Naturalism and ant-naturalism are just the dialectical poles that present two possible, or imaginable, perspectives. — Janus

Or instead, dialectics is itself dichotomous in a fashion that sometimes you have a unitary dichotomy - one in which the two poles are simply opposite ways of saying the same essential thing - and sometimes they are the "other" thing of two actually opposing generalisations.

Once a generality is itself made particular in this fashion - a choice of two generalities - then the either/or of the LEM does apply. So supernaturalists can be wrong in arguing transcendence over immanence, duality over unity. :)

The reason I wanted to say mind is what 'grasps meaning' — Wayfarer

Note how you are privileging perception over action. You are defining the dichotomy of subjective~objective in terms of an observer standing apart from the observable. So there is a representational paradigm at work here. And that is where the anti-naturalistic dualism stems from - this built-in sense that the mind stands apart from the world.

So your language assumes its premises.

Pragmatism and semiotics were the effort to naturalise "the mind" by switching to an embodied and enactive description of the essential relation. Meaning becomes use, as they say. We don't just grasp meaning. We exist as useful habits of interpretation. We know what to do when faced with a world composed of marks or signs.

You are thinking always from the point of view of the observer who stands outside nature. Your ontology is based on a transcending disconnect between the perceiving self and the actual world.

But a proper naturalist sees consciousness in terms of habits of interpretance, embodied actions. The self and its world (or umwelt) emerge as triadic relation. That is the way to bridge a dualistic disconnect.

Thus a physical thing is anything that has constrained states of motion. — Uber

That is as nice a summary as any.

But to build on that, I would generalise it to "constraints on instability or uncertainty" so as to better pick up an information theoretic perspective on the physics, as well as make a clearer connection to the science of life and mind.

The problem with materialism was that it reduced an Aristotelian naturalism - the full four causes kind - to just bottom-up construction. Nature became a cause and effect tale of material/efficient causation. The physical was defined by what was atomistic, mechanical, local, deterministic, monadic, etc.

But a full four causes physicalism would include the idea of causation via top-down constraints. That is, formal and final cause as well. And a constraints-based metaphysics indeed goes further in making constraints primary. The structure is what produces the material contents. The constraints are the global limits that produce the locally individuated features - the particles, the events, the excitations, the degrees of freedom, or however else we are currently conceiving of the material/efficient causes of Being.

Even Newtonian physics depended on global constraints in the form of laws, global symmetries or boundary conditions. And now - through the information theoretic turn of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics - constraints are being explicitly modelled as "material objects" like event horizons or holographic bounds. There are exact mathematical relations emerging between spatiotemporal extent and the number of local degrees of freedom that such a volume can contain.

So spacetime as a container, and states of motion or action as the contents, have a constant balance. They are two faces of the same coin. And we see all that coming together nicely now in a general shift to an entropy-based accounting system that unifies all our descriptions of nature.

The best general theories of brain function are the ones that emphasise a global minimisation of system uncertainty. The brain is a "machine" that learns to predict the future by minimising its uncertainty about what is likely to be the case.

And the cosmos is also a "machine" that has constructed itself by thermalising away its quantum uncertainty as much as possible. At its Heat Death, its states of motion will be as minimal as could be imagined. All that will be left is a homogenous sizzle of blackbody radiation emitted by cosmological event horizons.

So in dealing with the OP, I am saying that physicalism has been through its arch-materialist phase and is coming back around to a grander constraints-based physics that incorporates an appropriate understanding of top-down formal/final causation. We are cashing out naturalism as it was originally envisaged. Reality is the emergent thing of an intelligible structure imposed on brute uncertainty.

Which makes it as much mind-like as matter-like in our physicalist descriptions.

General relativity tells us that reality is a static 4D block - quite a feat for a mere calculating machine, I think you'll agree. — tom

You mean SR? And you mean that SR is a physical model that hardwires in a global time symmetry by treating time as a spatialised dimension? So having made this big metaphysical presumption - time being a direction in which you can go backwards and forwards just as happily as any of the three spatial dimensions - you then have this extraordinary metaphysical consequence of a block universe when you extrapolate the said model beyond its limits of usefulness?

This seems to be the same mindset in which you approach all your physics. If some bit of calculational convenience works for certain modelling purposes, you then happily believe whatever ridiculous scenario appears to be the case if the model is extrapolated to be the whole ontic story.

But the map is not the territory. It's just the map.

Linguistic structure does tend to account for the thinking that is linguistically structured.

Your problem then is defining thought in a more general fashion. That is where folk struggle.

Russell gave two main reasons for rejecting the causal interpretation of the dynamical laws:

1. Causal relations incorporate temporal asymmetry - dynamical laws do not.
2. Causal beliefs relate to localised events - dynamical laws relate global system states. — tom

Yes, but "laws" are a calculational machinery and so they have to represent the holism of nature indirectly. You get time-reversal because time itself has to be taken for granted as a backdrop dimension not accounted for by law.

So in QM, you almost have a time~energy complementarity, but not quite as QM still needs to presume time as background dimension. And to get to quantum gravity, that is why we would need an emergent story on time - one that explains its irreversibility in first principles fashion. We kind of have that already with statistical mechanical models of thermal time, but that too has to presume a fixed basis rather than being a fully emergent story. Somehow a state of low entropy must be rigged to create a start point down which time then flows.

So the story is just that time - representing change itself - has eluded its own fundamental theory. We need it as a globally fixed backdrop to make a local calculational approach possible. But we also know that time must be an emergent property of the cosmological system.

It is right to say a certain understanding of causality - as localised/deterministic chains of cause and effect - is thus an over-idealisation. Newtonian mechanics is certainly a powerful calculational framework despite its time-symmetry. Likewise SR, GR, QM and even statistical mechanics. But the metaphysics of physics already tells us that something bigger has to be going on. We know we can't just believe time-symmetry applies in the global fashion that is implied by its local presence.

Physics is founded on three general principles - the principles of locality, cosmology and least action. So standard "causation" is represented in the principle of locality. But then the cosmological principle speaks to a global symmetry - the rules of physics are the same everywhere. And the principle of least action then wires in a directionality - events take the energetically shortest path. You thus now have a holistic or systems metaphysics where there is a global tendency or finality. Everything is constrained to head in the direction that expresses the least action.

