Information/entropy might very well provide a viable model of quantum fundamentals to an extent, but I think this is still reifying our intuitions of bulk, relatively macroscale matter and applying it at the quantum scale, similar to the particularity of atomic theory. — Enrique

Mmm. I would argue instead that we are only just getting to a position of understanding how the transition from the quantum to the classical scale of description is not a black and white cut off (the arbitrary binary of the "wavefunction collapse) but instead itself a zone between the two physical extremes.

The problem is we have these dual schemes - quantum physics and classical physics. And both claim to cover the same total ground as quantum physics goes "all the way up" - because there is nothing formally in the quantum model to create a cut-off. And likewise, classical physics pretends to go "all the way down" - as again, no lower threshold exists in the theory to provide a cut-off.

Understanding that there is in fact this quasi-classical transition zone - in the very particular world that is room-temperature water at atmospheric pressure - now becomes a way to marry the two kinds of physics with an effective cut-off mechanism.

It does root the quantum~classical transition in an already particular scale of "stuff" - tepid water. But that is the obviously correct "stuff" if we are going to locate life and mind as natural biological phenomena.

The most general quantum~classical transition is of course way down back at the Planck-scale – the physical universe as it was with the energy density and interaction distances it had at the moment of the Big Bang. That is the most generic description of the transition zone - the phase changes that did stuff like turn the quark-gluon soup into a flood of gravitating particles in the first split second.

But that is a time when biology and neurology had no place. There is no room for what we want to explain - the "mind" - when even physical stuff was not properly formed.

When you get into quantum phenomena ... its complete transcendence of the spatiotemporal paradigm. — Enrique

It is incompatible with a classical Newtonian framework. Sure. But rather than getting carried away by the thrilling surprise that Newtonianism was too simple and mechanical to be the final theory, let's pay attention to how physics is actually knitting everything together nowadays. And how biophysics now has the tools and concepts to explore the quantum~classical boundary zone in empirical detail.

This is a not-insignificant advance in knowledge that must constrain our biological (and hence neurological) theories.

A panpsychist can't just jump on the woo mystery of 1920s quantum theory and ignore the 2020s pragmatism of biophysics as it reveals the really new insights.

We don't merely have to stop at a theory of the macroscopic/microscopic spatiotemporal divide, but can postulate a completely new, essentially nonlocal facet of substance yet to be detected directly by instruments — Enrique

As a scientist, you can freely postulate what you like if you back it up with empirical confirmation.

I went through those hoops with Stuart Hameroff when he was proposing quantum decoherence in microtubules as the special sauce mechanism. I was quite happy to talk to a whole bunch of quantum consciousness researchers (and the psi community too) even if I felt they were deluded or charlatans.

In the end, so long as they played the game of making testable predictions, they passed as scientists. And I'm not picking on them. Science is full of crazies who sometimes wind up right.

If qualia are integral to not merely matter as spatiotemporally conceived but this nonlocal substrate as well, we can legitimately expect to explain vastly more phenomena, — Enrique

I see your point but the problem remains that this is extrapolating an analogy rather than producing an empirical theory.

The principles of nonlocality may completely defy or reconstitute our fundamental image of entropy among much else, such that the structure of all prior models is like a delusion — Enrique

My argument is that "non-locality" is a transgressive shock to classical physics - as the metaphysics of substantial being. And that appeared to open the door to all kinds of wild ideas for a time. Plenty of folk invoked the quantum as the explanation of mind (just as an earlier generation invoked electromagnetism).

But from a holistic or systems science perspective - as with a modern thermal decoherence approach to QM - this non-locality is seen for what it really is. And that is the holism of contextuality, the holism of global informational constraints. It is no longer a bug but a feature - a prediction of the metaphysics. (Peirce arguably predicted it.)

Entropy is quite safe in this new scenario because thermal decoherence gives a nice explanation for why the Comos has an emergent arrow of time.

Classical entropy does tend to get regarded as a substantial stuff, it is true. But really it is about gradients - a slope down which development rolls. And that general slope is from the Big Bang (the moment of maximum quantum chaos/minimal classical deterministic structure) to the Heat Death (the end state that is its exact reverse)

...but the most true account will probably blow all current materialistic conventions to smithereens, and this is tantalizingly within reach. — Enrique

Well, for me at least, the recent biophysical discoveries were a confirmation way beyond what I expected.

As I say, the surprise is that the mystery of where biosemiosis could start has turned out to have such a complete and quite simple answer.

When in practice does the Universe become organised enough that it can provide a substantial platform for the new level of entropic complexity we call life and mind? Well it is rooted at the nanoscale of tepid H2O. There is enough entropic instability or quantum indeterminism concentrated at that physical point to drive the (classically-described, informationally-encoded) molecular machinery of biology.

Everything is unlocked by making that connection. Everyone involved should be getting their Nobel prize in another 30 years or so.

I just wonder if the notion of cooperation is inherently limited to an in-group. — BitconnectCarlos

If a system - such as a social system - is working properly, then competition~cooperation is a dynamic that will be in full effect over all its scales of operation. This would be a measurable prediction of a systems model of the situation. (See Adrian Bejan's constructal theory approach to social economics for instance.)

So "in-grouping" would be found on every scale. The smallest in-group would be just you. You would say to your left and right hand, don't squabble guys. Let's all be friends and work towards the greater good. Dr Strangelove ring a bell? :wink:

Then your family or friends or sports team are larger scale ingroups. The sports league you play in is full of rival in-groups that can have useful fun only because the teams all accept a shared framework of rules.

Nations are in-groups, religions are in-groups, the United Nations is an in-group.

So cooperation defines the general framework that constitutes an in-group as even a thing. And by the same token, defines what is legitimate in terms of displaying some competitive fire within that generally agreed set-up.

That was what democracy was all about. Paving the ground for a scale-free expression of interest groups - the basic unit of society according to a classic like Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Goverment: A Study of Social Pressures, 1908.

Communism and Fascism fail - when in competition with better balanced democratic politics - because they don't implement the basic social dynamic, except sometimes weakly and accidentally.

Competition can get out of hand quickly ... I wouldn't call it a "necessary evil" but it is something to be careful of. — BitconnectCarlos

But is that a result of experiencing the US system which leans too far in that direction? Or a reflection of how neoliberalism as a philosophy has tried to take the whole globalised financial system in that direction?

Sure, what should be balanced can also be unbalanced.

But we should celebrate competition - in its most creative sense - as much as we would celebrate cooperation (which can lean just as far in the direction of unnecessarily stultifying regementation without competition to balance its constraining tendencies).

The same debate lies behind Darwinian evolution.

Victorian Britain felt that the emphasis on "red in tooth and claw" competition in evolutionary theory was a justification for the very unequal capitalist empire it was running at the time. And since then, any biologist understands that nature only thrives because evolution is actually about an ecosystem of "interest groups". There is plenty of cooperation going on once you start looking for it.

If coherence fields are found to be supported by the molecular assemblages of cellular biochemistry in the nervous system, especially likely to be discovered in the brain, their extremely complex additive properties may be what we know as ‘qualia’. In this scenario, qualia are not merely an immateriality supervenient on atoms, but instead a kind of exceedingly complex “color” or electromagnetically quantum resonance, material states intrinsic to tangible structure of the physical world. — Enrique

Replying to the essence of your position, I've indicated here - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999 - why you might be right about the fact of quasi-classical nanoscale "coherence" at the level of organic chemistry, yet this actually supports a biosemiotic rather than a biopsychic position.

