There is a reasonable thought in your OP. At the Heat Death, there will only be a sizzle of photons with a temperature of the empty vacuum and wavelengths redshifted to the size of the visible universe. So that would be the ground state towards which everything tends. Just a generalised bath of radiation of zero degrees but moving at c, being in nothing but a vacuum.

Also the speed of light is the speed of gravity. The idea is more general.

Our brains cannot be more than computers, according to physics. — tom

Are algorithms physical? In what sense are you using the term physics to mean a scientific model of both hardware and software?

You can start with a Turing machine if you like.

I see the simple gate mechanism that switches the state of a symbol. I see the infinite length of tape on which those marks are recorded. I try hard not to mention the problems the second law creates for this imagined material device.

But then this machine needs someone to write it some rules, supply it some data, understand the results.

In what sense are you saying that all that rather mental stuff is reduced to the same materialistic physics used to imagine the hardware?

It seems simple.

If we need to numb ourselves, that spells some kind of problem. We would want to tackle the cause and not the symptoms.

If we want to enhance our cognitive state, that sounds useful. We would want to understand the causality of that so we can produce the said symptoms. Although there may still be a question about why we think it is such a good thing ... like all the time, in some extreme superhuman way.

So if drugs are being used as a numbing mechanism, that ain't a good thing if it is to avoid an underlying problem being addressed. But then, hey, maybe this idea of being wired - cognitively energised all the time - is bad too as relaxing, chilling out, goofing off, are part of being human too?

However are drugs actually good at producing relaxation. Isn't mediation or exercise way better?

And maybe there is a third thing - social lubrication. People feel very self-conscious and distant from each other. Drugs are a way to blur those interpersonal boundaries. But isn't it better to address the causes of this more than the symptoms? What is it about society and other people - or your own habits - that could be changed to remove the same awkwardness that booze or weed allegedly removes?

So actually, it's all a bit complicated.

But the posts that focus on the social framing of the perils and benefits are more relevant than the ones that talk about personal neurobiology.

Pharmaceutical science sure likes us believing that neurotransmitters are like the volume and contrast knobs on the side of the TV set. Others like the Romantic notion that there is some secret little door in our heads that opens into another more splendid world.

But drugs are really crude and rely on their social framing to produce most of any effect.

Inject some adrenaline and the jolt to your sympathetic nervous system will be read as excited or irritating depending on the context. You are suddenly aroused. Now you have to work out whether that is to get you busy in a good or bad way because of what is happening in the world around you.

Personally I have found that it is the boringly obvious stuff - hard exercise, quality sleep, clean diet - that does the most you can do for your biology. Then you have to deal with the social side of life the best way you can. You have to strike some balance of engagement and detachment that results in a long-term strategic sense of growth and flourishing.

And the toughest part of that is it is never something structurally stable. Shit happens. Circumstances change. Rebuilding is part of the game.

But anyway, everything people seek from "recreational" drugs is ultimately about that social thing, and so ought to be judged against other social mechanisms (like hiking, clubs, whatever). What impresses is that drugs seem more potent than the other choices as they promise to go right to the neurobiological source.

That is true in the bullshit sense they stick a crude spanner in the works. But then that still leaves you having to make sense of what you just did. And that in turn takes things back to the social context which is the ultimate arbiter on the issue.

So, there's no escaping reality then. — Posty McPostface

Has anyone found it yet? :)

Thanks. I'm not claiming anything original. An embodied approach to cognition would be pretty mainstream these days.

The OP was about drawing sharp baseline boundaries. My answer is that there is no sharp boundary really until you get right down to a state of matter that is not alive and mindful. A lump of something that is in no sense modelling a world.

But then you can start filling back in the obvious degrees of mindfulness/world modelling represented by the distinctions between reflexive behaviour, automatic behaviour, attentive behaviour, self-aware behaviour. That's just the neurobiology of complexity. The modelling steadily becomes more sophisticated in terms of a relation between "a self" and "a world".

Obviously understanding neurochemistry will broaden or simply alter your perspective; albeit in a different way than imbibing hallucinogenic substances will. So will hiking in the wilderness, studying physics, biology, mathematics, literature, history, political science, religion, as will surfing, playing or listening to music, painting and drawing. writing or reading poetry, belonging to a religion...the list of activities is endless. — Janus

I just posted on that. Perception depends on conception. And for humans, conception depends on intellectual systems. Even hiking qualifies as a holy sacramental activity - a socially-valued method of shaping perception - within particular cultures.

So to have a mind that hasn't been blown is to have a mind that lacks a radically different perspective. — Janus

If that different perspective has significant value, why hasn't it become shamanistically woven into modern common experience? Has society made other choices for good reason?

Yeah, I get the obvious answer. Drugs disrupt the smooth functioning of The Establishment. So they get suppressed. But I think it more likely that the supposed benefits are trivial.

Society already makes a place for drugs that get you whacked. The lubricants and anaesthetics. So health risks are endorsed for rather questionable personal rewards.

But here you are talking about a magical cognitive enhancer. If it safely worked, why wouldn't we?

Again, maybe society does value cognitive enhancement it seems. Although probably only for the few, or of the general form that is pro-social by being pro the norm. But granting that cognitive enhancement appears to be regarded as a general social good, hasn't acid been tried and found wanting? Or at least underwhelming.