So we are working our way back towards the fuller four causes view of causality set out by Aristotle. Causality became closely identified with local chains of cause and effect through Newtonian mechanics. In taking space and time for granted as fixed backdrop dimensions, that seemed to confirm local determinism. But there was a price paid for that helpful calculational shortcut. Space and time fell outside the material dynamics being measured. They became the a-causal void, a simple unexplained stage for all the action.

That really works for us humans, living in an era when the Universe is so cold and large and classical. But as we work our way to more fundamental theories, we have to make sense of the other two principles - the cosmological and least action. And while quantum theories can make space and emergent feature, they have not yet managed to absorb time as a further emergent property of the collective. That has to be the next step.

Well at least we know who George Cobau is I guess - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-better-philosophy-george-cobau/

Good luck with your book.

This is where I disagree with Chalmers, as I noted above. He actually makes it too easy on the physicalist. Everything going on in the mind is problematic for the materialist or physicalist, not just subjective experience. — George Cobau

These are not arguments. They barely qualify as assertions.

So, sure, the mind is like a computer in some respects, but what does that prove, beyond the fact that humans are clever enough to invent such devices. It really says nothing about the nature of mind per se. — Wayfarer

Huh? It says that information processing or computation is metaphysically general as a form of "mind-like" organisation.

Now you can say the initial analogy is a weak one. And I would agree. Especially if we are talking about Turing Machines or other complicated abacuses.

That is why I take a semiotic position on the issue. Syntax alone - rule-based symbol shuffling - can't cut it. You have to have a model that is semantically embedded in the world it is hoping to regulate in pursuance of some autonomously evolved goal.

If we are talking computer architecture, that is now some kind of neural network story. Funny that. A computer that looks more like an actual living brain.

So that is why I was careful to talk about "information processing" in a loose sense. I've already said often enough that we have to move quickly from the notion of a calculating machine to an autonomous organic system doing meaningful sign processing.

So we can have a naturalism that is a sophisticated naturalism. That is perfectly possible here.

I think you are overly optimistic about what science has already achieved. — George Cobau

And is your own pessimism based on any actual familiarity with the subject? Have you studied the issues enough to have a right to an opinion?

Sorry to be harsh. But if you are going to disagree, you need to supply the argument that would go with that.

Of course, you can reply that I need to defend my own statement with an argument. But the fact you don't even recognise it as a standard position is then a problem here.

Did you realise that Chalmers did explore this question with his good mate, Andy Clark? So he said it was one of the easy questions having actually given the matter some consideration.

https://www.ida.liu.se/~729G12/mtrl/clark_chalmers_extended_mind.pdf

That's because of the obvious comparison with computation. But this overlooks the fact that computers are, in fact, extensions of the human faculties, and would not exist without them. — Wayfarer

So are you now switching into anti-Platonism mode and saying that mathematical theorems, like Turing Universal Computation, are just arbitrary stories humans made up for fun? Or did we instead actually discover some kind of universal truth there?

If computers, or information processing in some semiotically general sense, were merely human constructs, then yes, they might not carry much metaphysical impact. However, plenty of folk seem to agree there is something Platonically real about computation.

For the same reason, many are prepared to entertain the possibility that the Universe could be a computer simulation because it sounds like a scientifically reasonable thing to believe - except for the fact that all the computers that are known to us, are manufactured artefacts and don't occur naturally. — Wayfarer

You mean that all computation has to exist within the material constraints of the laws of thermodynamics?

Yep. That more naturalistic view is coming to the fore in the physics of information.

We're indeed getting pretty good at physicalism these days.

Also, I don't really like the term, substance, which appears to be vague and not well defined. — George Cobau

LOL. Aristotle did a decent job surely?

(I wouldn't rely on neuroscientists. To me, they appear to be very biased and confused.) — George Cobau

OK George. It's great that you might be interested in these issues. But it is really lame that you seem to think you have something new to tell everyone when you have next to no background in everything that has already been said.

The replies here should have given you some quick pointers as to what you need to explore. It's over to you now to get up to speed.

Thus, in all likelihood, the brain causes, creates, produces, and generates conscious mental experience. — George Cobau

How is this not a general physicalist presumption? The only real dualism here is a certain semantic slipperiness that arises in the gap between some notion of the nature of the cause and some notion of the nature of the effect.

Which is basically what materialism says. — Wayfarer

Yep. George, your problem is that you are speaking dualistically of two kinds of substances - Descartes res cogitans and res extensa. Or mental substance and corporeal substance. And yet then accepting some type of material connection between the two - the corporeal substance of brain "somehow" creating the mental substance of experience.

So you are giving a confused presentation of the familiar explanatory issues. This is not a new dualism but a mash-up.

As I say, the reasonable working hypothesis of neuroscience is then that it is the structure of the brain - its information processing structure - that is going to be the cause of minds with experiential states. And this hypothesis stands against some actually materialist account, such as would see the mind as some kind of emergent macro-property - like liquidity or superconductivity. Or even - another popular one - that the brain is a complex antenna for tuning into a universal mind field.

So if you accept that brains create minds, that is not dualism, except to the extent that it tries to make some explanatory separation in terms of causes and their effects.

It is the next step of "how" brains could create minds that is the usual problem for a naturalistic and physicalist account. And information processing seems a reasonable starting point for most physicalists.

Materialism - as more strictly defined by emergentists - would be the other naturalistic-seeming alternative. But there is no good evidence for it. Whereas there is a ton of evidence for some form of information processing paradigm.

Emphatically not. Animals are sentient, but not rational — Wayfarer

Yeah. And isn't the physicalist problem allegedly to do with that sentience rather than that rationality?

I agree that there are coherent evolutionary accounts of how linguistic capacity and reason evolved, but that doesn't explain the horizons that these faculties open up — Wayfarer

So you are saying that consciousness isn't an issue. What is causally surprising is that reality has an intelligible structure?

Can't you see that you are mixing up two questions in your haste to make this about Platonic form?

I think you misunderstand my position. ... I believe in naturalism but not materialism ... I don't get how Uber cannot understand this, but that's his problem. — George Cobau

Maybe you haven't presented a position that is understandable as yet.