Your argument is still based on treating consciousness as a Cartesian substance. Logically it is a stuff that can then be fractionated or diluted. You can imagine little droplets called qualia, or the very faint glow of qualia as a kind of radiation starting up from its dimmest setting. Qualia simply exist in some brute primal fashion - the mind-stuff out of which everything is made, or which is at least another aspect of the stuff out of which everything is made.

So this is a familiar pattern of thought that leads so many to conclude that some kind of panpsychism is the case.

But science shows "consciousness" is some kind of information processing. And semiotics gives - for my money - the best model of that. Consciousness boils down to our organismic modelling of the world - indeed a model of the "world" with "us" in it. It is modelling with an embedded point of view - what we call a self in relation to what we call "the world" (or the Umwelt).

As I report in that post on the new biophysics, it is is now known how life itself is based on this kind of semiotic machinery. Down there are the molecular level, there is "information processing" going on in terms of molecular machinery that harnesses the entropic forces made available by the quasi-classical level of physical "stuff".

So your approach - talking about quasi-classical effects at the transition zone between the quantum and classical scales - offers no reason at all for why anything happening at that level should have the "property" of consciousness. That is only a conclusion derived from the presumption that reality is fundamentally "a substance". And so if there seems to be material substance and mental substance, perhaps we can collapse the two into the one by the material analogy of thinking in terms of atomisation or rarification.

Panpsychism is a solution derived from a particular ontological model - substance ontology.

Pansemiosis by contrast is about moving forward with the fundamental dichotomy between entropy and information that lies at the heart of modern science.

Mind (as understood by neurology) is some kind of information processing - but one anchored in entropic reality. And matter is no longer a "substantial stuff" anymore. It is somehow anchored in informational processing - quantum instability stabilised by classical constraints.

And as I outline, the findings of biophysics show this to be true at the boundary on which life must first form. We see the two sides of reality - the quantum instability, the mechanical regulation - coming together at that nanoscale of being.

So pansemiosis is testable hypothesis. There is empirical data. Biophysics gives us a direct view of the grain of being where "mindlike" stuff starts to exist as a causal mechanism.

Panpsychism is simply an attempt to persevere with the substance-based metaphysics that the information~entropy approach to explaining "substance" has already long made obsolete.

Another amazing implication of everything being free is that everything becomes one - not a closed, finite one - but an alive, organic, infinite, open one. Everything being free means everything sooner or later interacts with and crosses boundaries with everything else, causing everything to be this vast, complex, free one. — DanielP

Think it through. If everything is free to happen in one way, it is also free to happen in the other. And the outcome is that you have two freedoms that cancel each other out.

So "freedom" must be asymmetric. If everything can be the case, then everything is symmetric and self-cancels to zero. You actually wind up with nothing.

This seems a linchpin to your theory, and it's false at least in numbers high enough to matter. If it were true, the economic or political theory we chose would hardly matter. — Hanover

Human society is based on the dynamic of global co-operation in interaction with local competition. The two are a mutually reinforcing deal. They go together by necessity. And good economic or political theory gets that.

We have to cooperate to form the marketplaces we then compete in. There have to be collective protections for property rights for individuals to compete over those rights, for instance.

So the mistake is to try to build a theory around just one side of the dichotomy. The goal would be to design a system which maximises the expression of both - both the cooperation and the competition.

As humans, we are nicely evolved to flip between aggressive and empathetic behaviour. We are neurally equipped for the dynamic that has always been the driver of our complex sociality.

Kurzweil reserves the term "singularity" for a rapid increase in artificial intelligence (as opposed to other technologies), writing for example that "The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains ... There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine".[40] He also defines his predicted date of the singularity (2045) in terms of when he expects computer-based intelligences to significantly exceed the sum total of human brainpower, writing that advances in computing before that date "will not represent the Singularity" because they do "not yet correspond to a profound expansion of our intelligence."

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

I won’t derail here. But I might reply in that thread. A quick skim already brings up the fact that the kind of organic chemistry scale quantum coherence you talk about is indeed why I now argue so forcefully for pansemiosis rather than Panpsychism. Biophysics demonstrates the true generality of the semiotic perspective.

See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

That’s right if we are talking about the Kurzweil argument that AI will actually become the conscious super intelligent machines that replace us.

But people now talk of the Singularity in terms of its more modest promise of exponential tech trends driving the cost of everything to zero. So it is AI as we know it - Siri and Alexa. Aids to life. The kind of useful singularity that is now preached by the Singularity University.

Be prepared. I guess enough to be confident you have no reason to live in fear — Outlander

Should I say this? I find it quite exciting to be alive at this freakishly balanced moment in creation where we can both look back to see how the whole cosmic shebang originated and how our own part in its journey its going to pan out.

I should still be around in 2050 (just) when all the critical trend lines intersect. If you ever wanted to pick a time in the past million years, now is good in terms of what we will make of ourselves.

Is it a bad choice to privilege intelligence in a generalised sense?

I can see that there is the view that life is sacred in some (spiritual) sense. So if you believe in that kind of ontology, what you say is consistent with such a backdrop presumption. All life is equal (and the Comos needs to be "alive" too, otherwise its existential meaningless becomes monstrous).

But I am coming from another direction in terms of my backdrop ontology. If I treat reality as a dissipative structure, then that involves the balance of "intelligent" organisation (negentropic structure) and its necessary other in the form of entropy production (or waste heat).

It is a clash of paradigms as usual.

But the probable end of human civilisation while my own children are still growing up gives this debate a certain zing. :gasp:

All your points are familiar. But where I have changed my own position is on having any certainty as to which way the system will go. I certainly used to believe that because the Green Movement failed politically, collapse is locked in.

However now it feels more like a genuine two-horse race. Techno-utopianism could pull off its last minute Gaian twist of a self-organising step to the next "economic" equilibrium state.

Probably not. But the game has got interesting again.

Hi Janus. Isn't the problem that on the whole, humans seem to love this "monstrous" future more than they hate it?

So it certainly isn't "my" dream as such. But - for my own sanity - there has to be a reason why the Green movement has been such a consistent failure ever since I was first on board with its ideals in the 1970s.

If nature is in fact an entropic system, then what is the right moral position to take here? Is finding a way for a global population of 9 billion to kick on in the same basic economic fashion a "monstrous" outcome.

If so then nature itself is the monstrous thing. Us old school greenies are caught in the paradox of seeing nature as monstrous. And what is revealed is we had some misunderstanding of nature as a secret garden spoilt by too many of the wrong sort of humans.

I've cited before Vaclav Smil's excellent book, Harvesting the Biosphere.

As a population of currently 7 billion humans now, we harvest about a quarter of all terrestrial plant growth to support ourselves. A third of the earth's ice-free surface has been taken over by agriculture.

So the earth is mostly constituted of domesticated anthropomass - people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs. The quantity of this anthropomass has increased from 0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10% at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97% today.

The total weight of human flesh is now 10 times that of all wild mammals - that's everything from wombats to wildebeest. And our domestic livestock, our mobile meals, then outweighs that true wildlife by 24:1.

Read the figures and weep if you are a greenie. How could you wind the world back from that in any voluntary fashion?

One can only look forward. The ecosphere is well past the point of no return in being remade in the domesticated (and gardened) human image. We have to accept that trajectory and lean into it to have any chance of avoiding a catastrophic collapse in the next 20 to 100 years.

So what does that future look like - when the earth is even more thoroughly anthropomorphised?

It is going to have to be a world saturated by machine intelligence ... in a way that counteracts our current era of machine dumbness. We've had the fossil fuel Industrial Revolution. We've started the Information Age revolution but are caught between stools as we are still reliant on fossil fuels and it feels like too big a leap to get to renewables.