I don't find any sort of rituals to be of any actual significance to anyone apart to some idealized vision, which I don't share. I'm glad our shamans of the past have become more strict and logical instead of metaphysical and mystical. — Posty McPostface

I see @Bitter Crank made the important point in your other thread that shamans did create a guided experience. The rituals created a social framework which gave the production of an altered state its culturally useful meaning.

So it is the opposite of trite or insubstantial hedonism. Again to connect with this thread, it was constructing the conceptual framework within which that kind of perceptual state would make complete sense.

No different from going to church. Or an art gallery. In some general way, culture does want to frame our perceptual experience so that it has proper social meaning.

Which is where hippies come up. There was of course some cultural authenticity in the "counter-culture" movement. There would be good reason to want to alter people's perception of their social, economic and political reality.

LSD or pot was that sacrament. It could have been Ecstasy as it was a few decades later. Or it could have been the alcohol and cigarettes of their parent's generation. It could be EST sessions, yoga, Mozart, or the whole variety of things which are there to construct human perception in a culturally conceptualised fashion.

Even maths and philosophy are "drugs" in this sense. We are meant to be initiated into their mysteries by shaman guides and see the world through different eyes as a result.

So what I see as "trite" is the Romantic notion that one sees the world all by oneself, naked and simply. As if it is all about altered biology, not about social learning.

Perception is conceptual and systematised. For humans, it is culturally constructed. And so what becomes our individual choice is whose poison do we take? What culture do we consume to become the people we will thus grow to be?

You become wise or clear-minded by picking your influences carefully, not by altering your neurobiology or accessing a different plane of being.

If we want labels, perhaps something like: 'direct conception'. — StreetlightX

LOL. Direct systematisation! Even more honest.

We could easily tell if it had degrees if we had a good handle on what it actually is. Measurement and theory go together.

My general definition of consciousness or sentience would be being in a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

Rocks don’t model anything.

Microbes are a first glimmer of world modelling, but we would hardly say they see a world. They have some chemotaxic reflexes, but not some kind of integrated picture of an environment that changes from moment to moment in some modelled fashion demanding variety of behaviour.

And so we can move on up the chain to organisms with those kinds of complex world models. But being in a modelling relation would be a suitable dividing line. It marks off all of life with a reasonable sharpness.

Processes of individuation are a mix of purposeful constraints and material accidents. So the story is more subtle. Individuation is the limitation of accidents. Without constraint, the accidental would be unlimited. You would have the least globally individuated state of a generalised chaos - a meaningless host of localised accidents or fluctuations.

So it is not either/or. It is Aristotle’s four causes story, Peirce’s Hierarchical story, of purposeful global limits on freely occurring accidents. Individuation is the process of limiting those accidents - up until the point there is some reason to care.

Acts of individuation always wind up with plenty of accidental details that don’t matter in terms of whatever telos was in play. Twins with identical genetics could wind up with or without some particular mole. To the degree skin pigmententation mattered in a wider evolutionary sense, it was being controlled. Variety was being limited.

But if moles don’t matter in that sense, then they become unsuppressed freedoms. They are one of the accidents that genetics didn’t care enough about - a difference that doesn’t make a difference.

there's my apo! — csalisbury

Look at c trying hard to be all nasty and offensive. Just so cute.

[How does being a hippie on acid help you realize biosemiotics and talk about it often ] — csalisbury

Keep up. My attack was on the usual Romantic guff that motivates these kind of PoMo threads. Ooh, if only we would stop conceptualising and systematising everything, then we would really see things for how they are!

Hippies promoting altered states of perception was an example of how familiarly trite this advice is.

If you now feel compelled to bring biosemiosis into it, that's your look-out. It certainly betrays your fears about there being systems out there in philosophy-land well above your paygrade. Quick. Pretend to laugh it off with your trademark wit. Hit us between the eyes with a lack of capitalisation, textspeak and deconstructed paragraphing that speak to your outsider persona.

Yes, you are that easy to decode.

Pleasantries aside, you could pay more attention to what I actually posted now. :)

We create these stories in through thinking in an attempt to make sense of these forces. — Read Parfit

But the forces are also a "just a story". So what makes sense of what here?

Sure, that means we are in an epistemic bind. We only ever "talk about" reality. But what I'm picking you up on is the idea that one part of this talk is pure constructionism, the other might be talk about something concretely actual.

You are going with the usual reductionist division of epistemology that says our perception of abstracts or universals are just ideas, free inventions of the human mind, while our knowledge of the concrete particulars is something else - proper physical fact. And that framing is what I would question.

So yes, generally epistemology is a social construction of reality. That applies to the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete. It is all modelling.

But then modelling - if tied to the world in proper fashion - says the abstract and the concrete have a persisting reality. They are the forms and the actions that keep emerging as we hold our gaze. Symmetry is somehow just as real as the force which is the result of its breaking.

So the story is trickier. Platonism isn't just flat wrong. Symmetries are elements of reality, part of the ontic furniture of existence. Everything is a model. But also, we are seeing something true when it comes to the kind of abstract objects that force themselves upon physicalist theory.

You've squeezed from hippies what you can, so all that's left is an abstract, schematic [hippie]. — csalisbury

It was acid-tripping hippies. I was more specific.

