothing is changed.

And this is the basis for a sum over histories approach to quantum theory. It is how things work in fundamental physics.

Space as a void emerges the same way. Space is defined by inertial symmetry. You can go back and forth in three directions. Step to the left, step to the right, and nothing has changed. The nothingness is what gives space its essential property of being "a nothing". It emerges as a macro description of the freedom to go in either direction, and hence in no direction at all.

Although there are three directions of translation, or dimensions, in which action can go. Plus three matching directions of rotational symmetry, or spinning on the spot.

An actual state of nothingness - an empty void - is quite complex really.

Here's a question though about freedom having too much symmetry. Absolute freedom would have a dynamic symmetry. Think about it, just as soon as a system gets balanced out, a new area pops out freely. And despite all attempts at achieving perfect, static symmetry, absolute freedom would prevail and push out in a new direction. — DanielP

It is indeed possible that our current vacuum state is a false vacuum.

So everything may have hit a generalised balance and yet some fluctuation - a local disturbance arising by chance - may indeed kick everything down to some new level of balance that is even more fundamental.

There are other arguments for believing our current vacuum is fundamental. But physics certainly takes this kind of possibility into account.

The simple reason for vacuum stability is that a disruptive fluctuation would require some local energy density. And the colder and emptier spacetime gets, the less there is to drive any flukey local accident, even if we want to hang it on a quantum field fluctuation of some kind.

A judgement of any claimed property is contextual. Get over it.

Why don't you need to if this is a general philosophical question?

Your everyday use of language is a use of language appropriate to the everyday, not to fundamental questions of interest to metaphysics/physics.

What if you imagine unlimited and unbridled no-difference? — Daniel

Invariance is better understood as differences that don't make a difference. That is how you can describe reality in terms of symmetry (and symmetry breaking).

So a circle - a blank disc - could be spinning or stationary. You have no way of telling as the disc just looks the same whether it has turned a little bit, a lot, or not at all.

All these differences are possibilities. And yet none of them can change anything - at the macroscopic level of observation where we are describing reality in terms of gross movement vs gross stability.

This now defines "nothingness" in a rigorous sort of way as an absence of differences making a difference, and yet not ruling out difference at the level of raw possibility. Nothingness is modelled as an emergent property, not a fundamental one. Possibility becomes the fundamental substrate. But now it is a substrate described itself as merely a potential, a vagueness, rather than some kind of concrete and actual substrate.

The trick here is moving away from the usual concrete and actualised metaphysics of the naive realist to something with more intellectual grunt.

All questions are not resolved by this manoeuvre. But it moves us on from the unsophisticated language of a realist ontology with its concrete subjects and material predicates.