But as I say, the good news would be if the techno-optimists are right and tech is exponential. An economic rebalancing would become possible if we can return to a hunter-gather situation of living within the energy provided by the daily solar flux, and yet do that with a planet that is some kind of Borg colony of 9 billion and still growing individuals.

A monstrous future or logical destiny of nature itself?

Economics just makes a good lens for examining the realities at play. The moralities of yesteryear are no great guide once the future starts coming at you with exponential speed. Which really started to happen once humans stumbled on the motherlode of fossil fuel (trapped ancient sunlight) and the machines that could release its immense power.

You've got a nice model. But it seems you turn it upside down and say that the model is nature. — tim wood

This is what annoys me. You misrepresent.

Again, your Kantian epistemology is our shared departure point. We can only speak of reality as pragmatic truth. We are in a modelling relation with the thing-in-itself.

The Peircean twist on Kant is to argue that this psychological fact is not a bug but a feature. It is how a "mind" can separate itself off from a "world". The self (as a point of view, a state of conscious being) arises as from the Umwelt that pragmatic modelling will produce.

So the reason why science has the form that it does - a pragmatic story of theory and measurement that "represents" the world - is because it is just a natural extension of how psychological being in general works. The brain evolved to be able to interpret reality as a "system of sign", or the semiotic thing of an Umwelt.

So step one is the model of epistemology. And the Kantian cognitive model was the first major correction on Cartesian representationalism. It began the shift to a triadic and semiotic model - the generic modelling relations model.

That in turn had ontological implications. If we now ask why science is "right", it is because it has that particular epistemic structure - the one that evolution arrived at with conscious brains. And theoretical biology now says it is the epistemic structure that even explains life itself. Life and mind are both expressions of generalised biosemiosis – the ability to construct a "private" world to control the "real" world via a modelling relation (see Robert Rosen for the mathematically rigorous argument).

So step one is semiosis as our best model of epistemology. Then step two is semiosis as the best ontological model of mind, and even life - living epistemic systems.

Step three is where it gets pansemiotic. The Comos itself is - in some formal or model-theoretic sense - is ontologically-speaking, an epistemic system. The huge difference is that the Cosmos has no mind, no sense of self, no experiential Umwelt as such. It is not a private model within a reality, but reality itself.

However what does carry over is the triadic model of causality. A hierarchical or Aristotelean view of causality which is about global informational constraints on local entropic uncertainty or statistical degrees of freedom.

In some useful sense, the Cosmos is its own model. It has physical boundaries that encode information (hence holography, hence wavefunctions). That is globalised or contextual information that acts to constrain everything that can be observed at spatiotemporal locales. Or as Newtonian science would put it, the Universe has laws that regulate local actions.

Pansemiosis is a powerful advance in ontology because it can include all four causes put forward by Aristotle in a logically closed structure. The systems view demystifies "the laws of nature" as much as it does "the problem of mind".

And this is where we get to the patterns of nature as being something physically real - even if emergent from the interaction of globalised cosmic constraints and localised freedoms of action.

Another way of saying this is that Nature is essentially a statistical pattern. It has to develop structure stochastically - as an equilibrium outcome.

Any pattern that can't self-organise in a statistical fashion simply won't be found in nature - or at least on that side of the boundary which is "nature in the raw" and not nature as it becomes to a pattern imposing epistemic system.

So pansemiosis is granting special privileges to life and mind as being able to impose their will on the world. Humans have no problem constructing patterns that are rigidly mechanical and thus artificial. It is how we set ourselves apart from the world - re-imagining nature as a machine and thus gaining useful control over it.

But ontologically - if you have followed the whole trail of thought through to its scientifically-validated conclusion - the world is not actually a machine. It is a statistical pattern generator. It is a realm of structured entropic flows that everywhere do the job of dissipating entropy. And that kind of triadic or hierarchically-organised story - constraints in interaction with degrees of freedom - is Peirce's definition of semiosis.

Every definite material event is also - from the point of view of the cosmic context - an informational sign. Something happened, rather than didn't, and so is concrete step added to the great construction that is a cosmic history. The radioactive atom decayed. It becomes now a contextual fact which changes things for everything else that might follow with "wavefunction collapse" definiteness.

There's more to the tree than any model - models being for some purpose to some end. At best we see a thin "slice" of the tree - that part visible to us when and how we're looking. And how do we know, anyway? Because we are in possession of a pattern, a template, and the tree fits - resembles - to some degree the pattern. — tim wood

I keep saying this is standard cognitivism. This is the Kantian model of epistemology that became validated as the ontology of mind by psychological and neurological science.

Well, to be accurate, that is the 1970s form of cognitivism that suffered from a residual Cartesian representationalism and which has been fixed by the more recent Peircean and triadic brand of cognitivism known as enactivism (and various other things).

But anyway, you yourself are making the move from a model of epistemology to a model of ontology - in regards to our scientific models of an epistemic system like a "pattern-fitting" brain.

What you don't appear to get is that after a dualist causal paradigm must come the larger explanatory framework of a triadic causal paradigm. And that we need this kind of enlarged ontological holism to fully get at the workings of reality in general.

I enjoyed browsing your site. And of course there are both similarities and differences in our views. But generally, this is about the contrast between a mechanical or reductionist view of causality and an organic or holistic view of causality.

One starts off the general conception of the Cosmos as case of "there is nothing, so build me something". The other says "anything and everything is possible, but that in itself is going to result in a self-selecting competition". As in a quantum sum-over-histories, reality is what is left over once all the possible alternatives have cancelled each other out to leave a single sharp outcome remaining.

You seem to be reading way more into what I'm talking about than I am trying to say — Pfhorrest

I’m just interested how you think Panpsychism can work. Where’s the detail?

There's no two kinds of stuff, just events that can be interpreted two ways, both objects (matter) and subjects (mind) emerging from bundles of those interaction events (which are respectively equivalent to properties of objects or experiences of subjects, depending on which perspective you take). — Pfhorrest

How would you test this hypothesis? What perspective would reveal the experiential aspect of a stone?

This thread is about moral semantics, not ontology, and I do plan another thread on this kind of ontological topic later. — Pfhorrest

Cool.

Thanks for that - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281055385_The_role_of_interoceptive_inference_in_theory_of_mind/fulltext/563c935908aec6f17dd79ffc/The-role-of-interoceptive-inference-in-theory-of-mind.pdf?origin=publication_detail

Hey there yourself. :up:

Cheryl Misak has been doing very readable accounts of what Peirce is about and his legacy - Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)

She sums it up in this youtube lecture - https://youtu.be/nQuNWNjYcVY

Now show me where I'm off the rails. — tim wood

No need.

As I construct it, the mental and physical are two different perspectives on exactly the same stuff. — Pfhorrest

I've heard every version of panpsychism. Different perspectives on the "same stuff" remains Cartesian unless you can truly dissociate your position from a substance ontology and shift to a process ontology.

In the one, stuff just exists. The goal of monism is achieved by granting that stuff some kind of fundamental duality (of properties, aspects, perspectives, whatever).

In the other, stuff is a condition with a developmental origin. The duality that concerns us is something that isn't fundamental but must eventually emerge. So the monism, the unity, has to come from triadic closure.

And that is what pansemiosis achieves as a model of reality.

The account doesn't assume its conclusions by just granting the duality as a fundamental ingredient of nature. Instead it is a based on a logic of development where a dualised state of affairs is what emerges due to a visible feedback relationship, an actual semiotic theory of how things are caused to be this way.

So do you have a formal theory of how fundamental stuff came to be dual-aspect in the way you require? How did this state of affairs come about exactly?

And the generator a model, or not? I know how I get to nature, but how do you? — tim wood

More pointless snark.