You said your naturalism is dualistic in terms of believing in two kinds of substance - material substance and ... immaterial substance???

You also said you have ruled out some kind of panpsychism or dual aspect monism.

So I struggle to see what is "new" about your new dualism. It seems the regular kind so far.

You say the brain does information processing. How could it do that without a mind? — George Cobau

Are you claiming that the brain doesn't do information processing? On what grounds? Why did neuroscience look and find this going on?

Sure, you can be an old school dualist and say this ain't enough for you. But you can't question that information processing happens, and so mainstream science is already "dualistic" in accepting that physicalism includes more than just materialism. It now includes information as a second kind of thing.

My argument against materialism is traditionalist: that the nature of meaning, and therefore reason, inference, mathematics and so even science itself, cannot be understood as a consequence of the kinds of forces and empirically observable entities that naturalism studies, because reason, meaning, intentionality, and so forth, are required and assumed, before science itself can even be established. This is the sense in which reason (and so on) transcends the naturalist description, as reason is essentially prior to the empirical sciences as such. Reason dictates what to consider, what to study, and so on, prior to any actual observation being made — Wayfarer

You seem to be conflating reason and sentience here.

The Hard Problem is that thinking should feel like something (when allegedly it could feel like nothing). How humans can develop the linguistic habits involved in reasoning would be one of those "easy problems" already answered by neurobiology, social science and philosophy of science.

So you want to focus on the mystery of "creative insight". But what part of that is not explained by neurobiological habits of induction and generalisation? Where is the evidence that there is something else going on beyond some kind of materially-grounded information process?

Hopefully in the next few decades, the tide will turn, and philosophers and scientists will come to their senses and accept the fact that we have internal conscious experineces that are different and distinct from neurologica activity. — George Cobau

But the general scientific position would be that the mind part of the equation is broadly some kind informational process. So for a long time, there has been a standard physicalist dualism which treats the mind as software running on hardware.

Now a lot more can be said about how to understand that. But the rival naturalistic metaphysics you have to argue against is the one that divides nature into matter and symbol. Folk feel pretty certain that the brain is some kind of information processing device.

This does make more sense than dividing the world into two disconnected kinds of substance - one that is inert matter, the other which is some kind of perceiving "soul stuff" ... that has no conceivable natural structure or laws, only the usual supernatural kind of existence.

Neuroscience knows for sure the brain does some kind of information processing. The structure of that has been mapped in laborious detail. That is what neuroscience does.

So on what grounds do you challenge a naturalism, a physicalism, which already recognises the further "surprise" of the possibility of information processing as part of what is nature?

Both sides could still be acting in good faith, but the structure of exchange they've fallen into is not what they think it is. — Srap Tasmaner

Putting aside the merely rhetorical tactics that folk use, I'd say there is a largely unrecognised issue of logical structure in play.

And that is that the laws of thought that work for arguing over particulars are different from the dialectical laws for arguing over the metaphysically general.

So the laws of thought require an answer to be right or wrong in the fashion of the law of the excluded middle. Everyone understands that there has to be a winner and a loser, a truth and a falsity, when it comes to a question over some particular individual fact. The LEM says your choices are limited to either/or.

But arriving at generality - which is the usual goal of any metaphysically-tinged debate - should logically result in the and/also outcome that is a dichotomy, some mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive pair of correct ideas. The dialectical result is two formally complementary truths. When folk end up arguing diametrically opposed positions, that is a good result for the debate - if they can realise that by going at each other in Socratic fashion, they have laid bare the division that can then generally ground all consequent acts of individuation or particularisation.

We are familiar with all the traditional metaphysical dichotomies that dialectical philosophy almost immediately threw up, and which became the basis of modern rational thought.

Particular~general, for a start. Or flux~stasis, discrete~continuous, part~whole, one~many, matter~form, chance~necessity, atom~void, local~global, action~direction, potential~actual, mind~body, signal~noise, freedom~constraint ... the list really does go on and on.

So chances are, where people feel adamant that they are right about something in a general fashion, it is because they have seized on one pole of a polarity.

Is reality fundamentally something continuous or is it fundamentally discrete? A really convincing case can be made for either of those positions. And the LEM seems to rule already that only one particular answer could be right - the other is automatically false. But if the concepts of discrete and continuous are perfectly matched in this complementary fashion, then now we have the happy outcome that is the deeply useful fact of a metaphysical dichotomy.

Somehow both these answers must be true as the ultimate bounds on existence. They become the thesis and antithesis out of which the synthesis - in terms of a world of individuated particulars - can then appear.

So the LEM is a logical structure that fosters the expectation that any decent argument is going to reduce all possibilities to some single correct answer. It is either/or.

But larger than the LEM is the dialectic. That is how you arrive at the space of possibilities, the space of individuated particulars, to which the LEM could apply. And so dialectical reasoning is expansionary. It points you from the symmetry breaking that is a dichotomy towards the holism of a triadic or hierarchical generality. The resolution that is a synthesis. You have two bounding extremes and now all the possible balances that lie in-between.

So people get passionate because in any decent philosophical argument, the most completely opposed alternatives are the ones that are going to feel the rightest. Violent disagreement is the way to get progress - so long as there is then the follow-up of the synthesis that unites those opposites in a generally sensible way.

Impressive!

You lack imagination. Everyone doesn't feel the same way you do. Not just about death, but about all the other difficulties you go on about. Whether or not they are happy, most people get it. Get life. The point. You don't. That says something about you, not about life. — T Clark

Yep. The best bit of advice to the young is that to have a good death, you have to start with a good life. Death-bed interviews stress people's regret at not having more adventures and not taking more time with their close relationships.

Positivity or negativity are habits of mind, so it helps to begin learning the right choice at an early stage. You become what you practice.

'Society' rarely names an 'answer' so much as a problem to itself be explained: what are the conditions which made society respond in this way? And those answers will generally be local, historical, and concrete (even as they can play a part in broader anthropologies). — StreetlightX

Yeah. Social and anthropological science may seek out the deep natural structures that are the organising forces beyond the mere passing contingencies of history. But what do they know, hey? Bloody Platonists!

Apparently.

Thus begins the descent into point-for-point responding. — darthbarracuda

So either the complaint is no response, or too much response.