So it is now you seeking to assimilate what I said as something carefully particular into a more generic conceptual frame - the one that allows you to exclaim, with smug triumph, there is surely more to hippies than just LSD or Carlos Castaneda.

As if I would have said otherwise.

Nuff of that hippie talk! what about sitting in silence and thinking about peirce and being vaguely mad about it and so getting online and posting?? Thats the real pragmatic ---- — csalisbury

My day is large enough to do lots of things. Isn't yours?

It is true that the number 1 does not directly describe something else that is physical, but directly describing something physical is not the purpose of generic thinking aids like math and logic truths. — Read Parfit

But 1 exists as the identity element. It is the name we give an actual universal symmetry. And can nature escape being a story of symmetries and their breaking?

Between Platonism and constructionism there is the middle path that realises maths is doing its level best to directly describe something that is actual and fundamental about reality.

Tom's universal computation is clearly not in that class. It is the mechanistic caricature of how the world really is. One of the convenient fictions.

But when you get down to the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking, now you are closing your hand around something fundamentally true - true because its truth is simply inescapable as a necessary fact of existence in any sense.

That doesn't mean we have the whole story of mathematical symmetry either finished or correct. But there is a reason why we are not merely inventing happy fictions to pretend we exist in a reality of intelligible structure.

Some maths is just a game of patterns. But the core maths is a science of patterns.

Which is pretty well how I see things also. — Wayfarer

We sort of agree except I talk about sign rather than mind.

What I object to is the lingering dualism of treating consciousness as a substance, an immaterial soul-stuff or transcendent spirit.

But still, the other side of that traditional dualism - the one that speaks about matter as a material substance with all its own spooky actions and tendencies - has to be dissolved too.

And that is what I see semiotics doing. It dissolves both mind and matter as species of substantial being. They both become emergent states of semiotic organisation.

It is off topic. So I'll just say how I would respond personally. No to the stimulants as the mechanism is too crude. And no to the educational setting if it seemed a wrong fit.

So I would contrast my organic approach with the mechanical one you are describing. I would be critical of the drugs to the degree they are just a convincing mechanical metaphor. Are these nutrients to help your brain grow and flourish or some kind of turbocharger device you strap on, some kind of strong battery you plug in?

If you can't give an organic reason for why the drugs would be a true benefit, then you don't understand what you are doing. You are just learning to believe that you are essentially a machine - as this is what a machine would do.

Same with the college. If you can't give an organic reason of why what it does is going to help you grow and flourish, then you would be best to not believe in its value. If it is taking a mechanistic approach, again you will only learn to be a machine by going along with it.

I went through my own education with exactly these attitudes. I was sometimes a disgrace, sometimes top in the country. I once went a whole winter in shirtsleeves just because I didn't like the scratchy wool of the school jumper. On one hand, very silly. On the other hand, a formative experience.

But I think this is the secret here. If we view ourselves with a mechanistic logic, then all sorts of familiar discontents follow. Life looks quite different - or in fact, more how most folk would understand it - if seen through an organic lens focused on growth and flourishing.

Philosophy of course has plenty of good things to say about growth and flourishing. Aristotle was an organic thinker, even if he helped lay the foundations of a mechanical view too.

But, as I say in every post, organicism languishes as a well understood world view - as a metaphysics with a mathematical rigour.

Mechanicalism is held in high esteem because the mathematics of that (the very dumb and simple maths) has become something drummed in from birth. What could be more tragic than those parents of newborns who rush to decorate the baby room with the alphabet and numbers?

And this OP was tragic in celebrating a general rejection of totalising systems, just because the mechanical model is so patently dumb (if matchingly useful if you want a thoroughly mechanised life).

So what we ought to be focused on is the organic metaphysics that has the kind of rigour that lets us make better judgements because we know what actually makes life and mind tick.

Straight away we ought to be able to look at pills and schools seeing why they wouldn't lead to the best outcomes because they embody a mechanical crudeness. The reason why they would disappoint would leap out at us as obvious once we had the conceptual frame which allows us to perceive that.

[OK, the short off-topic reply just got turned into the on-topic again long-winded reply. Organically!]

Attempting to explain psychedelic experience to one who has not experienced it is like trying to describe colour to the congenitally blind. — Janus

But it works both ways. What is it like to have a mind that has never been blown? :grin:

Or if we are talking about the advantages of things being revealed, what is it like to have a mind that understands the neurochemistry? Will you ever know what you are missing?

We can all play these games. I say judge them on the pragmatic fruits. Which kinds of revealed truth are going to be of the most value to you over the course of a lifetime.

And of course, I am alert to the fact that our choices of which avenues of experience to pursue are the ones that end up defining us, so shaping our feeling about the answer as to what mattered. Your drug experiences may indeed be fundamental to your resulting sense of self. They did become the invaluable part of "you being you".

So you can't be persuaded they might be trite experiences when they are experiences integral to your ego. I respect that. It is why I say I am not making any high ground moral judgement.

But before you came flashing out of the woodwork to defend something you hold personal and dear, I was making an argument against the romanticised story being told via conceptualisers like Adorno, who talk of shedding their systematising tendencies and romping naked and exposed in the delights of pure unanalysed nature like ... so many acid-tripping hippies.