The generator would be the "physical" process. So whatever nature is and how it counts as a generative process. (The Big Bang tells us it definitely counts as such.)

We would then model that generative process. The model is a model, not the thing-in-itself.

Where you may be getting constantly tripped up is that the Peircean systems perspective closes the loop. The model of the process, the thing-in-itself, is that it is a modelling process. That is how it generates something so rationally structured and lawful.

As Peirce said, the Cosmos self-organised into existence as the inevitable expression of universalised concrete reasonableness. Rationality was the finality. (Hegel said much the same thing.)

But anyway, you have to take all three steps to arrive back at the whole picture.

First nature is nature - it looks like some kind of evolving and structure-producing process. Then we jam on our science hat and model that in good pragmatic/empirical fashion. Finally, the best possible theory of nature as a process turns out to be itself the very image of this pragmatic method. Nature is a triadic modelling relation.

Semiosis is all about a "system of interpretance". And as such, it anticipated all the mysteries of quantum theory. It is exactly the metaphysics we have discovered as physics.

But physics itself struggles to see that as it is still caught up too much in a conventional Cartesian framing of nature - the irresolvable duality of the observer and the observables. It is only when you start to get to a modern thermal decoherence story of quantum theory, or a quantum information one, that you start to move sideways into a systems metaphysics that works.

I'm actually very opposed to the Cartesian framing .... I support a panpsychist physicalism, like Galen Strawson — Pfhorrest

But panpsychism fails because it is just Cartesian dualism in thin disguise. It is an attempt to treat "mind" as a further substantial property of matter. And so a conflation of two mysteries rather than the explanation of either.

The systems perspective leads to what Peirceans would call pansemiosis - semiosis as a universal Nature structuring process.

Now we have a duality built around the scientific-strength concepts of information and entropy - a duality that is demonstrably two sides of the same coin. A single yardstick - physically anchored in the Planck scale - can measure what is happening on both sides of the "mental~physical" divide.

So panpsychism has always been based on parody physics. Sorry to be harsh, but Whitehead is hand-waving his way through quantum metaphysics (even if - like Bergson and other "emergentists" of the time, he was also a proto-systems thinker in many respects).

Pansemiosis is a reflection of where physics (and neuroscience) have actually arrived. The discovery of the unity of information and entropy that lies at the heart of the best existing theories of nature.

Friston's Bayesian Brain model in neuroscience made the breakthrough in describing the "information processing" of the brain in terms of "physical" entropy dissipation. Likewise, the whole of fundamental physics wants to do the reverse by using information processing as the way to model physically entropic reality - such as all the stuff about holography or quantum information.

...see upthread about "direction of fit". They're each about the relationship between the world and our ideas of it, and differ in what function those ideas about it are meant to serve. — Pfhorrest

Yes, I saw that bit leaning towards a triadic systems logic. So we are more likely to agree on that.

With "direction of fit", now we are working with the three things of two asymmetric poles of being and then their contrasting modes of interaction - the relationship that sustains the whole deal.

My story would be that the "world" and the "self" arise as two sources of constraint on our individual action. The world is all of that outside which we can't simply wish to be different. We have to work with its concrete material possibilities. Then the "self" is the internalised social construct which stands for our cultural backdrop. It is a second set of constraints on our action that is an encoded set of useful habits when it comes to navigating the hazards and opportunities of the world in a generally pro-social way.

In a pre-Cartesian, pre-science, time, the two sets of constraints were largely mixed up as one. We viewed the physical world animalistically and magically - an extension of the cultural world. It is only with a hard Cartesian divide that the physical world and the spiritual world became two different things, and a world as "nature as culture, culture as nature" became a disappearing framework.

So there could be a lot of tidying up to do on that part of the argument, as well as some essential agreement, in my eyes. But the foundations are what matter as a first step.

It looks to me like we need something that’s compatible with ontological naturalism or physicalism, that honors the is-ought divide, and yet still allows for moral claims to be genuinely truth-apt and not mere subjective opinions — and none of the conventional options above satisfy those conditions. — Pfhorrest

The problem - as ever - is to accept a Cartesian framing of Nature in this fashion. Your opposition of res cogitans and res extensa.

My systems science approach instead aims to show how Nature is a unity created out its divisions. So if "mind" and "matter" appear to be the major division at play here, then this is telling us that Nature is the stable product, the balancing act, that arises out of these two complimentary limits on possibility.

So you don't actually have a "physicalist" account of Nature unless it includes its cognitive aspect as fully as its physical aspect.

This is the same ying-yang, or dependent co-arising, insight as you get in Eastern philosophy. Reality arises from symmetry breaking or dichotomisation.

What we call the physical becomes that aspect of Nature which has the least (but not none) of what we might want to call the mindful, the cognitive, the subjective, about it. And in matching fashion, what we call the mental is the aspect of Nature which has the least (but not none) of what we might want to call the objective, the inanimate, the brute materiality, about it.

In morality, this then provides a holistic perspective where humans are part of the system of Nature. We have to discern the function of Nature - why it exists and where it is headed. And that becomes a baseline for making some judgement about our place within it.

If we turn to science for an "objective physicalist" account of Nature as a system, the answer can still be mighty disappointing to most folk. :cool:

No one much likes the ordinary Cartesian answer where you are either left with Nature being a great big dumb machine, and so offering up no moral imperatives at all. Or you have to talk about the totally abstract imperatives (divine command), or the totally subjective imperatives (complete relativism), that would be the two poles of being that could organise the cognitive realm.

But anyway, our best systems model of Nature is based on the Laws of Thermodynamics. Complexly organised nature exists to serve the function of the dissipation of entropy. So the baseline physics says we rightfully exist to the degree that - as local negentropic structure - we are organising things so as to accelerate the global imperative embodied by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Now there is much more that flows from this baseline moral imperative. (Or "moral" imperative, as once realising it to be the case, we are then suddenly in the newly reflexive position of it becoming a choice.)

For one thing, it is a statement of moral liberalism. Basically our natural existence can't break the laws of thermodynamics. But beyond that level of constraint, the Cosmos no longer cares how we go about achieving this general goal.

Paint paintings or burn books. Both are suitably entropic activities. But in terms of our human capacity to grow negentropically towards our own collective social future, the two activities might turn out to have quite contrasting results.

In summary, there is virtually zero moral literature that takes the perspective of a "systems physicalism". Even Peirce struggled to say much about ethics (largely because he was still conflicted by the severe religiosity of his own social environment).

But note how it is a framework that gives equal voice to both ends of the lived spectrum of life - order and disorder, entropy and negentropy, co-operation and competition, simplicity and complexification.

It is a large enough model of Nature to encompass the full dynamics in play. You don't have to exclude one half to have the other. Instead you start with both (as complementary extremes of being) and discover life as it is lived in the world arising inbetween.

First, successful economies are not jungles, they're gardens —

A great quote. Unfortunately neoliberalism may have had its own logic in paving the way for the move from human-scale economies to inhuman-scale ones. The shift from the "real world" economics of farms, factories and services to the new, more virtual seeming, world of finance economics. Naked global capital flows.

And so "gardening" might still be going on. But at that higher "Davos man" level and not at a human community level, or even at the competitive nation state level.

So going back to the past seems not an option. The world system has been financialised. It is a beast that must now find its next step up or simply collapse - the extinction event that would return any surviving humans to an old fashion community economics and actual gardening if lucky. :grin:

The nature of that next step is the interesting question. To side-step climate change extinction, it looks like we are relying on exponential technology. We have to get off fossil fuels and on to renewables, of course. In a general way, the virtual reality of global capital flows and national debts has to be reconnected to physical reality.