I get it. Nothing in this life will make you happy. :meh:

One argument I have presented before and here now is that humans are out of balance with nature by their very nature. We're too intelligent, too creative, too self-aware. — darthbarracuda

But if that is so, that is a sociocultural fact. We aren't born that way. We have to learn these things as skills. And so we have the possibility of making some collective choices.

That would be the central question that a naturalistic moral philosophy would be targeted at. If we are responsible for the culture that makes us, what kind of people do we really want to be, and thus what kind of cultural environment should we be producing to ensure that?

I mean, we already do have that kind of conversation. As a general rule - sample any random poster here - folk would support a romantic/individualist ideology as the ethos to promote. But then, is the outcome really functional? Does it result in a reasonable balance? As you say, does it produce people who are "too intelligent, too creative, too self-aware" for the collective good?

I think that objectively, there is something to the civilised/enlightenment mindset that is the core of the modern developed society. And also the individualist/romantic creative edge is part of that balance as well. There is the naturalistic makings of a flourishing psychosocial system in that cultural formula.

But then once we are talking therapeutics, that is why positive psychology gets it right and pessimism so wrong. If you find yourself out of balance personally, positive psychology offers a prescription to match the problem while pessimism is just an excuse to wallow in a state of learnt helplessness.

In crisis, turning towards the civilising, and away from the romantic, is the sensible way to go, just for self-preserving reasons.

Living "in tune" with nature just isn't good enough for us. Metaphorically speaking, nature kicked us out and we're on our own. — darthbarracuda

Here we go. Nature kicked us out. The lament of the lonely child turning angrily on its parent. Society filled our heads with romantic ideals and now the bastard expects us to go out and live them.

But in fact society also says it wants you to live as a mature, civilised, member of the collective. So even worse, you are getting mixed messages!

Well again, this may be a commonplace confusion, but that is why a more sophisticated philosophical or therapeutic frame is so important.

We can understand the dichotomy that a flourishing natural system is based on. It relies on being able to express both poles of its fundamental being - both the competitive and the co-operative, both the private and the collective, both a civilised core and a creative individualistic fringe.

But nihilism/existentialism/pessimism/anti-natalism is just a tradition of romanticist lament. It is trying to tell the whole story based on just its one angle.

Yet the antinatalist argument is that, despite this relationship, procreation is still an act of supreme manipulation. Someone is brought into existence without permission. — darthbarracuda

Now we get into a romantic view of humans as transcendental beings with transcendental rights. We are way off track when it comes to any properly naturalistic analysis.

So sure, use the familiar legalistic jargon. Try to persuade by rhetorical device what can't be sustained by logical argument.

A naturalistic morality does say society has super-organismic reality. So there is a level of being that transcends each of us as individuals. But also that this is a balancing act - a fair trade. We need that society for there to be the "us" - the self-aware us - that could even care about permissions and manipulations.

So we collectively get to write that script - within ecological limits. Or if we can in fact transcend those limits - in techno-optimism fashion - then we even get to rewrite that ecological script.

It is all to play for really. You just have to understand the game. And pessimism really doesn't. As philosophy, it is quite useless as a tool of human forward-planning.

As I told Baden, with respect to anything else, a "mixed bag" would not be acceptable. You would want something better. You'd tell the manager of the restaurant to please send out a better meal thank-you-very-muchly, this one's over-cooked. It's edible, sure, but it tastes like crap. The manager comes back with a bottle of meat sauce instead. Is that acceptable? Would you return to this restaurant? — darthbarracuda

If you made a bad choice in going to this restaurant, would you seek to make a better choice next time? Or would you simply never enter another restaurant in your entire life?

Rational folk would do one thing. Anti-natalists might do the other.

The crucial part of my argument that I do not think you responded to was the necessity of negative value and the contingency of positive value. — darthbarracuda

I can see that you need to make the negative a foundational truth and the positive a passing delusion. That is what your story hinges on. And I've responded to that how many hundreds of times now? :)

Life is terminal struggle, that's what it is. You're given a burden (mortality) and must find a way to carve out a small part of the world just for yourself so you can postpone death for as long as possible. Life may be comfortable now, but a single toothache, migraine, or kidney stone throws it into a wreck. — darthbarracuda

This is what keeps our conversation going. Gems like this. You seem to live in such a different world.

What you imagine: a Rousseau-esque return back to nature's harmony, is a pipe dream. — darthbarracuda

Yes, of course, this is exactly what I said. Or rather, exactly the kind of half-baked position that would be weak enough to leave your own half-baked position feel like some kind of suitable balance. Honours even.

But no. I'm expecting you to do more work here. Come up with a real counter to my real position.

My greater peeve about thinking of society as some sort of Creator, especially in the case of persons, is that our understanding of consciousness is limited (possibly permanently since the investigator of personhood is always a person). — frank

The social constructionist position would be more sophisticated than how you paint it. It is a co-construction story. Society shapes us as "persons". And we, as those persons, build society.

So for society to persist, in the form of some cultural set of habits, it must be able to produce the right kinds of people. And those people would need to generally re-build or re-produce the social culture that formed them, while also adding sufficient variety or spice to keep the evolutionary game going. The next generation can potentially start shaping some new cultural habits.

The collective whole thus has an organismic unity. We can speak of human society as something that actually exists in an evolutionary sense - a new kind of super-organism that adapts and responds to the world it makes.

This kind of feedback loop is already familiar in biology. We do talk about environments or ecosystems as having living or organismic reality. Earth has a uniquely oxygen rich atmosphere because bacterial life found that oxidative reactions offer the best energetic bang for buck. Life made the Earth that way for its own good reason.

And now humans, as socially constructed creatures, have just about remade the Earth again, transforming it into a planet dominated by farming and cities. The bulk of planetary biomass is entrained to the new human ecosystem. We have brought about the anthropocene age. Life is being redefined now in our image.

Of course, that may be a fleeting affair. But it has the same organic logic - the logic that actually needs to be applied to analyse the human condition through a social constructionist lens.

So perhaps the real problem with social constructionism is the extent to which it might encourage the idea that the outcomes of what it is to be "human" are either arbitrary or near completion.

It seems pretty clear that we are in a runaway period of explosive growth - the immature or "weed" phase of the ecological lifecycle. Come back in a thousand years and we will have a better idea of whether our particular social/linguistic adventure was a successful kind of "Creator".