I still say that romanticism is as trite as can be - in the context of psychological science and pragmatic philosophy. LSD-taking is just another of those romanticised social tropes - a way to define the cool gang willing to cross the line, transcend the world as experienced by the mere normie.

So romanticism is the general target here. Acid tripping would be a particular example of a form of perception being assimilated to the OP's romanticised conceptualisation of experiencing the world in a ... God-like! ... transcendent fashion.

You replied exactly as predicted. So you can have your sacred knowledge of the experience and I'll stick to my sacred knowledge of the cognitive neurochemistry. At the end of my life, I know which will have had more value for me personally.

If drugs could give you greater functional clarity of mind, I might take them. But the boring conclusion is that paying attention to health and training is how you maintain any mental edge in the long term.

I mean, it is an accepted dogma that evolution itself is not 'intentional' — Wayfarer

All I can do is shrug and think of all the theoretical biologists who don't accept this dogma.

They might not accept your theistic dogma either - the claim that evolution might be driven by a divine or transcendent purpose.

But that is also OK by me.

Ever tried it? — Janus

Nope. I've avoided all mind-altering substances on the grounds my neurochemistry seems nicely functional, thank you. ;)

I did get drunk once 40 years ago. No point doing it a second time. I drink coffee a lot. But it has zero detectable effect mostly.

I don't say everyone has to take such a rigorous view of drug use on some kind of moral high ground. But it was a decision I had to make for myself early on - back when hippies were handing around joints and bogans were keen on getting hammered. I see it as a personal health choice. And having studied neurochemistry - of altered states indeed - LSD doesn't have any of the allure of the unknown or forbidden.

So go ahead. Tell me what I'm missing. But I've already read all the phenomenological reports. They will do me.

So, the vague, or the virtual, or whatever you want to call it, can be thought only in terms of everything the determinate is not, it would seem. — Janus

That would seem to be what I said. Internalism would take advantage of the resource that is apophatic reasoning.

Geist is such a versatile, polyvalent idea; — Janus

So vague then? It absorbs all contradictions like a thirsty sponge.

it could be adapted to almost any metaphysic; will, will to power, elan vital, natura naturans, God, apeiron...Or it could be taken just to represent the collective spirit of humankind; the totality of zeitgeists, so to speak. — Janus

But Hegel at least would have wanted it to anchor his general metaphysical scheme in some definite fashion. So it has to be granted some kind of particular meaning in that historical context.

Like it or not, we can't use the term as if it is actually completely vague and without concrete referential intent. It has to be opposed to some "other" when you employ it, not conveniently change its meaning whenever it encounters an objection on how you seem to be using it.

You are treating Geist like a Joker or blank card - something you can lay it down on the table and claim it completes the winning hand, without needing to reveal which proper card it is meant to represent in the game this time around.

Is there anything at all of philosophical merit at the back of all this?

I think what you want to point to is a generalised and diffuse sense of meaningfulness and intentionality - that oceanic feeling which can come over us at the top of the mountain when all feels right about the world spread out below us. Reality as a whole has a ... spirit. Our self, with its purposes, feels less bounded, less demarcated, and becomes one with ... everything.

But to bring this back to psychological reality, I would point out the "other" that is involved. This kind of emotional reaction - this sense of fit, of rightness, of salience, of intentional direction - is a natural cognitive dichotomy. We can feel it both generally - the flow experience - and also particularly, as the aha! experience. When we realise that 2+2 must equal 4, or we find the last bit that must complete the jigsaw, we have that sharp sense of psychic conviction. We have an intense jolt of belief.

We know that this sense of focused rightness - an emotional response to the salient - is basic to neurocognition as we can see what happens when it goes wrong. When it goes wrong, we get the many cases studies along the lines of Oliver Sacks' man who mistook his wife for a hat. Or just the blind certainty that we left the keys on the shelf as usual, so they must have been stolen, when in fact we left them in the front door.

So a logical philosophising frame of mind still relies on a well functioning deep sense of conviction that knows when an argument is actually true ... because it feels true at the level of blind conviction.

And because we can laugh at that view of knowable truth, so we must also laugh at its "other" in the form of Geist - if Geist cashes out as some generalised conviction about a world being experienced in terms of an all-pervading salience, a holistic guiding spirit, lacking any particular structure or definable feature.

Feeling things is not enough. We have to construct the intellectual frameworks that minimise the degree of helpless blind conviction that is involved. That is what a scientific or logico-mathematical level of semiosis is all about.

That is why I hold Peirce above all others involved in this little game. He did not deny feeling. He wrapped it around with a strong enough structure to test it as well as it could be tested. He set things out as the dichotomy of the particular and the general (secondness and thirdness) - acting in concert to separate the vague (or firstness) into a state of hierarchically poised order. Habits of interpretance.

So that is why I say if you want to talk about Geist - even if you mean to refer to the primacy of the purely vague - you have to get back to that having secured your general and particular notions of Geist. You do need a theory of Geist, coupled to a measurement of Geist, that then says something about Geist - even if apophatically as the ground from which Geist is understood in terms of that which it is not. That "other" now being the crisp conceptual framework which is particular Geist and general Geist as the limits of how Geist could be conceived.