Neoliberalism operated by streamlining the economic realm so that capital was disconnected from the material world in the form of human labour, energy inputs, and most of all, the actual longterm costs of the environment as a sink for the entropic waste that physical effort must produce.

Freed of real world constraints, neoliberalism could run up a tab on this physical and social capital. That allowed the exponential creation of financial capital (in the form of credit. Ie: debt). But now physics is catching up on that streamlined fiction. The entropic sinks that it relies on - a degraded environment, a literally heating climate - are costs becoming due.

The only way out it would seem is technological utopianism - a reconnect of some kind where the physical and informational aspects of being a human organism, the evolving Noösphere, find a new functional balance.

This is the Singularity argument (of which I am always skeptical). But it is also quite exciting that there are now glimpses it could be an economic reality.

Kartik Garda at the ATOM - https://atom.singularity2050.com/ - gives a lucid account of how tech is on the cusp of becoming an unstoppable deflationary force. Tech will drive the cost of everything (even harnessing energy or growing food) down to practically free. Almost all jobs can be automated, creating unbounded growth in per capita labour productivity.

In this next phase of the economic system, the world can not only afford its MMT money printing and Universal Basic Income policies, Garda argues it is already having to pursue them to stave off the early stages of the coming great tech disruption.

The central banks can't generate even a flicker of inflation these days, despite throwing trillions of debt into the maw of the beast since the GFC. And the reason is that tech deflation - the way automation and AI makes all physical products cheaper - is already a counter-force flowing at several percent of the total economy. Garda argues money printing has to become exponential just for its inflationary pressure to balance the exponential rate of tech deflation. And - with the pandemic - that is why the central banks have felt so free to do just that. The money printer goes brrrrrr....

So yes. The existing system is broke. But it is no revelation that "free markets" always are part of something larger - a system of governance that encodes the current economic paradigm.

A market of some kind is still required. It is the intermediating mechanism between the global constraints that govern (the co-operating society) and the local individual action that makes room for the competition that defines us all as self-interested selves.

To be a "human" system, economics has to be aimed at maximising both our collective human identity and our own free expression of "being human" .... as currently defined in our ever-expanding developing human story. So a market - as a cohesive collective space populated by equally individuated actors - is always going to be the heart of the system.

But the question is always about what grand flows is the market equilibrating?

At base, it always has to be a balancing of energy expenditure and intellectual capital. The human adventure is about developing the savvy tricks - fire, tools, gardening, politics - that allow us to harness an ever increasing amount of the biosphere's physical capital.

For the longest time - see Smil's Energy and Civilisation - this was just whatever physical capital that the sun grew. Hunter-gatherer, then agriculturalist. And then came the sugar rush of discovering that fossil fuels could sustain an exponential economic paradigm based on machines (and environmental sinks).

The machine age - the industrial revolution - was pretty grim in many ways. Yet also liberating. There is always going to be good and bad. And overall the human lot became better. And while also unequal, an argument can be made that the inequality is merely a natural powerlaw expression of wealth distribution - what equality looks like in an exponentially growing system that, by statistical definition, has no mean.

The machine age was focused on labour and capital. All our views on left and right, capitalism vs socialism, are founded on the tension between the factory workers and the factory owners - a step up in abstraction from the previous tension of farm labourers and land owners.

The problem to solve was balancing lives at both scales. And post-WW2, this was somewhat sorted by the emergence of social democracies and corporate businesses. You had unions and welfare systems to build in protections for labour. You had "wrap around" corporate structures that were tied into a general notion of being "good citizens" - delivering a return on capital that recognised the need to balance the needs of shareholders and workers.

But capital - as its own abstracted flow - wanted to be liberated from this socialised/physicalised constraints. And so along came neoliberalism as a tool to break down all the accumulated publicly-owned stores of capital - the railways or telephone systems which had citizens as the shareholders - and put them on the market.

Financialisation could then take off as its own thing. It was a way to mine the world of its promised future growth by taking out leveraged derivative bets on tomorrow's income streams. And then eventually, just to mine the promises that fictional growth would surely occur.

We now have that broke system where the central banks - the Fed in particular - have in fact had to socialise the actual asset markets. There is no price discovery in the stock markets if their prices are simply reflecting the largesse of trillions in debt "stimulus" (nor price discovery in terms of the true value of the US dollar that still underpins the world financial system).

But the argument that is currently most believable to me - in this very shaky feeling time - is that we are never going to make a well-designed step backwards into any kind of Green utopianism. The gardening metaphor. That is impossible because thermodynamics is a ratchet - a flow that only has the one direction that spells "growth".

So we have to hope for Tech utopianism to be true as an alternative. And actually act on that expectation. As Garda and others (like Jeff Booth, who wrote The Price of Tomorrow) say, the field of economic punditry is obsessed by the problems of yesterday and not yet seeing the solutions of tomorrow. Someone has to be brave enough to understand what wants to happen as the next step of this story and push it through into the institutions of governance that thus frame the collective space that is the market.

It is a moment where we need revolutionary scale reforms to absorb the contrasting imbalances of unbridled debt creation and exponential (possibly) tech deflation. And of course, the cost of those ecological and environmental sinks have to be including in the grand accounting now. They must be monetised and be a factor in the newly-designed marketplace.

Do you have a more specific name for your "Pattern Generator"? — Gnomon

Well, nature is the generator. So really I am talking about the long tradition within metaphysics and science that seeks an immanent and self organising, thus triadic, approach to the development of the structured reality we observe. This knits together systems science, cybernetics, Peircean semiotics, hierarchy theory, thermodynamics, etc.

The key insight is that reality is the evolving product of top-down constraints interacting with bottom-up constructive degrees of freedom. Global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom to be what they are (the atomistic stuff that can construct). And local degrees of freedom then act to reconstruct the world that is the collective state of constraint forming them. Reality is a habit that works.

So a detailed summary of how the many strands of thought now weave into a tight thermodynamic story can be found here for example - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1006.5505.pdf

The key is the shift from a mechanical or Cartesian framing of Nature to a triadic framing that is thus large enough to include the idea that reality must evolve, develop or self-organise into being.

So Nature is self-generative. It is always forming patterns for reasons. Even its randomness or indeterminism is a pattern - the one produced by the least amount of possible constraint on what is going on locally.

Deus es machina — tim wood

A lazy insult.

Any information can be encoded as a string of bits. We can then calculate the entropy of that string. — Banno

Hmm.

So what is the entropy content of the decimal expansion of Pi? Is the resulting bit string all signal - that is minimally entropic? Or all noise - that is maximally entropic?

It rather depends whether sender and receiver share the same decoding key - the pattern generator or mental construct used to encode the string of bits.

If it is the algorithm for computing pi that was at work, then the string is all negentropy. Even if sent over a noisy channel, the receiver could fill in any gaps or errors by just doing the computation to double check. In fact, simply transmit the algorithm - the pattern generator - and have done with it.

But if the receiver has a different model of the situation - a different theory about the pattern, a different mental construct - then a very different message might be read.

The model in mind might be "this is a perfectly random decimal sequence". And yes, it then passes all the usual tests for being "patternless" - what we would expect to get by drawing numbers out of a hat by chance.

So we have here exactly the same "information", and precisely the opposite conclusion as to the underlying "data generator" in play. And each model can confirm its interpretation as the proper one by the different kinds of measurement it chooses to employ.