Genes, as the creator of ecosystems, have got a pretty great track record. Words, as the creator of sociocultural systems and thus individuated personhood, are still to prove their value at the planetary scale of organic organisation.

I'm tired of not being taken seriously, having my entire argumentative essay reduced to a single paragraph and then straw-manned, and then mocked for putting forward my honest thoughts on the matter. — darthbarracuda

But do you take my own position seriously - that structurally we would expect nature to produce a mental balance? A mixed bag would be the logical evolutionary story?

So I showed you how weak your argument is by showing it could equally well be used to argue its opposite. It becomes merely a prior evaluative frame that could make one version seem more right than the other, as @baden points out.

You and @schopenhauer1 are choosing to hang your hat on a structuralist argument. I've replied that natural structures are founded on balancing acts. They require a unity of opposites to be anything at all. So evolution must produce a mixed bag of hedonic states. We need to be adapted to our worlds. And so we need to be able to move across a wide range of emotions as appropriate, while generally seeking some kind of peaceful, neutral, mild, equanamity as the central tendency.

The issue of course is that we are social creatures, self-aware through language and social construction. So we have inherited a pretty functional psychobiology. But it was well adapted to our first million years or so of hunter/gatherer social lifestyle. And in a tearing hurry, the space of 8000 years, we have invented a succession of new lifestyles.

So yes, it may be the case that modern life is structurally shit. Folk are reared on romantic notions of their existence. Society has become a giant economic machine, out of control of a community level living. We are too self-aware in a particular way - our heads filled with the idea of being the heroes of our own unique sagas. And society has become a consumerist, planet-destroying, rat race.

There is plenty about the current state of things - the existing human structure of life and thought - that a philosopher could decry. We could do better.

So what I dispute - what I see as actually part of the problem itself - is this half-arsed pessimism you guys promote. Sure, there is structure. And sure, that structure might not be well balanced right at this time in history. But then is the answer to live a life where you have basically given up on making a personal difference? Is the best choice to make yourself more miserable, and try to make others as miserable, rather than focusing on what could be done about the situation?

Why the anti-natalist focus on not having children? Any of us who are parents will agree that it is a choice that should be carefully considered. But it also has the potential to be hugely rewarding and affirming.

Having children is one of life's big risks, big responsibilities, hence big adventures. From a personal point of view, it should be regarded in the same way as all such risk/reward opportunities, like relationships or travel or sport or enterprise or anything that requires taking a chance, plunging into life, seeing what happens.

It is only in a now over-crowded world that having children becomes some kind of collective social issue where we might talk about putting on the brakes. And as we know, the problem for "developed" nations is really the opposite already. They are breeding too little to maintain a healthy demographic balance.

But then - from the truly dispassionate view of a moral philosopher - we could say things will work out even so. Nations rise and fall. The human story will roll on and find some new steady state balance - some kind of story that also lasts a million years. And that may even be a return to hunter/gatherer level existence, 500,000 survivors scratching a living, after the big collapse.

So unless you actually believe in some transcendent/romantic ontology - humans as the chosen beings - then you have to view all this through the lens of naturalism. And nature has its natural structure - one based on a dynamical balancing act.

Life is a mixed bag because that is how nature works. That is my argument. But go on ignoring it by claiming I'm simply the mirror opposite of you - an optimist, a pollyanna, or whatever other glib counter helps to keep your own game going a little longer.

A mixed bag? Generally all right? Which one is it? — darthbarracuda

Both for most people much of the time.

But anyway, here is my absolutely killer argument. :grin:

Pessimists are selective and strategic in their attack on life. What they cannot attack, they criticise optimists for over-valuing. Or they attempt to psychoanalyze optimists as being "elated" or "deluded", because the existence of the optimist is incompatible with their negative narrative and must be "explained away" via some evanescent category. If optimism did not hold at least some element of truth, it would have been demolished from the get-go. Optimism would be definitively shown to be incorrect, not simply asserted to be incorrect.[/quote]

Most people focus on contingent pain. Metaphysical pessimists see the structural aspects. — schopenhauer1

Bullshit. The structural aspect is the dichotomy of the good and the bad, the rough and the smooth, the burdens and the transports.

So the "subtle" response you get is that you are telling a one-sided tale of unrestricted regret. There is only the bad. Even when things are good, that's when things are really, really bad, because now you have to deal with the possibility of that goodness being missing.

You have built yourself a rationale. It may have some kind of truth for you. You may just be very unlucky and stuck in a basically depressed state. But philosophically, you need to deal with the fact that your story lacks the kind of naturalism that understands life to be a mixed bag. And that is generally all right.

Then also the bit you really don't want to hear. If life is not as you would like it, then a large part of that could be because you have constructed this self-reinforcing rationale of pessimism - perhaps as a "coping" mechanism.

Pessimism is bad philosophy. Plain and simple. Fortunately there are other choices on the menu.

For one thing, this metaphor of a frame he uses, when you cash it out and ask a philosopher what frame they are working with, the answer is presumably a set of propositions. Some of them might be very banal, some of them might be empty metaphorical handwaving, some of them might be substantively interesting, and of the latter, it doesn't seem cretin-headed in the least to investigate whether they may be true or not. — jkg20

Yep. The further thing in play is a coherence angle on truth. Theories of truth - in the pragmatic view - arise out of the dynamical relation between coherent theories and their correspondence with acts of measurement.

So this makes structuralism legitimate. We do have an interest in the over-arching and unifying coherence of any putative reference frame. We are concerned about the particular truths of particular claims - the correspondence issue. But we are also concerned with how overall a paradigm hangs together in a generally coherent (but not actually prescriptive) fashion.

A prime business of philosophy is the uncovering of the rational structure that is objectively, ontically, an aspect of the world.

No, because the 'measuring, is done by an actual person, so again becomes an entirely subjective activity leading to total relativism.
— Pseudonym

Yeah, not dealing with this kind of sophistry. Thanks for your interest. — StreetlightX

I see that Pseudonym has struck on the obvious point. Bryant's blog post is nice as far as it goes. It is standard pragmatism/modelling relations/cogsci. But what is missing is the further fact that our "philosophical frames" are responsible not just for constructing the "truth" of the world, they also construct the "truth" of the self that is living that world. The making of ourselves - as the believers, the doers, the intenders - is the other pole of the modelling relation.