A tricky business as usual. But that is internalism and its apophatic manoeuvre by which it catches a glimpse of its own self-origination.

I'm not sure if that disagrees with you or not. — T Clark

My point was that any perception of things inevitably requires the context of systematising thought. So to pose God as an ideal observer who would "see each thing clearly as precisely that which it is and nothing else, and he would not need to use a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else he already knows," is just a bit of silly propaganda.

An observer is already the taking of some viewpoint. It is an inherently conceptual act in that you choose some place that sets you apart from whatever it is. Perception is thus active and not passive. The self, as a carefully positioned observer, is being constructed in a fashion to produce a distinction which is then the observed observable. A distinction is being produced by an act of framing. To see anything as individual requires this act of contextualised individuation - a positioning of the observer (physically, mentally, conceptually) in a fashion that makes it so.

This is the point of semiosis. The mind produces the sign of the thing-in-itself to construct a "world" - an umwelt. So any reality - if the word has a useful meaning - is embodied in this triadic relation. It is observerhood - the forming of individuated points of view - that constructs a world of observables.

This semiotic view of course seems to raise difficulties. A human conception of the world is linguistically structured. Through physics and metaphysics, we create umwelts that are even mathematically systematic. We impose an intelligible logical structure on a world of observables. We see a nature ruled by laws or principles - and it works.

By moving up a level - away from the world as seen from the point of view of scattered individuals at a certain highly atypical moment in the Universe's history, what we would call "life on Earth" - we can construct the kind of "all seeing/objective" scientific observer that takes a universalised view of the observable. We become minds reading off the facts of reality spelt out in numbers and measurements.

So we already know how how a more God-like perspective works. If we want to construct the objective view from nowhere - the observer that stands outside the observable which is the entirety of creation revealed - then it is going to wind up the utterly systematised view. Everything is going to be reduced to a pattern of marks, a set of symbols standing for acts of measurement, a collection of numbers read of dials.

To speak of God seeing things as they really are is codswallop. Does He see the green of the grass like us? Or does He see the electromagnetic radiation with a certain countable frequency? What does He actually see - be specific.

Either his perception is pseudo-human, but imagined happening everywhere at once in omniscient fashion. He can see inside our bodies to witness the redness of our pulsating heart - even though no light penetrates to illuminate the hue. Or He is a super-scientist who has the measure of every distinction.

Somehow we imagine Him as being present everywhere to notice every distinctive event - every thermalising exchange of energy or information. And He really sees it as He - from his chosen vantage point that places him as the observer, the steady context - can record it as the mark of a difference ... that makes a difference ... to Him .... as He is the one holding steady ... and it moved, or changed, or reacted, within the systematised reference frame that He embodies.

It doesn't work. You can't have a God with a direct and unmediated perception of His own reality. The de-systematised view. Naked distinctions can't exist. The very thing of "a view" requires the conceptual frame that is reading the world as a system of meaningful signs. An observer is an act of constructing a locus of stability - a point of view - that can then reveal surround instabilities as differences that make a difference ... to that supposedly stable point of view.

Again, the hypothesis was: He would "see each thing clearly as precisely that which it is and nothing else, and he would not need to use a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else he already knows."

That is a screamingly stupid sentence. It goes against everything we understand about the psychology of perception and consciousness. Why would anyone want to romanticise it as the proper way to do philosophy?

Philosophy wants literally to lose itself in everything that is heterogeneous to it, without bringing it back to ready-made categories. It would like to nestle in close to what it isn’t ... Its aim is undiminished kenosis, self-emptying. — Adorno

So Adorno sees that observables exist for observers. We have to construct ourselves systematically as "a point of view" to register a world as some ordered pattern of measurements, some memorable arrangement of meaningful and localised responses.

But now this carefully constructed self wants to lose itself back in the world of things as they "just are". It wants the unreduced experience of the unsystematic observer.

As if there are still observables without that construction of a context.

We are back to hippies popping tabs of acid to open the doors of perception. It is that trite.

You keep replying in non sequiturs.

Competition holds the advantage in the short run, cooperation in the long run. It ain’t rocket science.

That's because you assume that rational self interest is always optimal, — Posty McPostface

No I don’t.

You are still talking as if I said something different. If we have all the information, we can strike the balances which best satisfy our mutual interests. But likewise, we can also judge when selfish choices are wiser.

You lost me at the prisoners dilemma. Game theory studies competition and cooperation. You chose the set up that makes cooperation impossible due to lack of an opportunity to interact. Uninteresting.

I beg to differ. — Posty McPostface

Plainly.

Well, just take the Prisoners dilemma for example or the tragedy of the commons, or the fact that economics treats what is rational with self interest. All of these situations arise because we place a higher value of our own welfare than that of others in much of Westernized society. — Posty McPostface

But to the degree these are models of how collaborative good can arise out of selfish actions, then they are hardly egocentric. They speak to the social science understanding that flourishing requires a self-organising and adaptive balance of competitive and co-operative actions. Both are right as both are needed. And that is what the psychological fixes would be targeting as the reality.

So the commons are a good thing - so long at the personal vs group dynamic is balanced by "market forces". Economic self-interest is rational - so long as it is framed within a generally shared social context that generates sufficient real equality of opportunity (and factors in the true long-term costs of its economic activities).