I shall now give a definition of nature, in the hopes that you will endorse it or improve on it. Nature is that which underlies perception and understanding, describable in terms of perception and understanding and reasoning thereon, but not itself knowable (in the Kantian sense). In the practical sense, (again Kantian), as the matter that is perceived, reasoned upon, and understood, eminently knowable. — tim wood

If we talk at cross purposes, it is because you turn the original question about the ontology of patterns - are they real, and thus in what sense? - into an argument about epistemological foundations where I’ve already indicated my general agreement.

Anything we can say about “nature” is going to be a model - a pragmatic business of constructing a general causal theory to be constrained by “the facts” as we then discover them (the facts being of course measurements predicted by our models, so leaving us in Kantian fashion, still on our side of the epistemic bargain).

All this is completely accepted about the relation we would have with “nature” - our Umwelt.

And then there is my point. Broadly there are the two metaphysical models in play here. You - consciously or unconsciously - appear only able to apply a reductionist perspective to things. I am saying that a holist has a larger four causes model that can “naturalise” formal and final cause too. They are fully part of the world being described (and so not left hanging as being supernatural powers, nor simply dismissed as mere human social constructions).

How do you address the objection that because no two things are ever the same, that there is no pattern except in abstraction, which is a process of the mind of the one perceiving - creating, as it were - the pattern. That is, sez I, no mind, no pattern. No similarities anywhere anytime anyway, except in the mind of those who pick them out. — tim wood

This was the question you posed.

So you seem to want to say that abstracting over the particulars is a mental process. The real world is some unpatterned state of affairs, a mereological collection of concrete individuals, and we then invent notions of universals by choosing to ignore all the individual differences by applying some arbitrary, socially constructed, rule.

My reply is that nature itself is organised by abstracting over the particular. That is how the world develops its complex hierarchically structured form. Any collection of Interacting individuals will fall into emergent patterns as they develop a temporal history or memory - become constrained by their own past. Lawful and predictable behaviour will result.

So a pattern in nature is emergent form that serves some purpose. Although that purpose can be pretty humble and statistical. It can be just the finality of arriving at the collective, detail-forgetting, state of an equilibrium balance.

In an ideal gas model, it doesn’t matter what the particles are doing. Their motions are random - in a way then described by a simple globally-constraining mean. The gas has a temperature and pressure. And the temperature and pressure are quite real things, aren’t they? They might emerge at the collective level. But they act on the world in a measurable and not abstract way.

Again, my point was that even if an analysis of the situation in terms of four cause thinking says that any form or finality is mighty dilute in comparison to the kind of intentional twist we would give those metaphysical terms in relation to humans and their “minds”, there still is a need for a four causes model to account for what is going on. Nature actually forms its entropic patterns for causal reasons - such as achieving global equilibrium balances.

To deny this “desire” is to make the Cartesian ontological error of treating mind and world as divided realms. To be quite comfortable with psychologising nature is just a normal step towards being a proper natural philosopher or systems thinker.

A Cartesian thinks of matter as concrete stuff, and mind as an experiencing or rationalising stuff. A systems thinker would say instead that even matter is not as thus imagined (an idealised combination of material and efficient cause, hence little imperishable atoms). Why, our best physical theories confirm that particles are really waves. Of maybe quantum maps of potential. Or just informational constructs of some kind.

Science has dematerialised the material now! Particles are events that only exist with any concreteness in the sense an act of measurement has been recorded. They are purely contextual in their being.

So matter is no longer matter. And equally - as you are no believer in spooky soul stuff - mind is no longer mind. To now talk about Nature with either a super-physicalist rhetoric, or try to over-protect the use of mentalistic terms, is just a cultural exercise in boundary policing. It is preserving the Cartesian world view and not allowing in the clean air of new thought.

Unless I'm missing something, this settles the question. Pattern is read into nature. — tim wood

No, it starts things. It accepts that any ontological enquiry is rooted in a pragmatic epistemology. We can only "know" the world via whatever modelling relation we find to be useful.

It is a statement of epistemic humility. It begins an actual metaphysical-strength effort to talk about the "truth of reality" with an appropriate disclaimer.

So it is why I can say "reductionism" is perfectly fine within its own (restricted) purposes. And why "holism" can be also "just a model" and yet be the model demonstrably closer to the "truth" because it models that reality in terms of all four Aristotelean causes. It treats formal and final cause as also "part of nature", whereas reductionism posits only material and efficient cause as "part of nature", leaving formal and final cause hanging in the air as "super natural".

So a reductionist might claim that nature just doesn't contain its own forms, its own finalities. That becomes an ontological-strength claim they then need to support. You appear to be wanting to argue that.

Or a reductionist might more humbly agree that reductionism chooses to be mute on the question of how form and finality play a part in reality because - for the purposes of pragmatic modelling - reductionism simply doesn't need to include the class of top-down causes. No ontological claim is made. The reductionist model already presumes an intelligent human with some goal in mind and an ability to construct a design. The necessary formal and final cause will be supplied by a "creating mind".

And as I would then say, sure you can just model reality in terms of material and efficient cause, then call it quits. Meanwhile I'll go and join up with the guys who have the ambition of a full four causes model of reality. That is going to be the cutting edge of anyone actually still interested in metaphysics as a totalising inquiry into the nature of nature.

For clarity I'm taking nature as that that is at the instant, and from one instant to the next is never the same. — tim wood

Well there you go. You are taking a basic reductionist modelling trick and convincing yourself that is then "the world" truly described. You presume an atomistic ontology and read that into everything you see - so don't really ever see all that is there.

A systems perspective is holistic and so the whole idea of reality as a sequence of states - one damn instant after another - is clearly a wild over-simplification. A holist would see the same reality in terms of a dynamical flow, a process with structure.

So while things may be different from one instant to the next (they MUST be if the holism presumes that local possibility always has a baseline (quantum) uncertainty), overall everything is being kept on track by a global flow - a generally constraining purpose, direction or finality.

What you are saying is that you presume reductionism, and hence reductionism is what your argument must spit out.

I am saying check your presumptions. Reductionism just isn't a large enough model if you want to do anything as ambitious as metaphysics.

Why is there something rather than everything?

(Ie: What convinces you that you have started at the right end of the question?)

I'll be upfront. I don't like Aristotelians. — Gregory

You are ranting against theists now. And all my arguments are atheistic.

Anyway, you proposed a generator. That word means a person who generates. — Gregory

It is a mathematical term - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generator_(mathematics)

You need desperately to put down the Aristotle and read some Freud on religion — Gregory

The rant continues. You are unable to furnish an example of a natural pattern that wouldn’t have a generative process behind it. Case closed.

Can you supply me with a single example of a pattern in nature for which it is scientifically accepted it has no generating process?

As I have stressed multiple times here, even randomness and chaos can now be described as predictable patterns in terms of their generators.

So it is not I who is invoking supernatural beings. Just you as a way of ducking the argument being made.

For the rest, it appears to me that you read into nature whatever works for you. As practical science that seems about right. — tim wood

It is all models. What more are you hoping for here? Revelation? Faith?

Now, however, I must ask you for a rigorous - and short - definition of pattern. — tim wood

In a general way, we are talking about a form or state of organisation that somehow looks habitual, repetitive, meaningful, deliberate, pervasive, ordered. And thus not the opposite of being patternless - chaotic, accidental, arbitrary, lacking predictable structure.

The presence of a pattern implies a pattern generator. A finality. There is some larger process that is placing constraints on irregularity or uncertainty.

Thus a pattern does not simply exist as a result of meaningless accident as you seem to want to suggest. It has to be generated by constraints imposed on otherwise free possibility

Where modern statistical mechanics gets us to is the realisation that even the random and chaotic patterns of nature are also the product of exactly this kind of causal set-up - an Aristotelean or systems causal story. So there is nothing in nature that escapes this causal ontology as even “raw chance” is being shaped into its completely predictable patterns - if you check my citation.