So Bryant's presentation, and SX's talk of "sense", is still rather representational - not yet out of the correspondence approach to truth. What also needs emphasis is that the subjective part of the deal is also being fabricated because of the larger thing that is a modelling relation between a self and its world. The self comes into focus as a structure, a set of persisting interpretive habits taking a particular view of sense, through the development of a relationship that "works".

The triadic nature of this modelling relation becomes important. Once we leave behind the simple dyad of the perceiving mind and the perceived world, we have to recognise how a self~world relation forms in terms of a semiotic umwelt. The self becomes a structure of habits able to read the world - the thing-in-itself - as some set of signs or marks.

And as Bryant emphasises, our conscious world is the one where we mostly know what we can ignore. We have a reference frame that dictates the sense we make of things. We can attend to what are the significant signs, the events that matter, because we matchingly have formed a view in which we need pay no attention to everything else. A frame is a filter separating signal from noise.

So this is a general epistemological story. We become a self - some structure of intepretive habits - by learning how to mostly ignore the world. The less "we" are a direct reflection or representation of its buzzing, blooming confusion, the more we are in fact "a point of view". We are autonomous beings to the extent we are able to be partial about the sense we make of the world "as it really is".

There is no real surprise in any of this. As I say, its standard pragmatism. But the way that modelling is also responsible for the construction of some particular kind of individuated selfhood is a missing ingredient in SX's take on Bryant.

This has consequences. Obviously many folk want philosophy to reveal some kind of useful truth. And as a first step, it does quickly reveal the epistemic truth that we are only modellers constructing a view of "a world" - the umwelt world that has "us" in it - rather than somehow minds seeing reality as it "really is".

But the naive reading of that is to think that because all possible experiential views are a pragmatic construction, then any view goes. Philosophy would have as its project the willy-nilly production of alternative viewpoints that one can just "try on" for size.

This is in fact dangerous if we become how we think. If there is no actual "self" at the back of it all - this self is only an outcome of mental structures of interpretance being formed - then picking on bad philosophies will result in bad habits of thinking and a bad selfhood emerging out of that.

We are what we eat they say. So yes, there are an abundance of philosophical frames. But we should take some kind of active approach to picking out the structures we learn and internalise, because that is what we ourselves are going to be formed by. We have to be prepared to say some philosophies, some frames, are better than others on that score.

I think it is an unconsidered meta question. Has philosophy become too unrestricted in the frames it is willing to consider? Has it bred a lot of bad points of view, bad habits of thought? Is philosophy able to arrive at its own "best self"?

I would say that of course philosophy does have some kind of noble history. It's role is as a central civilising influence. It has been progressive as a historical project. It's not some kind of disaster.

But does philosophy realise that is has this general "mission"? There is something to aspire to.

And my point here is that the recognition of that would require a dethroning of the rather romantic view of selfhood that rather infects many people's philosophy. Folk cultivate subjectivity as the right thing to be doing.

But is taking some ontic notion of subjectivity to its "logical" extreme an actually healthy way to frame matters? Is that really the umwelt you would choose to dwell in as your personal view of "the world that has you in it"?

I set out the challenge.

:ok:

An edge marks the boundary of a region, a point marks the boundary of a line segment. A region is two or three dimensional, a line is one dimensional. Why are you intent on producing ambiguity? — Metaphysician Undercover

For pity's sake. Can't you see you are just saying what I said?

A line is a 1D edge to a 2D plane. A point is a 0D bound to a 1D line. So you are simply choosing to pretend to be confused by the fact that we use terms that speak to the specifics of some act of constraint.

Yes, a line is an edge to a plane. And a point is only an "edge" to a line. But if you can't see that in the context of my account that the similarity of the nature of the constraint, the form of the symmetry breaking, is exactly the same, then I've no idea how to talk about interesting ideas with you.

Again, that's not true. Geez, what are they teaching in school these days, that kids like you get so mixed up? — Metaphysician Undercover

You're taking the piss now? Or maybe you are 90+. Seems possible.

Two lines may cross at any random angle, and represent two distinct dimensions. — Metaphysician Undercover

And those two distinct dimensions would be distinct because ....?

[Clue: it rhymes with "morthogonal".]

Theoretically, we could assume an infinite number of rays around a point, and assign to each ray a dimension, such that there would be an infinite number of dimensions. That classical "dimensions" are produced by right angles, and are therefore orthogonal is completely arbitrary. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know what they taught you at high school Granddad but you are just imagining any number of rays in a spherical co-ordinate space - a description that is dual or dichotomous to the usual Cartesian one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_coordinate_system

If you did go to big school any time in the last century or two, you would have learnt that higher dimensional geometry doesn't work like that. You could indeed have an infinity of spatial dimensions, but they would all have to be orthogonal to each other as that is the critical thing making them a distinct dimension of the one connected space.

Why do 3D knots come undone in 4D? Trying working that one out.

I agree with you here up until you said "existence". — schopenhauer1

But the context of that is my own earlier posts in this thread.

So in terms of metaphysics, the question becomes what is the most universal goal? And one obviously sensible answer is the limitation of instability. If any kind of world is going to exist - given the primal nature of chaotic action - then it has to develop the kind of regularity that gives self-perpetuating stability. — apokrisis

So I was specific that existence = persistence in the face of instability or chaos. I am talking about Peircean process metaphysics.

However, you seem to make the illegal move to apply it to any and every subject in a totalizing fashion. — schopenhauer1

Illegal? It could be warranted or unwarranted - the evidence can decide the case. But it is illegal to hypothesise?

Besides killing any other angles of inquiry (which would be taking advantage of the open-endedness of philosophy I was talking about) you are quick to dismiss all else to constrain your framework, thus limiting possibilities of other frameworks. — schopenhauer1

Hey, do you see me trying to rule out hypotheticals by resort to rhetoric like SX? I welcome your hypotheticals. I just introduce them to the facts of reality. Nature has already chosen what is true. :)

But more important than this, you apply such methods/language-games to problems such as the Mind-Body problem. This is where your theory is in deep water and breaks down. Where math is all modeling, you try to overmine the modeling language-game (constraints/symmetry breaking, etc.) to experience itself, and then when people accuse you of never penetrating beyond the models- you defensively go back to the Romantic vs. Enlightenment rhetoric to hand-wave the rebuttal. Your argument becomes a circularity back unto the modeling. — schopenhauer1

Blah, blah, blah.