I don't want to turn this thread into a critique of modern society; but, it's almost inevitable that this thread will take that turn. Why is that? — Posty McPostface

Because we are changing everything so fast. Humans are socially constructed and humans are changing the society that constructs them. When else in history has there been such a need to consider the kinds of people we are making?

And it cuts both ways. The Millennials could be making the right world for them, so Baby Boomers and Gen Xers should be shoving over, letting the change happen quicker.

Who can decide without a clearer theory of what really works?

Yeah, so doesn't that prove the point that psychology is in need of a paradigm shift from the ego-centric model? — Posty McPostface

You mean like Positive Psychology? Which is a paradigm shift I've been tracking for some time. Where I live, it's been part of the damn national educational curriculum for a decade now. You can't get much more officially mainstream than that.

And among Millennials generally, it is one of their supposed hallmarks - a pro-social individualism. It expresses itself in social enterprise, the sharing economy, and other economic philosophies meant to roll back the excesses of funny money capitalism.

I'm not saying all of psychology is egocentric; and I sure hope it isn't, but there's really no way to frame the issue otherwise, or is there? — Posty McPostface

Social constructionism does not deny individuality. We are biologically various. So brains can be just broke at that level. And competition is part of the mix that social machinery would want to positively foster. You want people who have some assertiveness, self-esteem and motivation. Society needs creative energy as well as its generalised habits of constraint and collaboration.

So yes, there is definitely another way to frame the issues. But one that incorporates the natural thing of self-interested competition as part of the productive mix.

For example can the "unbridled everythingness" exist or subsist prior to the crisp somethingness of spatio-temporal existence? Does the latter emerge from the former or are they co-dependent, co-emergent? — Janus

It's something of both.

As soon as there is any definite development towards something, it counts also as a definite move away from something. So it is co-emergent in that sense. As soon as there is enough of a history, enough of a developing story, that points in the direction of the crisp, then there is also the direction pointing away from the vague.

Yet when this co-emergence is first the case, it is as vaguely the case as possible. It is only by the end of time that it could arrive at fully actualised crispness. So in some sense, the vague actually exists for a while before it gets supplanted. When the Big Bang first happened, it would have been so hot, so dense, that its physical state counts for something so generally vague and structureless that we might as well call it a state of actual vagueness. It was 99.99999...% vague. We can treat that as a concrete state of being which then gets dissipated by the cooling and expanding that leaves the Universe crisply flat and empty - its state at the end of time when it has hit its Heat Death.

So this is a feature of the language being triadic. The metaphysics requires a pair of dichotomies - the developmental or diachronic one that speaks to the vague~crisp, and the developed or synchronic one that speaks to the hierarchically structure state of being organised in a definite local~global fashion.

So two axes map the story. One tracks the emergence of crisply divided order. The other is like the cross-section view that measures just how well divided everything has become.

At the beginning, when vagueness rules, there is no cross-section to speak of. It is like a debating the width of a point as the local and the global - that is, the local actions and the global directions - are pretty much indistinguishably the same thing. They are so unseparated that they just look like a chaotic froth of quantum fluctuations.

But exponentially the actions and the directions move apart. You get the expansion and cooling that constructs a clear local~global separation. The froth settles and condenses into massive particles blundering around in a yawning void.

It is this duality of the axes of description - the longitudinal view vs the cross-sectional view - which make talking about the character of the beginning so tricky. The beginning is like a now featureless point. It has the least length possible - the shortest distance separating the vague from the crisp. And also the least width possible - the shortest distance separating the local from the global.

So it is simply the nature of triadic metaphysics that you have to be imagining a duality of dichotomous separations.

Dyadic metaphysics is dead simple. Just apply LEM to choose option A or B.

Or upgrade to dialectics and be mildly puzzled by a little ninja move like sublation. Thesis generates antithesis, but is resolved in synthesis, all ready to launch another spin around the same basic spiral.

But Peirce is another level beyond. You've got the longitudinal and the cross-sectional stories of a development that says both the determinate and the indeterminate are being crisply actualised out of the same unresolved initial vague blur.

I agree it can be very confusing. The beginning is when chance rules. You have unbriddled everythingness. But chance in any strongly constrained or determinate sense - chance as actual possibility - only emerges and achieves its fullest expression at the end of time. At the beginning, chance lacks the generality or regularity it gains later in the story. Even calling the beginning "chaotic" is an understatement as chaos is already the product of a definite set of boundary conditions.

I actually haven't stated any metaphysical commitments of my own, or even that I have any metaphysical commitments. — Janus

Not even to Geist? Is my memory that bad?

I think this is much more of a dualistic setup than what I was proposing. — Janus

Well again, do you have a proposal that doesn't retreat back into vague indeterminism every time I give it a prod?

You are happy to be sort of flat, but not radically flat. You are happy to be sort of dualistic, but not arch-dualistic.

So do you see a pattern? You want the benefits of making structural assertions, yet shy away from the costs. You mount challenges based on definite distinctions that you back away from as soon as that hard line is questioned.

A whole epistemology could of course be constructed on "treading lightly" in this fashion. It could be made to sound a good thing. Wittgenstein gets wheeled out all the time to tell us whereof one cannot speak.