There is always finality present in this sense. Even the random decay of a particle has a (Quantum) generator by virtue of the fact that we can observe its predictable statistical pattern.

If we are merely reading patterns into nature, then there would be no pattern generation machinery for science to discover and model. And really, what else defines nature than it is a pattern - a structure, a process, a system of dynamical generation or becoming?

If you want to argue this is not the case, how does science manage to extract universal strength laws of nature? What is going on there?

CERN physicists recently declared that according to their best estimates, the Universe ought not to exist at all, as the matter and antimatter really should have cancelled each other out. — Wayfarer

Yep. Almost all the matter and anti-matter - as mirror image states - did cancel each other away to leave the blazing sizzle of a cooling and expanding bath of photon radiation, the simplest possible form of being. But if you google CP violation, you will see that theory can predict a symmetry-breaking source of an underlying asymmetry that preserves a small fraction of matter. It has been observed with quarks. It just isn’t enough as yet. Other particles, like neutrinos, would have to contribute too.

Early results have given physicists confidence skewed neutrinos can supply the missing amount of asymmetry. They just need more public money and a next generation detector to demonstrate that, natch. :wink:

Which of his books talk about points and quantity? — Gregory

Peirce never wrote books as such. But his writings were voluminous. So there is no easy way in.

I don't really get what you mean by points and quantity. But if you want to dig into the patterns of nature, you might be much better off with books on fractal geometry, scalefree networks, chaos theory, and those kinds of things. You need the science to give you the conventional story on self-organising patterns in general. Only with that kind of grounding could you see how this relates to the metaphysics developed by someone like Peirce.

An overall - maybe residual - tendency? Life itself does not seem to be, to manifest, 'a "desire" to entropify.' That is, while I understand the tendency to disorder, I don't think it's quite all that simple. Do you care to assay a quick and simple definition of entropy, for present purpose? — tim wood

Don't be afraid of the T word. As a natural philosopher (cf: Stan Salthe), we can parse finality into the developmental stages of {tendencies {functions and purposes}}}. Or {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.

So when we are talking about desires when it comes to plate tectonics, rivers deltas, and other examples of natural dissipative structure, then clearly it is teleology of the dilute kind - a statistically-inevitable tendency of nature.

Then once you have life and mind - systems that can construct informational models of their own worlds - you have now the further possibility of a localised desire for a function (like breathing), and for a purpose (like surviving).

Formally, a simple natural system is just entropic. It serves no other purpose than to accelerate entropy and thus the extremely general desires of the second law of thermodynamics. But any living and mindful system is defined by its countering negentropy. It is in the business of producing local information - memory structures like genes and memes - that encode a local way of being that appears to swim counter to the generalised entropic flow, imposing its own ideas of order on the material world.

Of course, life and mind only exist because, on the whole, they do in fact overall increase the world's entropy. So they don't transcend the limits imposed by the second law's desires. They instead live within those desires as local agents of the entropification process. We use our smarts to produce more waste heat than would otherwise be the case.

So we - as living and thinking systems - are fully part of the great cosmic entropic flow. But being a part of that involves also our being able stand apart from it. To be local stores of negentropic form and finality and so break down "resources" - natural stores of negentropy - and speed their path to becoming waste heat.

How do you address the objection that because no two things are ever the same, that there is no pattern except in abstraction, which is a process of the mind of the one perceiving - creating, as it were - the pattern. — tim wood

That is the principle I am basing things on. Pattern has objective existence in nature as that which can locally suppress uncertainty. So every locale would have fundamental uncertainty - as quantum theory has empirically demonstrated. But then the job of emergent constraints is to produce a localised statistical regularity.

No two things could be exactly the same because the baseline of reality is just a pure uncertainty or vagueness (Peirce's tychism). But then a reality that develops generalised law or habits (Peirce's synechism) will constrain that uncertainty as much as it can be constrained. The statistical fluctuations will be reduced to the absolute minimum - ie: a Gaussian distribution.

So sure, minds can read patterns into nature by learning to overlook individual differences and conceiving of the world in terms of some larger generalising abstraction.

But the Peircean point is that is how nature itself works. For real. It develops the habits of regularity that constrain local irregularity. Laws evolved in ways that make being even possible by preventing absolutely everything just wanting to happen in a radically incoherent fashion.

Every brick that makes up a house is different. But that difference has to become trivial enough that as the houses get bigger, they don't start falling down.

Nature is the same. Its own growth is a constraint on variety. It has to arrive at the most robust patterns of organisation just to exist as a persistent process of being. Or rather, becoming.

As to A's four causes, I'm having some trouble identifying the final and formal causes. And until corrected, I'm thinking that those two do not occur in nature, except in the minds that entertain them. On thinking about it, none of the four in nature. We can describe in such terms, but in as much as the causes are really answers to questions, and nature asks no questions, then how can there be causes in this Aristotelian sense in nature? — tim wood

Aristotle's was a first clear attempt to dissect causality as a logical system. It may be a picture he read into reality - a metaphysical model. But a systems scientist has no trouble seeing it as the right model.

Reductionist science was based on the Platonic/Cartesian trick of splitting off material/efficient cause from formal/final cause. It cleanly divided the world of the Real from the world of the Mind.

Now that is a great model if you are a human wanting to impose some private desires on the world via the patterns of machines and engineering. You can build a science that is all about passive matter and the way it can be bent to serve your will.

But here we are talking about what is really real. And that is a nature which is immanent and holistic - a product of all four causes. With no external help.

Of course, you might find that metaphysical alternative arguable. And the first thing to protest is the idea that nature could have "a mind of its own" - as if finality still equals consciousness or spirit once you have actually shifted to a natural philosophy paradigm where nature starts out down at the maximally "mindless" state of having tendencies or habits. A teleomatic structure rather than a teleological one.

Do you see the difference at play? Once you are signed up to standard issue Western metaphysics circa 1600 - reductionist science tied to Platonic/Cartesian dualism - then any hint of mindfulness in nature becomes the extraordinary problem to solve. And patterns are the famous Platonic bone of contention.

But flip to a systems science or process philosophy paradigm and now the opposite is the focus. We are asking about where "mindfulness" ever actually ceases to be the case. On the local scale, even particles seem either weirdly quantum willful, or secretly following these abstract laws what someone wrote.

The question is: could quarks be broken down in smaller pieces too? And those pieces of quarks, could they be further broken down, etc. etc. ad infinitum?

Could there be no "bottom" to that stuff we call matter? Could it be "particles all the way down"? — Olivier5

Physics has shown that material particles only "break down" as far as their simplest possible symmetry states. So quarks exist as a mathematical limit on material symmetry breaking - the SU3 symmetry in their case. Electrons and neutrinos are the result of there being an even simpler accessible symmetry state - the U1 of electromagneticism (although the mechanism to get there is a little messy as you need this other things of the Higgs mechanism to break the intermediate step of the SU2 electroweak symmetry).

So putting aside the technicalities, physics has flipped the whole issue. The mathematics of symmetry tell us what is the simplest possible ground state of material being. The nearest to a vanilla nothingness. A cosmic sea of U1 photons. The problem becomes more about how any complexity in the forms of higher level crud, such as quarks, or Higgs fields, manages to survive, and thus give us a materiality that needs describing in the fashion of turtles stacked high.

At this point, the conversation has to shift from a classical metaphysics to a quantum one. And here the floor of reality becomes the very possibility of being able to break a symmetry with a question.