You are back to front. Peircean metaphysics begins in phenomenology. And it is not surprising that I arrived at Peircean metaphysics via a dissatisfaction with the prevalent reductionism and epiphenomenalism in mind science (and philosophy of mind).

So Peirce (like Rosen and others) made the deep structural connection that can connect epistemology and ontology.

Mind is a modelling relation. Epistemic fact.

Our model of mind is then going to be a model of this as a suitably general ontic fact. Modelling - or semiosis - is how minds arise in a natural fashion.

Then completing this philosophical trajectory, even matter may be explainable as a pansemiotic fact. Matter exists as an (attentuated or effete) form of the same essential modelling relation ... in some intellectually useful sense.

And guess what. As I keep saying. Physics has gone that way. Everything that exists is the product of informational or holographic constraints on entropic degrees of freedom.

Keep up with science and it is pan-semiotic.

Now, I agree with you very much about your ideas as they relate to math. I have no problem with that move. Its the totalizing of its application to all areas that this becomes questionable. — schopenhauer1

Questions are fine. This is the bleeding edge of metaphysical speculation. You ought to be questioning.

I'm just reminding that I've already replied many times on the same questions. And the criticisms are not penetrating.

I would also note that the reason why Peirce (and all the others I would cite) are getting it right is because they are structuralists, they are thinking in terms of fundamental mathematical basics.

Vagueness, dichotomies, hierarchies - these are all mathematical-strength concepts. They capture the architecture (the architectonics!) of Nature because they begin from first logical principles. They are what symmetry/symmetry-breaking looks like when described in general mathematics.

Now - because they are logical/holistic arguments - they are not the kind of maths you do a lot of calculation with. They are the meta-models rather than domain specific models. But there are then plenty of those kinds of models too now - all the stuff arising out of condensed matter physics, non-linear dynamics, whatever.

So maths itself is doing a better job of describing the structure of nature as it actually is.

As I said, it started out with geometry - existence in space, with time and energy left out of the equation. That was what made the Platonism objectionable - what is real about the form of a triangle?

But replace the bloodless triangle with some real life dynamical flow - like a fractally branching river - and suddenly you really are starting to talk about Nature in a way that has fundamental unifying scope. Suddenly you can see why Nature has to express fractal order so as to be able to exist - or rather, persist as a now regulated and equilibrated source of instability.

Mathematicians seem to think about creativity in mathematics this way; a certain 'accuracy of ideas' which doesn't immediately reduce to the accuracy of a proof. — fdrake

So inference to the best explanation - the principle of least action in practice. We jiggle the bits about until it all snaps into place with a holistic best fit.

That is, we start with a broken symmetry - some "problematic" that is a collection of disjointed parts. And then we probe for the symmetry, the global coherence, that must have originally connected them.

Proof follows because that is the formal (re)construction. It is the creation of the bottom-up deductive path that connects us securely to the top-down glimpse of the Platonic reality.

So first comes the abductive leap that allows us to see the fragments in an inductively retrospective light. We see the smashed glass across the floor, the cat innocently licking its fur on the bench. In a flash we see how the symmetry of the vase got broken.

Then proof is the mopping up operation. All the parts get gummed together to show that the vase did exist as we imagined. We have sound reason to blame the cat as we are certain the vase wasn't just stuck in a cupboard while we weren't looking and meanwhile some random collection of glass just materialised on our floor.

I know apo mentioned using 360 degrees being contingent, but again, the "discovered" aspect I refer to are the concepts behind them. — schopenhauer1

That was MU in fact. I agree with you that the fundamental structures of mathematical thought are the inevitable rules of form or constraint that are there (so "somewhere" a bit Platonic) to be discovered.

So where does the arbitrary or the contingent come in? Two ways.

First - the Peircean point - the deep structures or constraining rules must be themselves emergent from a ground of arbitrariness. They are precisely the states of organisation that will emerge from chaotic possibility itself. Order must evolve to regulate instability. It might be a very minimal order, a very permissive order. Yet still it will be a generalised state of order.

Even statistics depends on bounded action. Randomness can have macro properties like a mean or a variance because there is some kind of global constraint bounding a system of independent variables. You get a temperature or a pressure only when your gas is confined in a flask. And any workable notion of randomness or probability depends on a duality of free local action coupled to definite boundary constraints. Otherwise there just wouldn't be any "statistics" - any macro properties to speak of.

So our very notion of the arbitrary or the contingent only makes metaphysical sense in the context of its "other" - the necessity, the regulation, to be found in some set of bounding constraints. You can't even have the one without the other. Hence there is the Platonic structure to be discovered as the necessary spine of existence. That can't not be the case ... if you do in fact believe in the matching "other" of the accidental or contingent. Each secures the reality of the other in complementary fashion. Hence why SX's orientation, as expressed in the OP, is so off-base from the start.

Then second, in discovering the deep and necessary structure of existence, we humans can gain our own local possibilities of control. We can insert ourselves as agents into the cosmic equation. If we construct mathematical models that encode the basic rules of the game - the game that is symmetry and symmetry breaking - then we can start to use them in our own "arbitrary and contingent" fashion.

We can do things that Nature doesn't seem to be thinking about or caring about. And folk of course find that a big philosophical deal. Suddenly our values and desires start to affect the metaphysical story. We are the source of meanings. We are the source of inventions. We are the source of fictions and fables and beliefs.

All this can lead to a PoMo-style rejection of metaphysical structure and meaning. Dichotomies and hierarchies become dirty words. Humans can transcend nature to become ... well, now it seems philosophy has solid grounds for its Romantic revolt against all "merely" physicalist constraints or necessities.

But this gets the metaphysics wrong. Constraints only constrain. So there is room enough in our cosmos for the very mild and attenuated constraints - the generalised thermodynamic tendencies - and then the much more complex and particular kinds of natural organisation that are reflected in evolved life and mind.