But I can only reply in terms of my own objective here - which is to push until even the vague is crisply modelled and we can arrive at some kind of happy metaphysical terminus in terms of the question, "Why anything?".

Meaning, that for much of the past history of psychology, the importance of the self has been elevated over the concerns of society, giving rise to what I call delusional psychology — Posty McPostface

I don't really see that at all. Freudian psychology might be highly egocentric perhaps. But regular psychology has been focused on society's need to jam round pegs into square holes most of the time. Hence the dominance of the medical defect model where people are assumed to be broken parts, not partners in co-construction of self and society.

here's also a deep and insidious ad hominen hidden in what you call "A poor personal fit" here, think the label "mental disorder". — Posty McPostface

But it is me pointing that out!

That's a futile task. I'm reminded of the man who spent a week to detail one day of his life, who was never able to complete his autobiography in time. — Posty McPostface

You say it is futile. But your responses are anecdotal rather than evidential. And one of the skills that positive psychology would aim to teach here is to be able to break out of that kind of self-fulfilling circle where you assume stuff - like that typical psychology is highly egocentric - and then brush off all suggestions to the contrary ... in egocentric fashion.

However, I've noticed a trend happening in the field of psychology where this tendency of the analysis of the self is being replaced with the analysis of the self in respect to reality. This can be seen in CBT and some other forms of therapy, such as 'Reality Therapy'. — Posty McPostface

This just seems an example of what many have realised - we are socially constructed beings. So the focus of treatment for many psychological complaints - to the degree they are not strongly biological - is how people can better negotiate their position within their social world.

Of course, that leads to the political/economic question of whether that society is the right kind of world in the first place. A poor personal fit could reflect on the society itself. And it might be the good copers who suffer a kind of pathology in becoming so well adapted to the demands of their social environment.

Then, more optimistically, there is also the Positive Psychology movement that says "Reality Therapy" should be taught to everyone. It is not just there to fix the ill. It is the learnable basics of being mentally healthy.

Learning about how social construction works - how we get programmed for life by our early social influences - is also how we can transcend that early programming to make what might be more adaptive choices in terms of our attitudes and beliefs.

...actually an even flatter ontology than what I would recommend, because I do not think we can be exhaustively understood in the same way as the rest of the world. — Janus

But I am arguing for pragmatism. So not only am I arguing against an exhaustive account, I have argued that the very logic is instead to find the account which ignores the most that it can. What we are interested in arriving at are our limits of indifference that thus give crisp definition to the "other" that is ourself.

We exist as organisms to the degree we can take the world for granted in pursuing the desires that best define us. That is the autonomous condition towards which we strive to develop.

Also, as i see it, to explain ourselves in the same terms we explain the world is not internalism, but if anything would be more of an externalism, if not an ultimate denial of the whole distinction, since the sign relation is not understood to begin with humans as far as I understand. — Janus

You are still setting this up dualistically. It is the inside vs the outside. The observer vs the observables.

Internalism, in the sense I am using it, is to understand Being in terms of the triadic sign relation that produces both distinctions themselves. It is the difference between immanence/development and transcendence/creation. The observer and the observables are the splitting apart that allow the wholeness of a sign relation mediating that divide in a long-run, habitual, way.

Inside and outside are again our names for the absolute limits within which reality itself would arise.

So internalism certainly starts with the epistemological argument - we are trapped inside our own heads making models of a world.

But then internalism becomes an ontology by saying all reality arises via that kind of "mindlike" relation. This opposes it to externalism which says our minds are in fact completely explainable by objective material physics ... or a transcendent creator.

Externalism lets you pick your poison on that score. Either matter or mind is understood as the world that is larger, and so stands outside, its "other".

As I say, internalism goes the other direction. It brings the objective and the subjective into the one world as two opposing limits in a historically mediated interaction.

I would go for a kind of "flat' ontology, where there is no absolute distinction between inner and outer, higher and lower. That's why I often argue with you that we are not exhaustively socially constructed, because to say that is to valorize a kind of anthropocentric internalism that denies that our experience is in the world, or the world and mediated by the world. — Janus

So it seems you want the benefits of my structured system without having to commit to the notion of that structure. It is to be left "flat". That is vague and beyond contradictions. :)

Look, my internalism is explicitly the triadic internalism of Peirce and not the dualistic internalism of Kantian representationalism. Peirce was trying to fix the issues with Kantianism (and Hegelism), while being quite scornful of Cartesianism.

So yes, it is not "flat" but comes with clear triadic structure. And remember that Peircean semiotics cashes out in ontological pansemiosis.

The internalism might start as the psychological or epistemic reality. But the speculative metaphysical claim (increasingly in accordance with what the physics says) is that the Cosmos itself bootstraps into being via ontic semiosis.

The anthropomorphic story of the human semiotic condition is that we are "modelling the world with us in it". So we are now beyond simple realism and even indirect representationalism in seeing our own selves, as observers, arising along with the umwelt that is our field of observables, the set of signs by which we relate to the actual world as the thing-in-itself.

The dualism is replaced by a trichotomy where the "self" is found in the same place as the "world" is found - both being the complementary aspects of the mediating system of signs that emerges with habitual definiteness in the middle.