You want to know the simplest formally complementary pair of facts about the nature of something that might exist - like its location AND its momentum. Well sorry. Those are the logical opposites as measurements, so that is certainly the ground floor when it comes to asking something concrete and definite. You can't logically get simpler, or more binary. But because they are opposites, not both can be measured with precision simultaneously. Exactness in one direction becomes complete uncertainty in the other.

So again, we know in a mathematical way what constitutes the "smallest possible fragment of reality". A countable quantum degree of freedom.

The mystery is more about how nature would begin the business of smashing its way down through a whole series of higher symmetry states - like SU10 or whatever else counts as the grand unified theory describing the Big Bang state - to arrive at its simplest achievable arrangement.

That is the practical task before particle physics now. Recovering the story of when things were messy and complicated before they got reduced towards an idealised simplicity.

It's a meaningful objection to the idea that CERN will find the answer to the OP anytime soon — Olivier5

CERN is all about recreating those earlier times when things were hot and messy. The everyday world around us has evolved to be about as primitive as it gets. Electrons can't decay because there is no simpler state they could achieve. But go back and higher symmetry states of matter can fragment in a vast variety of short-lived ways - short-lived as they too will want to reduce towards the simplest achievable state of being, like a U1 photon.

Skip Hegel and jump straight to Peirce. :razz:

But seriously, they are all on a continuum as process philosophers - talking about a reality that self-organises in this dialectical fashion. Being as becoming.

I took the most basic example I could above. Take a blank white piece of paper. Does it have pattern? When exactly, once one starts drawing, does patterns start? — Gregory

Note that you are imagining a patternless state - a blank sheet - that you then ...for some reason... want to impose a pattern. And the pattern is then judged meaningful in light of that reason.

So this is a very human-centric start point - subjective rather than objective. You supply the formal and final cause. And you need a blank and passive material ground on which to impose those designs.

But pattern in nature is produced by stochastic self-organisation. Pattern emerges as free action or raw material possibility gets organised by the imposition of generalised constraints.

So "objective" patterns have this natural logic. Their underlying meaning or finality is encoded by a statistical law - principally the laws of thermodynamics. Nature has a "desire" to entropify. Characteristic dissipative structures, like vortexes, erupt everywhere in nature where that is the form which best serves the purpose of entropification at that locale.

This is a really good technical paper on the topic - The Common Patterns of Nature

So the patterning of nature does have objective existence in that it embodies all four Aristotelian causes. The structures really do exist. And they do exist because they are functional. And they exist in a hierarchically complementary fashion. The patterning exists to the degree they suppress or constrain the otherwise lawless or patternless ground of free material possibility that they make organised.

A vortex develops in a flow as a more efficient structure for serving the global purpose of statistical entropy. The vortex breaks the patternless symmetry of the flow - water molecules jostling in any old direction - and entrains them to the directional pattern of a localised rotation ... that allows everything now to get to that desired higher entropy state faster.

The glugging bottle is a good example of this. Fill a soda bottle with fluid and tip it upside down. If there is no spin in the fluid, you get an inefficient glugging as air is having to get in while the fluid is trying to drain out. But if a vortex can develop, organising the draining fluid around a rising air channel, then the bottle empties in a flash.

Coming back to your blank sheet of paper, you can see how this a quite different "subjective" view of reality. All the final and formal cause is Platonically in your head. You want to make the patterns and find them meaningful. And to do that, you also need to manufacture a "world" that is matchingly stable and unresistant in the face of your pattern imposing.

Nature itself starts as chaotically as possible. It is a fundamental source of instability - as by definition, that is the opposite, the vivid contrast, to what it then becomes when that patternless symmetry state get broken by the emergence of a direction, a form, an organising structure.

But a blank sheet of paper is at the other end of the spectrum to this in being engineered by humans as something that unresistingly will accept our marks. You can't draw a pattern on the surface of a stream. But you can make paper that has that quality of being maximally passive in terms of its material/efficient cause. It is the very definition of what most people think of as "material", or brute and inert, mindless and formless, matter.

So what is illustrated here is that there is nature as it actually is - the world as a self-organising stochastic structure serving a generalised thermal purpose and (paradoxically) rooted in a fundamental material instability - and then the "world" as it is generally conceived as the passive material "other" to the active and willing human mind.

Maths - as the science of patterns - has got rather screwed up by conflating the two paradigms. There is certainly the artificial "world" that humans can create by imposing their designs on a nature pacified - the forms we construct from piles of bricks or careful straight lines. If we have stable materials, then we are free to produce these engineered patterns that we find useful for our purposes.

But then there is the still fairly recent turn towards the maths of actual natural patterns of nature. This became big news with the discoveries of chaos theory and non-linear dynamics. Yet the metaphysical significance of this has been slow to percolate.

Which are the real patterns here? The ones we can (subjectively) impose on a suitably pacified nature, or the patterns which are (objectively) the only ones nature can arrive at to organise its instabilities to maximum effect?

If the laws we see in the universe are the only laws that a universe can have this gives fuel to the deterministic philosophy in which things have to/ will occur a certain way rather than completely by chance. — Benj96

The irony here is that "complete chance" must arrive at a lawful statistical conformity. If nature tried to do absolutely anything and everything all at once, almost everything would cancel out. Every zig left would get zeroed by a zag right ... leaving zero as the now stable outcome. In the same way, flip a coin and in the long run it must tend towards a stable 50:50 outcome ... with also a powerlaw distribution of excursions or runs of either head or tails.

This metaphysical-strength insight is what is behind the deepest insights of fundamental physics such as the least action principle or the quantum sum over histories. If nature is freely exploring every possibility, it will find the shortest possible route - the "straight line" - between two energy states.

So physics itself already explains the emergence of generalised law as just a result that if every possibility tries to get expressed, then most of it must self-cancel, leaving only that which can't be cancelled out of existence.

The problem that fundamental physics has is then to explain why just about everything gets cancelled, yet not absolutely everything. And here symmetry breaking comes into play. A zig left has to be - for some reason of symmetry - a little more probable than a zig right. Some grain of difference has to exist that puts an ultimate floor under reality and its emergent statistical regularity.

So laws can be simply the emergent constraints of the Cosmos - the regularities that even a chaos cannot avoid as it must conform to a statistical attractor.

But laws are then tied to fundamental constants - some ultimate grain that prevents everything just cancelling to nothing.

Is there an emergent story for them too? Probably. Why not? Especially if - like mathematical constants - they are simply ratios that emerge from a convergent series. A "growth of cosmic regularity" scaling factor. :smile:

I think hylomorphic dualism - dualism of matter and form - would be more satisfactory from your viewpoint, — Wayfarer

Yes, the systems view is always going to be rooted in Aristoteleanism. That was the first deep cut.

- last year I discovered an interesting paper by Marcello Barbieri, stating why he had resigned as Editor of the Biosemiosis - because he couldn't agree with the 'Piercian' orientation of biosemiotics. — Wayfarer

The group that Barbieri was part of were Peirce-lite. His beef - correctly - was they had a mentalistic approach to “interpretance” and hence meaning. And it needed to be understood in a physicalist sense.

But Barbieri just signed up to the wrong group. Theoretical biologists like Rosen, Pattee, Salthe, had already arrived at a well worked out physicalist version of biosemiosis. And as Peirce’s forgottten writings emerged in the 1990s, the fact that what they were doing was “biosemiotic” became apparent.

Barbieri was always very concerned to establish his own priority as the guy who gets it right. He wants to set his “code Biosemiotics” as the ultimate path to follow. So once he discovered Pattee existed, he had to tear down him too - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-009-9042-8

I don’t find much deep about Barbieri myself. Whereas Pattee, along with Salthe, have minds like razors.