There is no basic conflict here, no real battle that the Romanticist must fight. We don't need to be like SX and fetishise the arbitrary and the plural, anathemise the Platonic and the unitary.

To get back to the 360 circle, I would note how the choice of 360 wasn't so accidental. It seemed important that we find a numbering system that made division into simple fractions easy, while also offering enough divisions to capture the differences that were of (Babylonian/astronomical) interest to us.

Again, some deeper symmetry was the reason for 360 being a choice that lasted. It was a number that offered the kind of symmetry breaking we found most convenient. Given an infinity of numbers we could have chosen, picking on 360 was not an arbitrary act from the point of view of a human having to do the calculations on a regular basis.

Neither can a point have an edge ... A point marks the limit to a line segment. — Metaphysician Undercover

So a point can be the edge to a line? Make up your mind.

It is contradictory to say that a point is a line segment which can't be cut any shorter, because a point and a line segment are fundamentally different. — Metaphysician Undercover

So if we cut away all the line to one side, it is bounded by a point on that edge. And if we then cut away all the rest of the line to the other side, what then? Is the point bounded by a point or is there just the point?

Isn't the fundamental difference that the point is the natural unit of which lines are composed? It has a locally emergent symmetry which marks the place where no more can be cut away. A point is all featureless edge?

A point has zero dimensions, while a line signifies a dimension. — Metaphysician Undercover

But doesn't the point have a location? It exists as a limit on dimension. A line represents a space of points. A point represents that space without a line.

What this indicates is that our spatial concepts, in terms of dimensions, are incorrect. The concept of dimensions of space produce an unintelligibility and therefore must be incorrect. — Metaphysician Undercover

Seems radical. But sure, throw away the concept if you can tell us about something better to replace it.

Or maybe it is your logic that lets you down. My logic expects metaphysical truth to be rooted in the fruitfulness of dichotomies. Yours is instead deeply troubled by discovering dialectical "contradiction" at the heart of things.

I think that the application of the theory of general relativity has proven this to be false, the shortest distance to connect two points is not actually a straight line. — Metaphysician Undercover

You got it exactly backwards. I was saying GR indeed shows that "straightness" is relative. It cashes out as the shortest path, the least action principle, once your geometric intuitions include some proper notion of action or energy density along with the spacetime dimensionality.

That is one of the issues with classical geometry. It all rests on spatial intuitions. It doesn't have a natural way of including energy, thus actual time and change, in the picture. It is a story of the directions but not the actions.

So GR is geometry with energy density included. It is more physically realistic as maths. And now the least action principle comes to the fore when we are thinking about "straight lines". We have generalised Euclidean geometry so that there is just universal curvature. We have removed a major constraint - the one picked out by the parallel lines axiom. And now straightness becomes defined more clearly as the shortest possible (energetic) distance between two points.

GR changed the simple definition of what counts as straight. That was the bleeding point.

I answer this question by saying that the entire conceptual structure which models space in terms of distinct dimensions is inadequate and therefore incorrect. — Metaphysician Undercover

Seems coherent - in being dichotomistic - to me. Dimensions are defined by being orthogonal to each other. Mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. The x axis is oriented so that no part of it - apart from a point, an origin - intersects with the world of the y axis.

You can head for infinity in the x-axis without moving an infinitesimal amount in the y-axis. And that is your strong definition of a spatial dimension. You have two disconnected or asymmetric directions that exist for motion~rest.

Remember how that distinction played out in Newtonian mechanics. Spacetime became defined by its energy conserving transformations. Masses could spin inertially on the spot or move inertially in a straight line. These were local symmetries that couldn't be broken down as they were the terminus to the very possibility of a more global symmetry breaking.

Then along comes GR, and even QM, to add the missing ingredients of time and energy back into this mathematical picture. The classical view was certainly correct, but still carried extra constraints that proved themselves to be local and particular rather than cosmically general.

The "angle" is something totally arbitrary, inserted into spatial conceptions as an attempt to alleviate the described problem of an incompatibility between linear dimensions. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is not arbitrary. What got inserted was the very notion of a dichotomy or asymmetry. Dimensions are distinct due to their orthogonality.

Ask yourself why pi = 180 degrees. Hint: a circular rotation that flips you back to a flat line having transversed its orthogonal "other".

These things aren't arbitrary at all. They are logically founded. They are Platonic strength.

That is why SX is so off the mark in his OP. Maths is "unreasonably effective" because - where it is based on the metaphysics of symmetry and symmetry-breaking - it is finding ways to model the necessary structure of existence. For anything to be, it would have to have being in this self-justifying form.

... and your insults are so lame as well.

Quit complaining and put up a counter argument if you have something to say.

Insults and yet no argument. Curious that.

It is not that the two determinations are teleologically programmed in advance, but rather that from the moment when they occurred (as a contingency), their emergence retrospectively unifies all prior attempts, through the construction of the universal. — Artmachines

PoMo is going to get such a shock when it catches up to 1980s work on universality in dynamical systems. :)

In statistical mechanics, universality is the observation that there are properties for a large class of systems that are independent of the dynamical details of the system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universality_(dynamical_systems)

The curved line is not a limit to the straight line, the two are categorically different. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmm. What then of the points that make the circle. Are they not the smallest possible straight edges?

A point is the limit to a line - the zero-D terminus that has greater local symmetry than the 1D line which is having its own symmetry broken by being cut ever shorter, and eventually, infinitely short. A point is simply a line that can't be cut any shorter.

Then for a line to be either straight or curved is itself a question embedded in the 2D of a plane at a minimum. So curvature, or its lack, is determined by the symmetry breaking of a more global (2D) context. A line becomes "straight" as now the locally symmetric terminus of all possible linear wigglings.

Straightness is defined in terms of the least action principle. A straight line is the shortest distance to connect two points. You may be familiar with that story from physics.

So now what can we rightfully say about the points that make up the circumference of your circle?

They are minimal length lines. But are they straight or are they curved? Or would you say the issue is logically vague - the PNC does not apply? No wiggling means no case to answer on that score.

Anyway, it is clear that the straightest line is simply the shortest path in regard to some embedding context. And even you would agree that a circle is composed of points. So the standard view - that a circle is the limit case, an infinite sided regular polygon - holds.