The usual assumption is that nature would want some kind of direct veridical connection between consciousness and reality. Our view of the world should be faithful to its reality. But the psychological evidence already tells us that we want to be able to ignore the actual world so as to be able to live in a world of our own creative invention - the world where we are freely choosing beings able to impose our own desires and forms on its inert materiality. And so that is the kind of umwelt we have to develop. A world that is fit for that kind of self. A system of habitual signs is how we construct this mediating tale.

And then - pansemiotically and ontically - the world would also be understood as "a model with itself in it". It becomes a self, an enduring and autonomous state of affairs, by developing a structure of habits that represent it. It develops laws that encode what it means to be "the Universe". It becomes a system of constraints expressing the purpose of being "that thing" until it safely reaches the very end of time.

So I am certainly not denying the world. Pansemiosis is an attempt to explain the world in the exact same terms we would explain ourselves.

No, I actually think both internalism and externalism are wrongheaded. — Janus

And yet it is externalist language you keep using against my account.

Just calling any explanation "wrong" is a sound tactic I guess. But you could instead put forward some clear story on what you might in fact believe here.

If it is neither internalism nor externalism, what is it?

That "unbridled everythingness" would seem to be, for you, the genesis state prior to the existence of anything. — Janus

So I can keep saying that I am attempting to describe a limit and you will keep ignoring that?

I am trying to do justice to an internalist metaphysics. You keep replying to that from an externalist perspective. You are demanding the kind of crisp initial conditions that could be the definite start of things - even if that then propels you straight into your infinite regress of "first moments" and "first actions". I am describing how things are when beginnings dissolve into a vagueness that is less than nothing, as nothing already supposes the actualised possibility of an absence.

Can we say that state exists, or subsists, eternally (since it is atemporal and aspatial)? Insofar as it is prior to any temporal or spatial existence it is utterly indeterminate and indeterminable; and it follows that we cannot say anything about it at all. — Janus

This is just a formula of words to justify a claim of arriving at an externalist perspective. So no. That would be a false victory in my view. Pragmatism is the embracing of internalism. It doesn't have to beat it by the end.

And - treating vagueness as a limit - we can say plenty about it in crisply apophatic fashion.

We know that we came out of it. We know that this somethingness develops via a dichotomous or dialectical logic. We know that the Cosmos is the result of a quite mathematically specific cascade of symmetry breakings.

So we can reverse the physics to wind everything back to a crisp model of a vague limit. We can imagine a definite start in a state of "perfect symmetry". We can form an image of the vague that does some pragmatic work.

And then, in Kantian fashion, we can accept it is then only the image of the thing-in-itself - the metaphysical umwelt we have created to turn the unspeakable into a speakable theory. So it becomes the story secured against the measurable somethingness of the world as we find it to be. Which is of course better than a metaphysics secured against nothing much at all except some shallow reductionist and mechanical conception of cause and time.

If we don't believe in classical physics, why would we believe in classical metaphysics? Why would you keep promoting classical cause and effect thinking as the framework that anything I say must assimilate itself to? That is exactly what I mean to challenge at the fundamental level.

Crisp classicality certainly exists. But as another emergent limit on Being. It describes the world after it has developed into a large cold void occupied by small hot objects. It describes the counter ideal of a world that is simply a completely constrained and deterministic mechanism.

Our human ability to postulate sameness / endurance enables us to conceptualize and count. But it is only an appearance, in a dialectic with 'difference'. — mcdoodle

As usual, folk try to make it reductionistically a case of either/or when it stares them in the face that it is holistically both.

We can see the same because we can see the different. And we can see the different because we can see the same. They are two complementary limits bounding our conceptions.

So the OP is balderdash in striving for some superiority of "direct perception" over "systematising conception". That is not how things work either psychologically or metaphysically.

The general and the particular are both forms of conception used to framed our acts of perception. We don't just zero in on differences, but differences we believe make a difference. So a lack of sameness, the existence of individuation, is a judgement that depends on a prevailing generalisation about what should mostly be the case, and hence what now stands out as a significant difference, not a difference we would merely ignore.

Why isn't it statically present in one spot forever? — TheGreatOne

Our experience of time is anticipatory. The brain works by guessing what is just about to happen (which is mostly going to be a continuation of what has just happened). And so the flow of time is experienced as the degree to which things matched strong expectation while being punctuated at distinct points by various surprises.

Thus our experience of time is inherently dynamic rather than static. If we see a falling ball, we already expect it to drop, hit the ground, bounce up.

Psychologically, time does appear to freeze or hang suspended in moments of very great surprise when we can't effectively react in an anticipation based way. Like in a car crash. The usual smooth flow created by forward modelling gets lost and our experience of time becomes halted in a weird fashion.

You then have the separate issue of how this relates to the block universe story on time.

My two cents on that is the block universe is a convenient modelling fiction. Physics just models time as having time symmetry so it can do its calculations. It spatialises time so that going forward looks the same as going backwards, thus erasing the symmetry-breaking significance of moving beyond some "point in time".

But that leaves energy and thermodynamics out of the modelling. It leaves out the fact that change in the universe has a thermodynamical arrow that is not some kind of illusion.

So no need to take the block universe at face value. It is a model that simplifies reality in a way useful for doing calculations. Physics already knows it likely needs an emergent thermal model of time if it wants to get to a quantum gravity theory of everything.